M. Bellart and his guests, smitten to stone, looked dumbly towards the door. The talk stopped in every corner, the music stopped, the play at the card-tables stopped. In a moment, the tension passed. It was not the great Marshal, nor his astral. It was a blunder of the footman, who had confounded the name with that of a friend of the family, M. Maréchal Aîné. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] CHAPTER III. THE DUNGEON OF VINCENNES. I. Louis XI. strolled one day in the precincts of Vincennes, wrapped in his threadbare surtout edged with rusty fur, and plucking at the queer little peaked cap with the leaden image of the Virgin stuck in the band. There was a smile on the sallow and saturnine face. At his Majesty's right walked a thick-set, squab man of scurvy countenance, wearing a close-fitting doublet, and armed like a hangman. On the King's left went a showy person, vulgar and mean of face, whose gait was a ridiculous strut. Louis stopped against the dungeon and tapped the great wall with his finger. "What's just the thickness of this?" he asked. "Six feet in places, sire, eight in others," answered the squab man, Tristan, the executioner. "Good!" said Louis. "But the place looks to me as if it were tumbling." "It might, no doubt, be in better repair, sire," observed the showy person, Oliver, the barber; "but as it is no longer used——" "Ah! but suppose I thought of using it, gossip?" "Then, sire, your Majesty would have it repaired." "To be sure!" chuckled the King—"If I were to shut you up in there, Oliver, you could get out, eh?" "I think so, sire." "But you, gossip," to his hangman, "you'd catch him and have him back to me, _hein?_" "Trust me, sire!" said Tristan. "Then I'll have my dungeon mended," said Louis. "I'm going to have company here, gossips." "Sire!" exclaimed Oliver. "Prisoners so close to your Majesty's own apartments! But you might hear their groans." "Ha! They groan, Oliver? The prisoners groan, do they? But there's no need why I should live in the château here. Hark you both, gossips, I'd like my guests to groan and cry at their pleasure, without the fear of inconveniencing their King." And the King, and his hangman, and his barber fell a-laughing. ------- From that day, in a word, Louis ceased to inhabit the château of Vincennes, and the dungeon which appertained to it was made a terrible fastness for his Majesty's prisoners of State. It was already a place of some antiquity. The date of the original buildings is quite obscure. The immense foundations of the dungeon itself were laid by Philippe de Valois; his son, Jean le Bon, carried the fortress to its third story; and Charles V. finished the work which his fathers had begun.