"No, Monsieur le Procureur-Général," Boisfleury said quietly, "I decided on no such thing. What I did truly decide on, since I was informed that the young man would but be drawn into a duel with Fleur de Mai, in which his chance might be as good as that of the other--was that I would stand by and see that duel. Thereby I should not appear to be against those two ruffians, La Truaumont and La Preaux, and should obtain time in which to come to a conclusion as to how I might best warn his Majesty against the wicked plot."
"Such being your praiseworthy resolve why did you not put it in practice later?"
"He did," the President whispered to La Reynie. "He went to Fontainebleau to inform the Marquis de Louvois of that plot."
"True," La Reynie whispered in turn as he hastily turned over the depositions. "Yet he did not warn the Marquis. It was to De Brissac that he unbosomed himself some week or so later. But we will hear his story. Now," again addressing Boisfleury, "you say in these," tapping the papers before him, "that you went to Fontainebleau to warn the King's Ministers of this plot against his Majesty. Yet you failed to do so. Why did you refrain? Why also wait some week or so ere you addressed yourself to the Sieur de Brissac?"
"Monsieur le Procureur-Général, I was too much undone, too startled by what I saw on my way up the Grand Avenue to the Château. I thought I had seen a spirit from another world."
"What!" While, as La Reynie spoke scornfully to the man, all eyes, including those of the prisoners, were turned on him. What rhodomontade was this they were listening to, they all wondered; with what gibberish was this man, half knave and half adventurer and wholly vagabond, insulting their understandings as he mumbled this buffoonery about spirits from another world?
They did not know--not even the most astute Judges and men of law in France knew or understood, that the fellow before them was but preparing his final effects, his tableau and dénoûment (which should crush the man who had meant to crush him and brand him as a secret midnight assassin) as their own dramatists prepared their tableaux by exciting curiosity from the commencement.
"Monsieur le Procureur-Général," Boisfleury replied, speaking with such well-affected calmness and intensity that his tones became almost dignified and were entirely impressive. "There is no person in this court who would not have thought as I thought, have believed as I believed, that he was looking on a spectre or one who had come back to this world for some dread purpose, had that person seen what I saw on that awful night in Basle and then seen what I saw in the Grand Avenue. A dead man as I thought at first, at the moment,--one who had come back from the grave. Monsieur le Procureur, Messieurs les Judges, may I tell all?"
"'Tis for that you sit in that seat,--that you are here," D'Aligre said. "Speak, but speak only the truth. Otherwise----"
"Otherwise, monseigneur!" Boisfleury exclaimed, "otherwise! Dieu! there is no lie, no fiction that mortal man could invent which can equal that which I saw at Basle. Horrors have I known; I have been a soldier"--there were those who said he never had been one but only a common footpad and cut-throat; but this matters not--"yet never have I seen so wicked, so bloodthirsty and cruel a night as that."