Yet Paris did not fall.
When M. d’Agen returned a little before midnight, he found me still sitting in the dark looking from the window. I heard him call roughly for lights, and apprised by the sound of his voice that something was wrong, I rose to meet him. He stood silent awhile, twirling his small moustaches, and then broke into a passionate tirade, from which I was not slow to gather that M. de Rambouillet declined to serve me.
‘Well,’ I said, feeling for the young man’s distress and embarrassment, ‘perhaps he is right.’
‘He says that word respecting you came this evening,’ my friend answered, his cheeks red with shame, ‘and that to countenance you after that would only be to court certain humiliation. I did not let him off too easily, I assure you,’ M. d’Agen continued, turning away to evade my gaze; ‘but I got no satisfaction. He said you had his good-will, and that to help you he would risk something, but that to do so under these circumstances would be only to injure himself.’
‘There is still Crillon,’ I said, with as much cheerfulness as I could assume. ‘Pray Heaven he be there early! Did M. de Rambouillet say anything else?’
‘That your only chance was to fly as quickly and secretly as possible.’
‘He thought; my situation desperate, then?’
My friend nodded; and scarcely less depressed on my account than ashamed on his own, evinced so much feeling that it was all I could do to comfort him; which I succeeded in doing only when I diverted the conversation to Madame de Bruhl. We passed the short night together, sharing the same room and the same bed, and talking more than we slept—of madame and mademoiselle, the castle on the hill, and the camp in the woods, of all old days en fin, but little of the future. Soon after dawn Simon, who lay on a pallet across the threshold, roused me from a fitful sleep into which I had just fallen, and a few minutes later I stood up dressed and armed, ready to try the last chance left to me.
M. d’Agen had dressed stage for stage with me, and I had kept silence. But when he took up his cap, and showed clearly that he had it in his mind to go with me, I withstood him. ‘No, I said, ‘you can do me little good, and may do yourself much harm.’
‘You shall not go without one friend,’ he cried fiercely.