This suggestion required long and much consideration; but at length it was adopted, though the minor arrangements afterward devised removed a great many of the objections which at first presented themselves. Edward was to be transformed into a young farmer of the Marais, and Lucette to appear as his sister, while Pierrot assumed the garb of one of the peasants. It took two days to procure the long-waisted, square-cut coat, and wide breeches for Master Ned, and a similar but coarser dress for Pierrot; for tailors were not plenty in the Marais, and clothing-shops were none,--so that the wardrobes of neighbors were to be ransacked. Lucette was more easily supplied with the manifold petticoats and the white cap to cover her immense luxuriance of hair. Changes of apparel, provisions of many kinds, and good wine, were stored in a boat; and, after about three weeks' residence in that wild and strange but not uninteresting district, with two stout boatmen for their guides, Lucette and her companions took their departure from La Caponnière, and entered upon a tract perhaps even more desolate and intricate than that which they quitted. By Tallemont, by La Motte Achard, and by Logé, they proceeded on the _country-road_, as it was called, toward Nantes, and at the end of the third day they began to approach a city the glory of which certainly has departed, but the interest of which--a melancholy interest--remains. Before I close the chapter, however,--a chapter devoted to quiet if not dull subjects,--I may as well say a few words--a very few--upon the actual state of France, and the changes which had taken place within the last five weeks, which were not without their significance. Every day had seen La Rochelle more and more closely hemmed in by the royal forces. Slowly, quietly, but steadily, troops had poured into the Sevres and the Aunis, and the ports in the neighborhood of the threatened city had become crowded with small armed vessels. Invested by land, the citizens of Rochelle might have felt alarm if their fine port had been also subjected to blockade; but their own powerful fleets, and the certain aid of England, made them contemn the small though numerous ships of the enemy, and they never comprehended, till too late, that the gigantic mind of their enemy was then planning a vast undertaking destined to deprive them of all the advantages of their position. Their egregious confidence was perhaps further increased by a knowledge that the court of France, and, indeed, the whole country, was fermenting with plots against the man whom they had most to dread; and it is not at all impossible that they were more or less aware that the most formidable conspiracy which had ever threatened the power of Richelieu was upon the very eve of explosion. CHAPTER XV.