“Condition! fie!” exclaimed Madame de Fiesque.
“You don’t know what it is,” replied Grammont.
“Oh! it is easy to guess,” remarked la Limueil.
The Italian custom of calling ladies, as peasants call their wives, “la Such-a-one” was then the fashion at the court of France.
“You are mistaken,” said the count, hastily, “the matter is simply to give a letter from my cousin de Jarnac to one of the maids on the other side, Mademoiselle de Matha.”
“You must not compromise my young ladies,” said the Comtesse de Fiesque. “I will deliver the letter myself.—Do you know what is happening in Flanders?” she continued, turning to the Cardinal de Tournon. “It seems that Monsieur d’Egmont is given to surprises.”
“He and the Prince of Orange,” remarked Cypierre, with a significant shrug of his shoulders.
“The Duke of Alba and Cardinal Granvelle are going there, are they not, monsieur?” said Amyot to the Cardinal de Tournon, who remained standing, gloomy and anxious between the opposing groups after his conversation with the chancellor.
“Happily we are at peace; we need only conquer heresy on the stage,” remarked the young Duc d’Orleans, alluding to a part he had played the night before,—that of a knight subduing a hydra which bore upon its foreheads the word “Reformation.”
Catherine de’ Medici, agreeing in this with her daughter-in-law, had allowed a theatre to be made of the great hall (afterwards arranged for the Parliament of Blois), which, as we have already said, connected the chateau of Francois I. with that of Louis XII.