He glowered at me for a moment, as though he were minded to launch his spiritual weapons at my head; but as I returned his glare with an unmoved eye--and my four rascals, who were as impatient as myself to learn the news, and had scarce more reverence for a shaven crown, began to murmur--he thought better of it, and cooling as suddenly as he had flamed up, lost no more time in satisfying our curiosity. It would ill become me, however, to set down the extravagant and often blasphemous harangue in which, styling M. de Guise the martyr of God, he told the story now so familiar--the story of that dark wintry morning at Blois, when the king’s messenger, knocking early at the duke’s door, bade him hurry, for the king wanted him. The story is trite enough now. When I heard it first in the inn on the Clain, it was all new and all marvellous. The monk, too, telling the story as if he had seen the events with his own eyes, omitted nothing which might impress his hearers. He told us how the duke received warning after warning, and answered in the very antechamber, ‘He dare not!’ How his blood, mysteriously advised of coming dissolution, grew chill, and his eye, wounded at Chateau Thierry, began to run, so that he had to send for the handkerchief he had forgotten to bring. He told us, even, how the duke drew his assassins up and down the chamber, how he cried for mercy, and how he died at last at the foot of the king’s bed, and how the king, who had never dared to face him living, came and spurned him dead! There were pale faces round the fire when he ceased, and bent brows and lips hard pressed together. Then he stood and cursed the King of France--cursing him openly by the name of Henry of Valois, a thing I had never looked to hear in France--though no one said ‘Amen,’ and all glanced over their shoulders, and our host pattered from the room as if he had seen a ghost, it seemed to be no man’s duty to gainsay him. For myself, I was full of thoughts which it would have been unsafe to utter in that company or so near the Loire. I looked back sixteen years. Who but Henry of Guise had spurned the corpse of Coligny? And who but Henry of Valois had backed him in the act? Who but Henry of Guise had drenched Paris with blood, and who but Henry of Valois had ridden by his side? One 23rd of the month--a day never to be erased from France’s annals--had purchased for him a term of greatness. A second 23rd saw him, pay the price--saw his ashes cast secretly and by night no man knows where! Moved by such thoughts, and observing that the priest was going the round of the company collecting money for masses for the duke’s soul, to which object I could neither give with a good conscience nor refuse without exciting suspicion, I slipped out; and finding a man of decent appearance talking with the landlord in a small room beside the kitchen, I called for a flask of the best wine, and by means of that introduction obtained my supper in their company.