Either very gravely gay,
Or very gaily grave,
--W. M. PRAED
Montpipeau, though in the present day a suburb of Paris, was in the
sixteenth century far enough from the city to form a sylvan retreat,
where Charles IX, could snatch a short respite from the intrigues of his
court, under pretext of enjoying his favourite sport. Surrounded with
his favoured associates of the Huguenot party, he seemed to breathe
a purer atmosphere, and to yield himself up to enjoyment greater than
perhaps his sad life had ever known.
He rode among his gentlemen, and the brilliant cavalcade passed through
poplar-shaded roads, clattered through villages, and threaded their
way through bits of forest still left for the royal chase. The people
thronged out of their houses, and shouted not only ‘Vive le Roy,’ but
‘Vive l’Amiral,’ and more than once the cry was added, ‘Spanish war, or
civil war!’ The heart of France was, if not with the Reformed, at
least against Spain and the Lorrainers, and Sidney perceived, from the
conversation of the gentlemen round him, that the present expedition had
been devised less for the sake of the sport, than to enable the King to
take measures for emancipating himself from the thraldom of his mother,
and engaging the country in a war against Philip II. Sidney listened,
but Berenger chafed, feeling only that he was being further carried out
of reach of his explanation with his kindred. And thus they arrived
at Montpipeau, a tower, tall and narrow, like all French designs, but
expanded on the ground floor by wooden buildings capable of containing
the numerous train of a royal hunter, and surrounded by an extent of
waste land, without fine trees, though with covert for deer, boars, and
wolves sufficient for sport to royalty and death to peasantry. Charles
seemed to sit more erect in his saddle, and to drink in joy with every
breath of the thyme-scented breeze, from the moment his horse bounded
on the hollow-sounding turf; and when he leapt to the ground, with the
elastic spring of youth, he held out his hands to Sidney and to Teligny,
crying ‘Welcome, my friends. Here I am indeed a king!’
It was a lovely summer evening, early in August, and Charles bade the
supper to be spread under the elms that shaded a green lawn in front
of the chateau. Etiquette was here so far relaxed as to permit the
sovereign to dine with his suite, and tables, chairs, and benches were
brought out, drapery festooned in the trees to keep off sun and wind,
the King lay down in the fern and let his happy dogs fondle him, and
as a hers-girl passed along a vista in the distance, driving her goats
before her, Philip Sidney marvelled whether it was not even thus in
Arcadia.
Presently there was a sound of horses trampling, wheels moving, a party
of gaily gilded archers of the guard jingled up, and in their midst
was a coach. Berenger’s heart seemed to leap at once to his lips, as a
glimpse of ruffs, hats, and silks dawned on him through the windows.
The king rose from his lair among the fern, the Admiral stood forward,
all heads were bared, and from the coach-door alighted the young Queen;
no longer pale, subdued, and indifferent, but with a face shining with
girlish delight, as she held out her hand to the Admiral. ‘Ah! This is
well, this is beautiful,’ she exclaimed; ‘it is like our happy chases
in the Tyrol. Ah, Sire!’ to the King, ‘how I thank you for letting me be
with you.’
After her Majesty descended her gentleman-usher. Then came the
lady-in-waiting, Madame de Sauve, the wife of the state secretary in
attendance on Charles, and a triumphant, coquettish beauty, than a fat,
good-humoured Austrian dame, always called Madame la Comtesse, because
her German name was unpronounceable, and without whom the Queen never
stirred, and lastly a little figure, rounded yet slight, slender yet
soft and plump, with a kitten-like alertness and grace of motion, as
she sprang out, collected the Queen’s properties of fan, kerchief,
pouncet-box, mantle, &c., and disappeared in to the chateau, without
Berenger’s being sure of anything but that her little black hat had a
rose-coloured feather in it.
The Queen was led to a chair placed under one of the largest trees, and
there Charles presented to her such of his gentlemen as she was not yet
acquainted with, the Baron de Ribaumont among the rest.
‘I have heard of M. de Ribaumont,’ she said, in a tone that made
the colour mantle in his fair cheek; and with a sign of her hand she
detained him at her side till the King had strolled away with Madame la
Sauve, and no one remained near but her German countess. Then changing
her tone to one of confidence, which the high-bred homeliness of her
Austrian manner rendered inexpressibly engaging, she said, ‘I must
apologize, Monsieur, for the giddiness of my sister-in-law, which I fear
caused you some embarrassment.’
‘Ah, Madame,’ said Berenger, kneeling on one knee as she addressed him,
and his heart bounding with wild, undefined hope, ‘I cannot be grateful
enough. It was that which led to my being undeceived.’
‘It was true, then, that you were mistaken?’ said the Queen.
‘Treacherously deceived, Madame, by those whose interest it is to keep
us apart,’ said Berenger, colouring with indignation; ‘they imposed
my other cousin on me as my wife, and caused her to think me cruelly
neglectful.’
‘I know,’ said the Queen. ‘Yet Mdlle. de Ribaumont is far more admired
than my little blackbird.’
‘That may be, Madame, but not by me.’
‘Yet is it true that you came to break off the marriage?’
‘Yes, Madame,’ said Berenger, honestly, ‘but I had not seen her.’
‘And now?’ said the Queen, smiling.
‘I would rather die than give her up,’ said Berenger. ‘Oh, Madame, help
us of your grace. Every one is trying to part us, every one is arguing
against us, but she is my own true wedded wife, and if you will but give
her to me, all will be well.’
‘I like you, M. de Ribaumont,’ said the Queen, looking him full in the
face. ‘You are like our own honest Germans at my home, and I think you
mean all you say. I had much rather my dear little Nid de Merle were
with you than left here, to become like all the others. She is a good
little _Liegling_,--how do you call it in French? She has told me all,
and truly I would help you with all my heart, but it is not as if I
were the Queen-mother. You must have recourse to the King, who loves you
well, and at my request included you in the hunting-party.’
Berenger could only kiss her hand in token of earnest thanks before the
repast was announced, and the King came to lead her to the table spread
beneath the trees. The whole party supped together, but Berenger could
have only a distant view of his little wife, looking very demure and
grave by the side of the Admiral.
But when the meal was ended, there was a loitering in the woodland
paths, amid healthy openings or glades trimmed into discreet wildness
fit for royal rusticity; the sun set in parting glory on one horizon,
the moon rising in crimson majesty on the other. A musician at intervals
touched the guitar, and sang Spanish or Italian airs, whose soft or
quaint melody came dreamily through the trees. Then it was that with
beating heart Berenger stole up to the maiden as she stood behind the
Queen, and ventured to whisper her name and clasp her hand.
She turned, their eyes met, and she let him lead her apart into the
wood. It was not like a lover’s tryst, it was more like the continuation
of their old childish terms, only that he treated her as a thing of his
own, that he was bound to secure and to guard, and she received him as
her own lawful but tardy protector, to be treated with perfect reliance
but with a certain playful resentment.
‘You will not run away from me now,’ he said, making full prize of her
hand and arm.
‘Ah! is not she the dearest and best of queens?’ and the large eyes were
lifted up to him in such frank seeking of sympathy that he could see
into the depths of their clear darkness.
‘It is her doing then. Though, Eustacie, when I knew the truth, not
flood nor fire should keep me long from you, my heart, my love, my
wife.’
‘What! wife in spite of those villainous letter?’ she said, trying to
pout.
‘Wife for ever, inseparably! Only you must be able to swear that you
knew nothing of the one that brought me here.’
‘Poor me! No, indeed! There was Celine carried off at fourteen, Madame
de Blanchet a bride at fifteen; all marrying hither and thither; and
I--’ she pulled a face irresistibly droll--‘I growing old enough to
dress St. Catherine’s hair, and wondering where was M. le Baron.’
‘They thought me too young,’ said Berenger, ‘to take on me the cares of
life.’
‘So they were left to me?’
‘Cares! What cares have you but finding the Queen’s fan?’
‘Little you know!’ she said, half contemptuous, half mortified.
‘Nay, pardon me, _ma mie_. Who has troubled you?’
‘Ah! you would call it nothing to be beset by Narcisse; to be told one’s
husband is faithless, till one half believes it; to be looked at by ugly
eyes; to be liable to be teased any day by Monsieur, or worse, by that
mocking ape, M. d’Alecon, and to have nobody who can or will hinder it.’
She was sobbing by this time, and he exclaimed, ‘Ah, would that I could
revenge all! Never, never shall it be again! What blessed grace has
guarded you through all?’
‘Did I not belong to you?’ she said exultingly. ‘And had not Sister
Monique, yes, and M. le Baron, striven hard to make me good? Ah, how
kind he was!’
‘My father? Yes, Eustacie, he loved you to the last. He bade me, on his
deathbed, give you his own Book of Psalms, and tell you he had always
loved and prayed for you.’
‘Ah! his Psalms! I shall love them! Even at Bellaise, when first we came
there, we used to sing them, but the Mother Abbess went out visiting,
and when she came back she said they were heretical. And Soeur Monique
would not let me say the texts he taught me, but I WOULD not forget
them. I say them often in my heart.’
‘Then,’ he cried joyfully, ‘you will willingly embrace my religion?’
‘Be a Huguenot?’ she said distastefully.
‘I am not precisely a Huguenot; I do not love them,’ he answered
hastily; ‘but all shall be made clear to you at my home in England.’
‘England!’ she said. ‘Must we live in England? Away from every one?’
‘Ah, they will love so much! I shall make you so happy there,’ he
answered. ‘There you will see what it is to be true and trustworthy.’
‘I had rather live at Chateau Leurre, or my own Nid de Merle,’ she
replied. ‘There I should see Soeur Monique, and my aunt, the Abbess,
and we would have the peasants to dance in the castle court. Oh! if
you could but see the orchards at Le Bocage, you would never want to go
away. And we could come now and then to see my dear Queen.
‘I am glad at least you would not live at court.’
‘Oh, no, I have been more unhappy here than ever I knew could be borne.’
And a very few words from him drew out all that had happened to her
since they parted. Her father had sent her to Bellaise, a convent
founded by the first of the Angevin branch, which was presided over by
his sister, and where Diane was also educated. The good sister Monique
had been mistress of the _pensionnaires_, and had evidently taken much
pains to keep her charge innocent and devout. Diane had been taken to
court about two years before, but Eustacie had remained at the convent
till some three months since, when she had been appointed maid of honour
to the recently-married Queen; and her uncle had fetched her from Anjou,
and had informed her at the same time that her young husband had turned
Englishman and heretic, and that after a few formalities had been
complied with, she would become the wife of her cousin Narcisse. Now
there was no person whom she so much dreaded as Narcisse, and when
Berenger spoke of him as a feeble fop, she shuddered as though she knew
him to have something of the tiger.
‘Do you remember Benoit?’ she said; ‘poor Benoit, who came to Normandy
as my _laquais_? When I went back to Anjou he married a girl from
Leurre, and went to aid his father at the farm. The poor fellow had
imbibed the Baron’s doctrine--he spread it. It was reported that there
was a nest of Huguenots on the estate. My cousin came to break it up
with his _gens d’armes_ O Berenger, he would hear no entreaties, he
had no mercy; he let them assemble on Sunday, that they might be all
together. He fired the house; shot down those who escaped; if a prisoner
were made, gave him up to the Bishop’s Court. Benoit, my poor good
Benoit, who used to lead my palfrey, was first wounded, then tried, and
burnt--burnt in the PLACE at Lucon! I heard Narcisse laugh--laugh as he
talked of the cries of the poor creatures in the conventicler. My own
people, who loved me! I was but twelve years old, but even then the
wretch would pay me a half-mocking courtesy, as one destined to him; and
the more I disdained him and said I belonged to you, the more both he
and my aunt, the Abbess, smiled, as though they had their bird in a
cage; but they left me in peace till my uncle brought me to court, and
then all began again: and when they said you gave me up, I had no hope,
not even of a convent. But ah, it is all over now, and I am so happy!
You are grown so gentle and so beautiful, Berenger, and so much taller
than I ever figured you to myself, and you look as if you could take me
up in your arms, and let no harm happen to me.’
‘Never, never shall it!’ said Berenger, felling all manhood, strength,
and love stir within him, and growing many years in heart in that happy
moment. ‘My sweet little faithful wife, never fear again now you are
mine.’
Alas! poor children. They were a good way from the security they had
begun to fancy for themselves. Early the next morning, Berenger went
in his straightforward way to the King, thanked him, and requested his
sanction for at once producing themselves to the court as Monsieur le
Baron and Madame la Baronne de Ribaumont.
At this Charles swore a great oath, as one in perplexity, and bade him
not go so fast.
‘See here,’ said he, with the rude expletives only too habitual with
him; ‘she is a pretty little girl, and she and her lands are much better
with an honest man like you than with that _pendard_ of a cousin; but
you see he is bent on having her, and he belongs to a cut-throat crew
that halt at nothing. I would not answer for your life, if you tempted
him so strongly to rid himself of you.’
‘My own sword, Sire, can guard my life.’
‘Plague upon your sword! What does the foolish youth think it would
do against half-a-dozen poniards and pistols in a lane black as hell’s
mouth?’
The foolish young WAS thinking how could a king so full of fiery words
and strange oaths bear to make such an avowal respecting his own
capital and his own courtiers. All he could do was to bow and reply,
‘Nevertheless, Sire, at whatever risk, I cannot relinquish my wife; I
would take her at one to the Ambassador’s.’
‘How, sir!’ interrupted Charles, haughtily and angrily, ‘if you
forget that you are a French nobleman still, I should remember it! The
Ambassador may protect his own countrymen-none else.’
‘I entreat your Majesty’s pardon,’ said Berenger, anxious to retract his
false step. ‘It was your goodness and the gracious Queen’s that made me
hope for your sanction.’
‘All the sanction Charles de Valois can give is yours, and welcome,’
said the King, hastily. ‘The sanction of the King of France is another
matter! To say the truth, I see no way out of the affair but
an elopement.’ ‘Sire!’ exclaimed the astonished Berenger, whose
strictly-disciplined education had little prepared him for such counsel.
‘Look you! if I made you known as a wedded pair, the Chevalier and
his son would not only assassinate you, but down on me would come my
brother, and my mother, and M. de Guise and all their crew, veritably
for giving the prize out of the mouth of their satellite, but nominally
for disregarding the Pope, favouring a heretical marriage, and I know
not what, but, as things go here, I should assuredly get the worst of
it; and if you made safely off with your prize, no one could gainsay
you--I need know nothing about it--and lady and lands would be your
without dispute. You might ride off from the skirts of the forest; I
would lead the hunt that way, and the three days’ riding would bring you
to Normady, for you had best cross to England immediately. When she is
one there, owned by your kindred, Monsieur le cousin may gnash his teeth
as he will, he must make the best of it for the sake of the honour of
his house, and you can safely come back and raise her people and yours
to follow the Oriflamme when it takes the field against Spain. What! you
are still discontented? Speak out! Plain speaking is a treat not often
reserved for me.’
‘Sire, I am most grateful for your kindness, but I should greatly prefer
going straightforward.’
‘Peste! Well is it said that a blundering Englishman goes always right
before him! There, then! As your King on the one hand, as the friend who
has brought you and your wife together, sir, it is my command that you
do not compromise me and embroil greater matters than you can understand
by publicly claiming this girl. Privately I will aid you to the best of
my ability; publicly, I command you, for my sake, if you heed not your
own, to be silent!’
Berenger sought out Sidney, who smiled at his surprise.
‘Do you not see,’ he said, ‘that the King is your friend, and would be
very glad to save the lady’s lands from the Guisards, but that he cannot
say so; he can only befriend a Huguenot by stealth.’
‘I would not be such a king for worlds!’
However, Eustacie was enchanted. It was like a prince and princess
in Mere Perinne’s fairy tales. Could they go like a shepherd and
shepherdess? She had no fears-no scruples. Would she not be with her
husband? It was the most charming frolic in the world. So the King
seemed to think it, though he was determined to call it all the Queen’s
doing--the first intrigue of her own, making her like all the rest of
us--the Queen’s little comedy. He undertook to lead the chase as far as
possible in the direction of Normandy, when the young pair might ride on
to an inn, meet fresh horses, and proceed to Chateau Leurre, and thence
to England. He would himself provide a safe-conduct, which, as Berenger
suggested, would represent them as a young Englishman taking home his
young wife. Eustacie wanted at least to masquerade as an Englishwoman,
and played off all the fragments of the language she had caught as a
child, but Berenger only laughed at her, and said they just fitted the
French bride. It was very pretty to laugh at Eustacie; she made such a
droll pretence at pouting with her rosebud lips, and her merry velvety
eyes belied them so drolly.
Such was to be the Queen’s pastoral; but when Elisabeth found the
responsibility so entirely thrown on her, she began to look grave and
frightened. It was no doubt much more than she had intended when she
brought about the meeting between the young people, and the King, who
had planned the elopement, seemed still resolved to make all appear her
affair. She looked all day more like the grave, spiritless being she was
at court than like the bright young rural queen of the evening before,
and she was long in her little oratory chapel in the evening. Berenger,
who was waiting in the hall with the other Huguenot gentlemen, thought
her devotions interminable since they delayed all her ladies. At length,
however, a page came up to him, and said in a low voice, ‘The Queen
desires the presence of M. le Baron de Ribaumont.’
He followed the messenger, and found himself in the little chapel,
before a gaily-adorned altar, and numerous little shrines and niches
round. Sidney would have dreaded a surreptitious attempt to make him
conform, but Berenger had no notion of such perils,--he only saw
that Eustacie was standing by the Queen’s chair, and a kindly-looking
Austrian priest, the Queen’s confessor, held a book in his hand.
The Queen came to meet him. ‘For my sake,’ she said, with all her
sweetness, ‘to ease my mind, I should like to see my little Eustacie
made entirely your own ere you go. Father Meinhard tells me it is safer
that, when the parties were under twelve years old, the troth should be
again exchanged. No other ceremony is needed.’
‘I desire nothing but to have her made indissolubly my own,’ said
Berenger, bowing.
‘And the King permits,’ added Elisabeth.
The King growled out, ‘It is your comedy, Madame; I meddle not.’
The Austrian priest had no common language with Berenger but Latin. He
asked a few questions, and on hearing the answers, declared that the
sacrament of marriage had been complete, but that--as was often done in
such cases--he would once more hear the troth-plight of the young pair.
The brief formula was therefore at once exchanged--the King, when the
Queen looked entreatingly at him, rousing himself to make the bride over
to Berenger. As soon as the vows had been made, in the briefest manner,
the King broke in boisterously: ‘There, you are twice marred, to please
Madame there; but hold your tongues all of you about this scene in the
play.’
Then almost pushing Eustacie over to Berenger, he added, ‘There she is!
Take your wife, sir; but mind, she was as much yours before as she is
now.’
But for all Berenger had said about ‘his wife,’ it was only now that
he really FELT her his own, and became husband rather than lover-man
instead of boy. She was entirely his own now, and he only desired to be
away with her; but some days’ delay was necessary. A chase on the scale
of the one that was to favour their evasion could not be got up without
some notice; and, moreover, it was necessary to procure money, for
neither Sidney nor Ribaumont had more than enough with them for the
needful liberalities to the King’s servants and huntsmen. Indeed
Berenger had spent all that remained in his purse upon the wares of an
Italian pedlar whom he and Eustacie met in the woods, and whose gloves
‘as sweet as fragrant posies,’ fans, scent-boxes, pocket mirrors, Genoa
wire, Venice chains, and other toys, afforded him the mean of making up
the gifts that he wished to carry home to his sisters; and Eustacie’s
counsel was merrily given in the choice. And when the vendor began
with a meaning smile to recommend to the young pair themselves a
little silver-netted heart as a love-token, and it turned out that all
Berenger’s money was gone, so that it could not be bought without
giving up the scented casket destined for Lucy, Eustacie turned with her
sweetest, proudest smile, and said, ‘No, no; I will not have it; what do
we two want with love-tokens now?’
Sidney had taken the youthful and romantic view of the case, and
considered himself to be taking the best possible bare of is young
friend, by enabling him to deal honourably with so charming a little
wife as Eustacie. Ambassador and tutor would doubtless be very angry;
but Sidney could judge for himself of the lady, and he therefore threw
himself into her interests, and sent his servant back to Paris to
procure the necessary sum for the journey of Master Henry Berenger and
Mistress Mary, his wife. Sidney was, on his return alone to Paris, to
explain all to the elders, and pacify them as best he could; and his
servant was already the bearer of a letter from Berenger that was to be
sent at once to England with Walsingham’s dispatches, to prepare Lord
Walwyn for the arrival of the runaways. The poor boy laboured to
be impressively calm and reasonable in his explanation of the
misrepresentation, and of his strong grounds for assuming his rights,
with his persuasion that his wife would readily join the English
church--a consideration that he knew would greatly smooth the way for
her. Indeed, his own position was impregnable: nobody could blame him
for taking his own wife to himself, and he was so sure of her charms,
that he troubled himself very little about the impression she might make
on his kindred. If they loved her, it was all right; if not, he could
take her back to his own castle, and win fame and honour under the
banner of France in the Low Countries. As the Lucy Thistlewood, she was
far too discreet to feel any disappointment or displeasure; or if she
should, it was her own fault and that of his mother, for all her life
she had known him to be married. So he finished his letter with a
message that the bells should be ready to ring, and that when Philip
heard three guns fired on the coast, he might light the big beacon pile
above the Combe.
Meantime ‘the Queen’s Pastoral’ was much relished by all the spectators.
The state of things was only avowed to Charles, Elisabeth, and Philip
Sidney, and even the last did not know of the renewed troth which the
King chose to treat as such a secret; but no one had any doubt of the
mutual relations of M. de Ribaumont and Mdlle. de Nid de Merle, and
their dream of bliss was like a pastoral for the special diversion of
the holiday of Montpipeau. The transparency of their indifference
in company, their meeting eyes, their trysts with the secrecy of an
ostrich, were the subjects of constant amusement to the elders, more
especially as the shyness, blushes, and caution were much more on the
side of the young husband than on that of the lady. Fresh from her
convent, simple with childishness and innocence, it was to her only
the natural completion of her life to be altogether Berenger’s, and
the brief concealment of their full union added a certain romantic
enchantment, which added to her exultation in her victory over her cruel
kindred. She had been upon her own mind, poor child, for her few weeks
of court life. She had been upon her own mind, poor child, for her few
weeks of court life, but not long enough to make her grow older, though
just so long as to make the sense of her having her own protector with
her doubly precious. He, on the other hand, though full of happiness,
did also feel constantly deepening on him the sense of the charge
and responsibility he had assumed, hardly knowing how. The more dear
Eustacie became to him, the more she rested on him and became entirely
his, the more his boyhood and INSOUCIANCE drifted away behind him; and
while he could hardly bear to heave his darling a moment out of his
sight, the less he could endure any remark or jest upon his affection
for her. His home had been a refined one, where Cecile’s convent purity
seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of modest reserve such as did not
prevail in the court of the Maiden Queen herself, and the lad of
eighteen had not seem enough of the outer world to have rubbed off any
of that grace. His seniority to his little wife seemed to show itself
chiefly in his being put out of countenance for her, when she was too
innocent and too proud of her secret matronhood to understand or resent
the wit.
Little did he know that this was the ballet-like interlude in a great
and terrible tragedy, whose first act was being played out on the stage
where they schemed and sported, like their own little drama, which was
all the world to them, and noting to the others. Berenger knew indeed
that the Admiral was greatly rejoiced that the Nid de Merle estates
should go into Protestant hands, and that the old gentleman lost no
opportunity of impressing on him that they were a heavy trust, to be
used for the benefit of ‘the Religion,’ and for the support of the King
in his better mind. But it may be feared that he did not give a very
attentive ear to all this. He did not like to think of those estates;
he would gladly have left them all the Narcisse, so that he might have
their lady, and though quite willing to win his spurs under Charles and
Coligny against the Spaniard, his heart and head were far too full to
take in the web of politics. Sooth to say, the elopement in prospect
seemed to him infinitely more important than Pope or Spaniard, Guise or
Huguenot, and Coligny observed with a sigh to Teligny that he was a good
boy, but nothing but the merest boy, with eyes open only to himself.
When Charles undertook to rehearse their escape with them, and the Queen
drove out in a little high-wheeled litter with Mne. la Comtesse,
while Mme. De Sauve and Eustacie were mounted on gay palfreys with the
pommelled side-saddle lately invented by the Queen-mother, Berenger,
as he watched the fearless horsemanship and graceful bearing of his
newly-won wife, had no speculations to spend on the thoughtful face
of the Admiral. And when at the outskirts of the wood the King’s
bewildering hunting-horn--sounding as it were now here, now there, now
low, now high--called every attendant to hasten to its summons, leaving
the young squire and damsel errant with a long winding high-banked lane
before them, they reckoned the dispersion to be all for their sakes, and
did not note, as did Sidney’s clear eye, that when the entire company
had come straggling him, it was the King who came up with Mme. De Sauve
almost the last; and a short space after, as if not to appear to have
been with him, appeared the Admiral and his son-in-law.
Sidney also missed one of the Admiral’s most trusted attendants, and
from this and other symptoms he formed his conclusions that the King had
scattered his followers as much for the sake of an unobserved conference
with Coligny as for the convenience of the lovers, and that letters had
been dispatched in consequence of that meeting.
Those letters were indeed of a kind to change the face of affairs in
France. Marshal Strozzi, then commanding in the south-west, was bidden
to embark at La Rochelle in the last week of August, to hasten to
the succour of the Prince of Orange against Spain, and letters were
dispatched by Coligny to all the Huguenot partisans bidding them
assemble at Melun on the third of September, when they would be in the
immediate neighbourhood of the court, which was bound for Fontainebleau.
Was the star of the Guises indeed waning? Was Charles about to escape
from their hands, and commit himself to an honest, high-minded policy,
in which he might have been able to purify his national Church, and
wind back to her those whom her corruptions had driven to seek truth and
morality beyond her pale?
Alas! there was a bright pair of eyes that saw more than Philip
Sidney’s, a pair of ears that heard more, a tongue and pen less faithful
to guard a secret.