"Do you know what that is?" demanded Corse de Leon; and, ere Bernard de Rohan could reply, he went on. "It is an act of folly worthy of a king or a prime minister. There are people in that castle," he said, "who, knowing of my coming and of your escape, have done the act, the effects of which you see flaming yonder, in order that the tower may fall in and crush the dungeon into which they had thrust you, solely to prevent the Lord of Masseran from discovering how you have escaped. Thus it is with the world; every one act of weakness, of folly, or of crime, we judge must be followed by another, to conceal or to justify it. Let men or ministers place themselves in a dangerous situation by some capital fault, and then they think expediency requires them to commit another to obviate the effects of the first, forgetting that each fault is written down in the two eternal books--the Book of Fate, God's servant, and the Book of God himself; and that there must be a reckoning, a terrible reckoning, for the whole amount, in this world and in the next. Let us ride on." CHAPTER XIV. We must now entirely change the scene. The spot is no longer the same--the actors different. From the mountains of Savoy, the feudal castle, the lonely chapel, and the humble inn, let us turn to the capital of France, her stately palaces, and the gay and glittering hall where laughed and revelled the bright, the brave, the fair, and the witty of that splendid epoch which began with Francis the First, and ended with his immediate successor. The personages, too, have changed with the scene. The young warrior and his fair bride, the wily Italian and the supercilious and unprincipled Count de Meyrand, are no longer before us. Even good Father Willand himself is left behind, and one for whom we owe no slight affection, Corse de Leon, is, for the time, off the stage. At the door--or rather, we may say, beyond the door, for they were not actually in the chamber--stood two of the king's guard, with their halberds resting on their shoulders, embroidered on which appeared the well-known cognisance of the salamander. They were there merely to perform the place of a living gate, barring the way against any who would enter, till such time as the orders of the king threw open the halls of the Louvre.