Though each prince wore his device openly, and displayed it broadcast on robe, banner, and pennon, they were brought together, and there was sworn reconciliation between the pair. On the 20th November, 1407, they heard mass, and took the sacrament side by side. Two days later the princes attended a great dinner given by the Duc de Berri. After the feast they embraced, drank to each other, and again swore friendship. The Queen, who was lodging at the time in a little hotel in the old Rue du Temple, near the Porte Barbette, had recently given birth to a still-born child. On November 23rd, the duke of Orleans, always on the best of terms with his sister-in-law--popular rumour, indeed, made her his mistress--came to offer his condolences, and supped with her in that house. The gay meal was interrupted by the advent of a suborned valet de chambre of the king, summoning the duke immediately to the royal presence. "Il a hâte de vous parler," said the messenger, "pour chose qui touche grandement à vous et à lui."[156] The Duke, nothing doubting, ordered his mule to be brought without delay, and, though he had six hundred armed men in Paris, set out, unaccompanied, except by two squires, mounted upon the same horse, and four or five valets on foot carrying torches. It was about eight o'clock in the evening; the night was overcast (assez brun), and the street deserted. The Duke, dressed in a simple costume of black damask, rode slowly down the old Rue du Temple, singing, and playing with his glove. As he was passing before the house of the Maréchal de Rieux, no more than a hundred paces distant from the Queen's apartments, a company of about twenty armed men, in ambuscade behind a house called L'Image Notre Dame, broke out upon the little party. The horse on which were the two squires, startled by the noise, took fright, and galloped away down the street. With cries of "À mort! à mort!" the assassins fell upon the Duke, and one of them struck him a blow with an axe that cut off his hand. "What is this?" cried Louis. "Who are all these? I am the Duc d'Orléans." "'Tis you whom we want" (C'est ce que nous demandons) replied the assailants. In a moment, a storm of blows, from sword, axe, and spiked club, brought him down from his mule. He rose upon his knees, but, before he could recover himself, his head was split open, and his brains were streaming over the pavement. "And they turned him over and over, and so terribly hammered him that he was soon dead and piteously slain." A young page, who sought to defend his master, was likewise struck down; another, grievously wounded, managed to escape into a little shop in the Rue des Rosiers. [Illustration: ·CORNER OF THE PLACE DES DUCS· ·DIJON·]