Things went against us, as all the world knows. Then came the news of the arrest and imprisonment of the Prince of Condé. It came to us at Châtillon, whither the Princess of Condé had sought refuge with a few devoted adherents, amongst whom was Jean de Marcilly; and there, too, befell that which led me, step by step, along the Traitor’s Way.
CHAPTER IV
WHAT MAJOLAIS SAW
It was Majolais, the black dwarf, who first pointed it out. We, that is, Lanoy, the Comte de Marcilly, who was known as “The Shadow of Condé,” myself, and lastly Majolais, who had no business to be there, were on the platform of the stone cavalier, built up against the keep of Châtillon, where the walls fell sheer into the Indre.
A little to our right was a projecting oriel window, in the bay of which sat the Princess, Condé’s wife, with avid eyes that looked ever to the north. It was partly to escape those eyes, which implored and upbraided at once, whenever they fell on us, that we had come out, and were pacing backward and forward, trying to talk, with hearts as heavy as lead. But we had to flog ourselves for this, the effort to speak was so painful, and at last there was a dead silence, and we tramped up and down, in a sullen and speechless way.
Finally Lanoy and the Comte, separating from me, leaned over the battlements, and looked down into the town below, at the pointed gables, the red and gray roofs, and the narrow, winding streets, where the people were as ants moving restlessly to and fro.
And I, I was left to my thoughts, such thoughts as a man has who has sinned and regretted, and then sinned again. They sting like an adder now when I recall them, and they hurt even then; but I shook them from me as a dog shakes the water from his coat, and, standing still, looked aimlessly around.
It was winter, but the sun was out, and the air crisp. I glanced up at the spread of the sky, half filled with a mountainous pile of soft white clouds glistening in the light, and wondered to myself that the sun could shine on such a hell as lay beneath it. The sky was as blue, the clouds as silver white in the north, as in the south, the east, the west. And yet the heavens should have been black there, above Amboise and the Orléanais, black as a pall, and lit only by the pitying eyes of the stars, for there the Italian woman and the Lorrainers were shedding the best blood of France like water.
Let me stop for a moment to explain in a few words why we were as we were. The King—he was barely sixteen, and already dying of a terrible disease—together with Mary of Scotland, his young Queen, were in the hands of the brothers of Guise and Catherine, and Lorrainer and Italian were both, for the present, partners. The country was bankrupt. In the King’s name they reduced it to beggary. The people were starving. They let them die. They seem to have gone blood mad in their thirst for power. It was nothing but “Kill! kill!” Add to this a religious persecution of the most intolerable kind, and the picture of the times is roughly outlined.
The most fiendish cruelties were inflicted in the name of the Law, and of God, against the followers of the New Faith, or rather of the Old Faith that was found anew. “Huguenots!” they called us in derision, after the wretched farthing piece, or, as some say, after the goblin King of Tours—I neither know nor care which—the name was yet to be one of terror to the Woman of Babylon.
The chiefs of the old nobility, and Princes of the blood, found themselves prisoners, or practically exiles. Their hereditary rights were denied to them, they were cut off from the State. It is not strange that all the liberalism, all the patriotism in France, saw with horror the coming ruin of their country, and forgetting, for the moment, differences of creed, coalesced with one accord against the tyrants. The outcome of this was the attempt of Amboise—and its results are known.