'Pardieu--no! 'tis our devil of a Cardinal who asserts this. But France will not be content with her boundaries at the Rhine, and if so, where is this spirit to end? Since the days of Charles the Great, the French dominions have not had such prospects of extension as they have now by the schemes of Richelieu, who has cast his eyes on Lorraine, Alsace, Brissac, and Philipsburg. He has cast them over Flanders, towards Dunkirk; across the Pyrenees, and over Rousillon into Catalonia. The annexation of our duchy to France would bring her frontier forty leagues into the empire; it would make Louis XIII. master of all the land between the Saar and the Moselle; it would secure his possession of Burgundy, and open up his path to the Palatinate; but never while blood and breath remain to Duke Charles and his son will they submit to France, and place the coronet of their independent dukedom under the closed-crown of the imperious line of St. Louis! And now, M. Blane, for your own affairs. You must be aware, my friend, that the sooner you leave Nanci, the better for your honour and for your life. In the first place rumour may indulge in unpleasant surmises about your sojourn here; and in the second, I would have you to rejoin your comrades without delay, lest Pappenhem, this Æneas of ours who seeks a wife, and his fidus Achates, the Petardier, who seeks that, which is much the same, mischief--may work you evil; for they are at no pains to conceal their hostility.' 'Prince, you speak my very thoughts; I am, indeed, most anxious to be gone,' said I, though the prospect of leaving Nanci without a parting word from Marie Louise was agony to me; yet, fooled and deceived as I had been, what would a parting word avail me now? 'I will this night depart for the French camp; but I know not where my comrades are, or how far I have to travel.' 'Morbleu! you do not know where they are?' 'No.' 'How--' 'You forget, M. le Prince, that I have passed a winter in the seclusion of the Bastille, where I heard nothing of Paris but the hum of its streets, far down below my chamber window.' 'The French are still before Elsace Zaberne.' 'I think Madame d'Amboise mentioned that siege to me.' 'Very probably.' 'Colonel Mulheim defends it?' 'Ma foi! yes: a valiant Lorrainer, a handsome and gallant seigneur, who will give them some trouble, for he is as proud and as obstinate as a Scot or a Spartan. He will give them a heavy butcher's bill of killed and wounded to send king Luis.' 'Them--whom?' 'Messieurs Hepburn, Lavalette, and Saxe-Weimar.' 'Is he in the field, too?'