“Then I told him that, if he were willing to believe me and to trust himself to me, I would extricate him from this difficulty with honour and glory; that the Duke of Alba, grandfather of the present duke,[164] had preferred to commit the crime of rebellion, in delivering his son Fadrigue de Toledo,[165] in the midst of peace, by the use of petards, from a château in which he had been shut up in order to force him to espouse a maid-of-honour, than to allow him to espouse a very wealthy girl, of a family equal to his own; and that I myself had been at law for eight years with a powerful family, who had threatened me with certain death if I did not espouse a maid-of-honour of the Queen [of France] by whom I had had a child, and to whom I had given a promise of marriage to serve her as a blind; that, in case his honour and that of his House was dear to him, as I believed it to be, he ought without regret to quit for a time the Court of Spain, in which he was out of favour, since he had been deprived of the charge of _cavalerizzo mayor_, while his relatives and friends were disgraced and persecuted; that the remedy I offered him was to leave the town at nightfall by post, and go to await me at Bayonne, where I would join him at a month at furthest; that the Comte de Gramont would entertain him there in the meantime in such fashion that his stay would not be disagreeable; that, in case he had not the money at hand to take him there, I would furnish him with 1,000 pistoles to defray his expenses until my arrival; that I would answer that, when he reached the Court, the Queen would give him--until, by her intervention, his peace was made here--1,000 crowns a month, and that, if she did not, I would do so out of my own purse and give him the word of a _caballero_ for it. “He assured me that he was deeply grateful both to the Queen and to myself, and then said: ‘But what means have I of leaving Spain without being stopped? And, if I were stopped, they would undoubtedly have my head struck off.’ “I answered that I never proposed impossible things to those whom I desired to serve, and that I would be responsible for his departure, his journey and his safety; that I had been given a passport for a gentleman whom I was sending that same day to the King, and that he was travelling with two attendants; that he would serve him on the road as valet, although this gentleman ought to be his; that he would not take his departure until an hour of the night when he [Saldagna] might come to me unperceived, and that he might leave the other arrangements to me.