It is a strange thing that love--or passion, if the sudden fancy for
Mademoiselle which had seized Count Hannibal be deemed unworthy of the
higher name--should so entirely possess the souls of those who harbour it
that the greatest events and the most astounding catastrophes, even
measures which set their mark for all time on a nation, are to them of
importance only so far as they affect the pursuit of the fair one.
As Tavannes, after leaving Mademoiselle, rode through the paved lanes,
beneath the gabled houses, and under the shadow of the Gothic spires of
his day, he saw a score of sights, moving to pity, or wrath, or wonder.
He saw Paris as a city sacked; a slaughter-house, where for a week a
masque had moved to stately music; blood on the nailed doors and the
close-set window bars; and at the corners of the ways strewn garments,
broken weapons, the livid dead in heaps. But he saw all with eyes which
in all and everywhere, among living and dead, sought only Tignonville;
Tignonville first, and next a heretic minister, with enough of life in
him to do his office.
Probably it was to this that one man hunted through Paris owed his escape
that day. He sprang from a narrow passage full in Tavannes' view, and,
hair on end, his eyes starting from his head, ran blindly--as a hare will
run when chased--along the street to meet Count Hannibal's company. The
man's face was wet with the dews of death, his lungs seemed cracking, his
breath hissed from him as he ran. His pursuers were hard on him, and,
seeing him headed by Count Hannibal's party, yelled in triumph, holding
him for dead. And dead he would have been within thirty seconds had
Tavannes played his part. But his thoughts were elsewhere. Either he
took the poor wretch for Tignonville, or for the minister on whom his
mind was running; anyway he suffered him to slip under the belly of his
horse; then, to make matters worse, he wheeled to follow him in so
untimely and clumsy a fashion that his horse blocked the way and stopped
the pursuers in their tracks. The quarry slipped into an alley and
vanished. The hunters stood and blasphemed, and even for a moment seemed
inclined to resent the mistake. But Tavannes smiled; a broader smile
lightened the faces of the six iron-clad men behind him; and for some
reason the gang of ruffians thought better of it and slunk aside.
There are hard men, who feel scorn of the things which in the breasts of
others excite pity. Tavannes' lip curled as he rode on through the
streets, looking this way and that, and seeing what a King twenty-two
years old had made of his capital. His lip curled most of all when he
came, passing between the two tennis-courts, to the east gate of the
Louvre, and found the entrance locked and guarded, and all communication
between city and palace cut off. Such a proof of unkingly panic, in a
crisis wrought by the King himself, astonished him less a few minutes
later, when, the keys having been brought and the door opened, he entered
the courtyard of the fortress.