‘The Duke, sir.’
I stared again between wonder and suspicion. ‘The Duke of Nevers is not in this part, is he?’ I said slowly. ‘I heard he was on the Brittany border, away to the westward.’
‘Mon Dieu!’ my host exclaimed, raising his hands in astonishment. ‘You have not heard, sir?’
‘I have heard nothing,’ I answered impatiently.
‘You have not heard, sir, that the most puissant and illustrious lord the Duke of Guise is dead?’
‘M. de Guise dead? It is not true!’ I cried astonished.
He nodded, however, several times with an air of great importance, and seemed as if he would have gone on to give me some particulars. But, remembering, as I fancied, that he spoke in the hearing of half-a-dozen guests who sat about the great fire behind me, and had both eyes and ears open, he contented himself with shifting his towel to his other arm and adding only, ‘Yes, sir, dead as any nail. The news came through here yesterday, and made a pretty stir. It happened at Blois the day but one before Christmas, if all be true.’
I was thunderstruck. This was news which might change the face of France. ‘How did it happen?’ I asked.
My host covered his mouth with his hand and coughed, and, privily twitching my sleeve, gave me to understand with some shamefacedness that he could not say more in public. I was about to make some excuse to retire with him, when a harsh voice, addressed apparently to me, caused me to turn sharply. I found at my elbow a tall thin-faced monk in the habit of the Jacobin order. He had risen from his seat beside the fire, and seemed to be labouring under great excitement.
‘Who asked how it happened?’ he cried, rolling his eyes in a kind of frenzy, while still observant, or I was much mistaken, of his listeners. Is there a man in France to whom the tale has not been told? Is there?’