They left the château by way of the warren, rode through a by-path to the Bourges highroad, from which they soon turned to the right, and then through other by-paths to the Château Meillant road, leaving on their right the baronial town of La Châtre, and finally, leaving the last-mentioned road, they descended across the fields to the château and village of Briantes, which was the goal of their journey.
As the country was really peaceful, the two gentlemen had ridden on ahead of their little escort, in order that they might converse without restraint; and this is how young D'Ars enlightened D'Alvimar:
"The friend upon whom I propose to quarter you," he said, "is the most extraordinary personage in Christendom. You must keep a close watch upon yourself in order to stifle a wild desire to laugh when you are with him; but you will be well rewarded for such tolerance as you may display of his mental peculiarities by the great kindness of heart he will manifest to everybody he meets. He is so kind-hearted that, if you should happen to forget his name and ask the first passer-by, noble or serf, where the kind gentleman lives, he will direct you, and never make a mistake as to the person you mean. But this requires an explanation, and, as your horse has no great desire to hurry, and as it is only nine o'clock at the latest, I propose to entertain you with your host's story. Listen, I begin! Story of the kind Monsieur de Bois-Doré!
"As you are a foreigner, and have been in France no more than ten years, you can hardly have met him, because he has been living on his estate about the same time. Otherwise, you would certainly have remarked, wherever you might have chanced to see him, the good, mad, gallant, noble old Marquis de Bois-Doré, to-day lord of Briantes, Guinard, Validé and other places; also, abbé fiduciaire of Varennes, etc., etc.
"Despite all these titles, Bois-Doré does not belong to the great nobility of the province, and we are related to him by marriage only. He is a simple gentleman whom the late King Henri IV. made a marquis solely through friendship, and who made a fortune, no one very well knows how, in the wars of the Béarnais. We are compelled to believe that he must have done more or less sacking and pillaging, as the custom was in those days, and as is the well recognized privilege of partisan warfare.
"I will not attempt to describe Bois-Doré's campaigns; it would take too long. Let me tell you his family history simply. His father, Monsieur de——"
"Stay," said Monsieur d'Alvimar; "so this Monsieur de Bois-Doré is a heretic, is he?"
"Ah! deuce take it," replied his guide, laughing, "I forgot that you are a zealot—a genuine Spaniard! We fellows hereabout do not care so much about these religious disputes. The province has suffered too much because of them, and we long for the time when France shall suffer no more. We hope that the king will soon bring all those fanatics of the South to terms at Montauban. We want them to have a sound thrashing, but not the cord and the stake to which our fathers would have treated them. Political parties are not what they used to be, and in our day people don't damn one another so much as they used. But I see that my remarks displease you, and I hasten to inform you that Monsieur de Bois-Doré is to-day as good a Catholic as many others who have never ceased to be Catholics. On the day when the Béarnais concluded that Paris was well worth a mass, Bois-Doré concluded that the king could not be in error, and he abjured the doctrine of Geneva, without publicity, but sincerely, I think."
"Return to the story of Monsieur de Bois-Doré's family," said D'Alvimar, who did not choose to let his companion see with what suspicious contempt he regarded new converts.
"As you please," replied the young man. "Our marquis's father was the sturdiest Leaguer in the neighborhood. He was the âme damnée of Monsieur Claude de la Châtre and the Barbançois; I need say no more. He had, in the château where he lived, a nice little assortment of instruments of torture for such Huguenots as he might capture, and did not hesitate to plant his own vassals on the wooden horse when they could not pay their dues.