I may briefly mention, that before leaving the château, I was permitted, after innumerable difficulties, to visit my antagonist of the preceding night. I found him in bed, a handsome and soldier-like fellow, but pale with loss of blood, and, though out of danger, weak and severely wounded. I begged his forgiveness, which he readily accorded, and declined to accept back his ring; but requested my word of honour, that I would not mention his name to any one in Paris, as he was an officer of the Duke of Lorraine--the chevalier Raoul d'Ische, to have whom quietly disposed of, in one of the oubliettes of the Louvre or the stone cages of Louis XI., Cardinal Richelieu would readily pay a thousand crowns of the sun, for Raoul was the right arm of Lorraine. 'How, then, does the king's physician visit you?' 'Because his place depends upon the smile or frown of my sister Clara. The reason of the Cardinal's enmity to me and to my master the Duke, on whose service I am secretly in Paris, another month will explain; but the Cardinal dreads us more than that cancer of which his mistress Anne of Austria is dying,' said he, as he pressed my hand, and I left him. CHAPTER VII. CHARENTON. The horse I rode, my new bay horse Dagobert, was a beautiful animal, and his housings were worthy of the generous donor, whose strange freedom of manner and voluptuous image, filled all my thoughts as I rode on; and heedless of the way to Paris, caracoled along the green lanes and hedgerows, until I lost the main road, and found myself at a village beside a broad river. It proved to be Charenton-on-the-Marne, and about four miles from Paris. I was about to ride on, when my informant, who was an innkeeper, asked me to tarry and refresh. 'There is an inn here?' said I. 'An inn? I should think so! and there is no better in France; 'tis my own, M. le Chevalier; an inn where Henri Quatre himself has dined and got drunk, and where you may still see his favourite oath, _Ventre Saint Gris_, written with his diamond ring on a window.' It was a quaint old tumble-down house, at the end of the stone bridge, with pigeon-holes for windows, and covered up to the chimney tops in luxuriant ivy and wild roses. Without dismounting, I drank a pot of wine under the sign-board, which bore on one side three fleurs-de-lis, and on the other a likeness of Henry the Great, with his famous white feather in his helmet, waggishly on one side, just as he wore it at the battle of Ivry. This sign-board had been painted, for a pot of wine and a loaf of bread, by a poor discharged soldier, who was travelling to Paris; and this dusty wayfarer was now known to honourable fame as Nicolas Poussin, of whom Louis XIII. was proud to be the patron. 'And how came it to pass,' said I, 'that within four miles of the Louvre, Henry the Great halted at an auberge so humble as this?'