"Come! come!" cried the Duchesse de Nevers. "Do not miss, sire. Give the beast a good stab!"
"Be easy, duchess!" said Charles.
Couching his lance, he darted at the boar which, held by the two bloodhounds, could not escape the blow. But at sight of the shining lance it turned to one side, and the weapon, instead of sinking into its breast, glided over its shoulder and blunted itself against the rock to which the animal had run.
"A thousand devils!" cried the King. "I have missed him. A spear! a spear!"
And bending back, as horsemen do when they are going to take a fence, he hurled his useless lance from him.
An outrider advanced and offered him another.
But at that moment, as though it foresaw the fate which awaited it, and which it wished to resist, by a violent effort the boar snatched its torn ears from the teeth of the bloodhounds, and with eyes bloody, protruding, hideous, its breath burning like the heat from a furnace, with chattering teeth and lowered head it sprang at the King's horse. Charles was too good a hunter not to have foreseen this. He turned his horse, which began to rear, but he had miscalculated the pressure, and the horse, too tightly reined in, or perhaps giving way to his fright, fell over backwards. The spectators gave a terrible cry: the horse had fallen, and the King's leg was under him.
"Your hand, sire, give me your hand," said Henry.
The King let go his horse's bridle, seized the saddle with his left hand, and tried to draw out his hunting knife with his right; but the knife, pressed into his belt by the weight of his body, would not come from its sheath.
"The boar! the boar!" cried Charles; "it is on me, D'Alençon! on me!"