One in a Thousand; or, The Days of Henri QuatreJames, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
History
One in a Thousand; or, The Days of Henri Quatre
James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
France -- History -- Henry IV, 1589-1610 -- Fiction
On his arrival in the capital, he demanded to be carried instantly to
the presence of the Duke of Mayenne; but this application was evaded,
it being boldly asserted by those who held him in their hands that the
Duke was absent from the city. Hitherto his attendants had been
permitted to bear him company; and as he had ridden through the
crowded streets of the city, he had felt less as a prisoner than as a
voluntary visiter of the great metropolis; but when, after having been
detained for some time at the house of Albert of Wolfstrom, he was
told that he must accompany his captor to the convent of the
Dominicans, whither only one servant could be permitted to attend him,
he began to suspect that the bonds of his imprisonment were being
straitened; and he remonstrated with calm but firm language,
reiterating his demand to be brought before the Duke of Mayenne, and
expressing his determination to hold the name of that nobleman up to
the reprobation of all honourable men, if he suffered any of his
adherents to violate the safe-conduct from his hand with impunity.
Wolfstrom, however, who on more than one occasion had shown himself
but little tender of his own fair fame, could not be expected to feel
much solicitude for that of another; and, although he held the potent
Duke in some degree of awe, he had become hardened by the impunity
which every sort of falsehood enjoyed in the good easy times of civil
war, and doubted not that, in the end, he should find means of
extricating himself from the consequences of the present intrigue, as
he had done in regard to many which had preceded, namely, by the
unlimited command of impudence, shrewdness, and three thousand
mercenaries.
He turned a deaf ear, therefore, to the complaints of St Real; and the
young Marquis was conducted to the convent of the Jacobins, in the
midst of precautions which he did not fail to mark, and from which he
augured little good in regard to the intentions of his gaolers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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