"Your Majesty's gracious pardon," he said, "for presenting myself before you thus: but I heard tidings, as I came along, which I believed might give you great and exceeding pain."
"Well may it give me pain, cousin of Guise," replied the King. "Well may it give me pain, to find that my subjects are so insensible to their own honour or to mine, as to suffer a foreign enemy to encamp upon our native soil, without doing what best we may to drive him forth."
"It may, indeed, Sire," replied the Duke of Guise. "But the matter has not been properly explained; and neither the Tiers Etats nor the Clergy have seen it in its true light."
"But where was the Duke of Guise to explain it?" demanded Henry. "Where was the Generalissimo of my armies, the Lieutenant-general of my kingdom, the Grand Master of my household, the man whose voice is only second to my own in France--ay, and by Heavens! whose voice is sometimes first likewise? Where was he, I say; and how came he not to be present?"
"From the simplest of all possible causes, Sire," replied the Duke. "The business regularly appointed for this morning's discussion by the States was a mere trifling matter of some petty impost. I had not told your Majesty last night of this affair of Savoy, because I thought it would spoil the pleasure of your evening, and perhaps disturb your rest. I myself, however, neglected nothing. I instantly dispatched orders, in your Majesty's name, to my brother of Mayenne, to advance towards Piedmont with troops from Lyons. Before I rested, I sent for the Presidents of the Nobles and of the Tiers Etats. The latter, however, was not to be found; but I told Brissac and Magnac what had occurred, and begged them to prepare all minds for vigorous measures against Savoy, without disclosing the actual fact of aggression, that fact having only reached me by the excessive speed of my brother's courier. I felt perfectly certain that the news could not be known till to-night or to-morrow morning; and how it happened that your Majesty was informed of it so early, as to send down a message thereon to each of the three Estates, I really do not know."
"Very simply, my good cousin of Guise," replied the King, whose face had now relaxed from the harsh and acrid aspect it had borne throughout the morning; "it was Miron told me."
"I had forgotten, I had forgotten," replied the Duke. "He was in the room when the packet arrived, and I must have given vent to my thoughts aloud."
"Well, under such circumstances," replied the King, "I suppose I must pardon, cousin of Guise, your having gone to pay your homage somewhere else, as Monsieur de Villequier insinuates, when the King much wanted your presence."
"Monsieur de Villequier is, as usual, wrong," replied the Duke of Guise frowning upon him. "Where he seeks for or finds such abundance of evil motives to attribute to other men, I do not know. May it not be in his own bosom? I went, for your Majesty's service, to inspect a body of three thousand men, about to march early this morning from Laucome to join the army of the Duke of Nevers, and it was only as I returned that I heard of this unfortunate business."
"Perhaps his Highness thinks," said Villequier, not unwilling to increase any feeling of ill-will between the King and the Duke, "perhaps his Highness thinks that your Majesty would have done more wisely to have waited till his return, and not to have communicated the news from Savoy at all to the States, till you had consulted him upon it."