"Well, D'Alençon! Well, Henriot!" cried he—"here you are, mordieu! as calm and quiet as nuns following their abbess. That is not hunting. You, D'Alençon—you look as if you had just come out of a band-box; and you are so perfumed, that if you got between the boar and my dogs, you would make them lose the scent. And you, Henriot—where is your boar-spear? Where your arquebuss?"
"Sire," replied Henry, "an arquebuss would be useless to me. I know that your majesty likes to shoot the boar himself when it is brought to bay. As to the spear, I handle it very clumsily. We are not used to it in our mountains, where we hunt the bear with nothing but a dagger."
"By the mordieu, Henry, when you return to your Pyrenees you shall send me a cart-load of bears. It must be noble sport to contend with an animal that can stifle you with a hug. But hark! I hear the dogs! No, I was mistaken."
The king put his horn to his mouth and sounded fanfare. Several horns replied to him. Suddenly a piqueur appeared, sounding a different call.
"The view! the view!" cried the king; and he galloped off, followed by the other sportsmen.
The piqueur was not mistaken. As the king advanced he heard the baying of the pack, which was now composed of more than sixty dogs, fresh relays having been slipped at different places near which the boar had passed. At last Charles caught a second glimpse of the animal, and, profiting by the height of the adjacent trees, which enabled him to ride beneath their branches, he turned into the wood, sounding his horn with all his strength. The princes followed him for some time, but the king had so vigorous a horse, and, carried away by his eagerness, he dashed over such steep and broken ground, and through such dense thickets, that first the ladies, then the Duke of Guise and his gentlemen, and at last the two princes, were forced to abandon him. All the hunters therefore, with the exception of Charles and a few piqueurs, found themselves reassembled at the carrefour. D'Alençon and Henry were standing near each other in a long alley. At about a hundred paces from them the Duke of Guise had halted, with his retinue of twenty or thirty gentlemen, who were armed, it might have been thought, rather for the battle-field than the hunting-ground. The ladies were in the carrefour itself.
"Would it not seem," said the Duke of Alençon to Henry, glancing at the Duke of Guise with the corner of his eye, "that yonder man with his steel-clad escort is the true king? He does not even vouchsafe a glance to us poor princes."
"Why should he treat us better than our own relations do?" replied Henry. "Are we not, you and I, prisoners at the court of France, hostages for our party?"
The Duke Francis started, and looked at Henry as if to provoke a further explanation; but Henry had gone further than was his wont, and he remained silent.
"What do you mean, Henry?" enquired the duke, evidently vexed that his brother-in-law, by his taciturnity, compelled him to put the question.