What happened in the little Room 82. The Husband and the Lover 83. Showing how Chicot began to understand the Purport of Monsieur de Guise's Letter 84. Le Cardinal de Joyeuse 85. News from Aurilly 86. Doubt 87. Certainty 88. Fatality 89. Les Hospitalières 90. His Highness Monseigneur le Duc de Guise LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 1.--_Frontispiece_.--Briquet at the window. 2.--"His face pleases me, and he has white hands and a well-kept beard." 3.--Chicot, on rising, found himself face to face with a soldier. 4.--"An ax!" cried Henri, and with a vigorous arm he struck down wood and iron. 5.--"I said you were a traitor, and as a traitor you shall die." 6.--The prince was cold, stiff, and perfectly inanimate. THE FORTY-FIVE GUARDSMEN CHAPTER I. THE PORTE ST. ANTOINE. On the 26th of October, 1585, the barriers of the Porte St. Antoine were, contrary to custom, still closed at half-past ten in the morning. A quarter of an hour after, a guard of twenty Swiss, the favorite troops of Henri III., then king, passed through these barriers, which were again closed behind them. Once through, they arranged themselves along the hedges, which, outside the barrier, bordered each side of the road. There was a great crowd collected there, for numbers of peasants and other people had been stopped at the gates on their way into Paris. They were arriving by three different roads--from Montreuil, from Vincennes, and from St. Maur; and the crowd was growing more dense every moment. Monks from the convent in the neighborhood, women seated on pack-saddles, and peasants in their carts, and all, by their questions more or less pressing, formed a continual murmur, while some voices were raised above the others in shriller tones of anger or complaint. There were, besides this mass of arrivals, some groups who seemed to have come from the city. These, instead of looking at the gate, fastened their gaze on the horizon, bounded by the Convent of the Jacobins, the Priory of Vincennes, and the Croix Faubin, as though they were expecting to see some one arrive. These groups consisted chiefly of bourgeois, warmly wrapped up, for the weather was cold, and the piercing northeast wind seemed trying to tear from the trees all the few remaining leaves which clung sadly to them.