'Oh, madame!' I murmured, overpowered by the beauty of the speaker and perplexed by the strange morality she displayed—a code which I now heard for the first time.
'And Monseigneur le Duc de Bellegarde, Peer and Marshal of France, the declared lover of the Queen Regent, before taking leave of her Majesty, to command the army on the frontiers, prayed, that as a parting favour she would lay her beautiful hand but once on the hilt of his sword. Thus it is, we still foster the spirit of gallantry which Anne of Austria brought among us from old Castille and the cavaliers of Madrid. But while I am running on in this way, monsieur my friend, I am quite forgetting that the night has passed, that the morning draws on apace, and that, as you have never been in love, it could not be an affair of the heart which made you leave your country so young. What was it then?'
'An affair of the dagger, madame,' said I, with a bitter sigh.
'Drink again, refresh yourself, and collect your thoughts before you speak.'
And while doing so, I will here insert a little paragraph for my reader's information.
His Majesty, Louis XIII., though not very much of a lover, sometimes did take a liking to the fair sex. His regard for Mademoiselle de la Fayette, a maid of honour to his queen, was notoriously known, but he was a man at times religious, weak, bigoted, scrupulous by fits, and not over-voluptuous by nature; hence, save for the honour his royal regard was supposed to confer, and the magnificent gifts it drew forth, his gallantries were neither dangerous nor much in request. His confessor, the Jesuit Coussin, permitted his mild liaison for the charming Fayette to favour the queen-mother's rival, and mademoiselle being in the interest of the minister, Cardinal Richelieu, smiled on the vapid love and clumsy gallantries of the most Christian king. But the tide of politics turned; and by desire of the Cardinal, and by the exordiums of Father Leslie, a Scot, who succeeded Coussin as keeper of the royal conscience, the beautiful Fayette was immured in a convent. Then his Majesty of France fell in love with Clara d'Ische, a lady of Lorraine, whom he created Countess d'Amboise; and on her, now, were the eagle eyes of Richelieu turned, to discover by what means she might be made subservient to himself or be crushed for ever. Thus, thanks to the secret agency of his familiar, Father Joseph du Tremblay, of terrible memory, nearly every servant in her château was the spy of the Cardinal Prime-minister, who, with what truth I say not, was at that moment accounted the lover of Anne of Austria and of Marion de l'Orme.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BOND OF MANRENT.
Madame, who never tired of prattling, spoke again:
'The letter of my dear old friend the Duke—by-the by, does he still curl his mustachios up to his ears?—says that your father was—'