door again.
I did so suspiciously, and without averting my eyes from my visitors.
Great were my embarrassment and confusion, therefore, when, the door
being shut, they dropped their cloaks one after the other, and I saw
before me M. du Mornay and the well-known figure of the King of
Navarre.
They seemed so much diverted, looking at one another and laughing,
that for a moment I thought some chance resemblance deceived me,
and that here were my jokers again. Hence while a man might count ten
I stood staring; and the king was the first to speak. 'We have made no
mistake, Du Mornay, have we?' he said, casting a laughing glance at
me.
'No, sire,' Du Mornay answered. 'This is the Sieur de Marsac, the
gentleman whom I mentioned to you.'
I hastened, confused, wondering, and with a hundred apologies, to pay
my respects to the king. He speedily cut me short, however, saying,
with an air of much kindness, 'Of Marsac, in Brittany, I think, sir?'
'The same, sire,'
'Then you are of the family of Bonne?'
'I am the last survivor of that family, sire,' I answered respectfully.
'It has played its part,' he rejoined. and therewith he took his seat on my
stool with an easy grace which charmed me. 'Your motto is "BONNE
FOI," is it not? And Marsac, if I remember rightly, is not far from
Rennes, on the Vilaine?'
I answered that it was, adding, with a full heart, that it grieved me to be
compelled to receive so great a prince in so poor a lodging.
'Well, I confess,' Du Mornay struck in, looking carelessly round him,
'you have a queer taste, M. de Marsac, in the arrangement of your
furniture. You--'
'Mornay!' the king cried sharply.
'Sire?'
'Chut! your elbow is in the candle. Beware of it!'
But I well understood him. If my heart had been full before, it
overflowed now. Poverty is not so shameful as the shifts to which it
drives men. I had been compelled some days before, in order to make
as good a show as possible--since it is the undoubted duty of a
gentleman to hide his nakedness from impertinent eyes, and especially
from the eyes of the canaille, who are wont to judge from externals--to
remove such of my furniture and equipage as remained to that side of
the room, which was visible from without when the door was open.
This left the farther side of the room vacant and bare. To anyone within
doors the artifice was, of course, apparent, and I am bound to say that
M. de Mornay's words brought the blood to my brow.
I rejoiced, however a moment later that he had uttered them; for
without them I might never have known, or known so early, the
kindness of heart and singular quickness of apprehension which ever
distinguished the king, my master. So, in my heart, I began to call him
from that hour.
The King of Navarre was at this time thirty-five years old, his hair
brown, his complexion ruddy, his moustache, on one side at least,
beginning to turn grey. His features, which Nature had cast in a harsh
and imperious mould, were relieved by a constant sparkle and
animation such as I have never seen in any other man, but in him
became ever more conspicuous in gloomy and perilous times. Inured to
danger from his earliest youth, he had come to enjoy it as others a
festival, hailing its advent with a reckless gaiety which astonished even
brave men, and led others to think him the least prudent of mankind.
Yet such he was not: nay, he was the opposite of this. Never did
Marshal of France make more careful dispositions for a battle--albeit
once in it he bore himself like any captain of horse--nor ever did Du
Mornay himself sit down to a conference with a more accurate
knowledge of affairs. His prodigious wit and the affability of his
manners, while they endeared him to his servants, again and again
blinded his adversaries; who, thinking that so much brilliance could
arise only from a shallow nature, found when it was too late that they
had been outwitted by him whom they contemptuously styled the
Prince of Bearn, a man a hundredfold more astute than themselves, and
master alike of pen and sword.
Much of this, which all the world now knows, I learned afterwards. At
the moment I could think of little save the king's kindness; to which he
added by insisting that I should sit on the bed while we talked. 'You
wonder, M. de Marsac,' he said, 'what brings me here, and why I have
come to you instead of sending for you? Still more, perhaps, why I
have come to you at night
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