Stretched in a coffin of the rudest material and construction, with his pale visage bare, displaying still in its distorted lines and sharpened features the agonies of mind and body which had preceded his untimely dissolution, the bad but haughty noble was borne to his long home in the graveyard of Nôtre Dame. His sword, broken in twain, was laid across his breast, his spurs had been hacked from his heels by the base cleaver of the scullion, and his reversed escutcheon was hung above his head. Narrowly saved by his wronged kinsman’s intercession from dying by the headman’s weapon ere yet his mortal wounds should have let out his spirit, he was yet destined to the shame of a dishonored sepulchre. Such was the king’s decree--alas! inexorable. The funeral-train proceeded; the king and his court followed. They reached the graveyard, hard beneath those superb gray towers!--they reached the grave, in a remote and gloomy corner, where, in unconsecrated earth, reposed the executed felon. The priests attended not the corpse beyond the precincts of that unholy spot; their solemn chant died mournfully away; no rites were done, no prayers were said above the senseless clay, but in silence was it lowered into the ready pit--silence disturbed only by the deep, hollow sound of the clods that fell fast and heavy on the breast of the guilty noble! For many a day a headstone might be seen--not raised by the kind hands of sorrowing friends, nor watered by the tears of kinsmen, but planted there to tell of his disgraceful doom--amid the nameless graves of the self-slain, and the recorded resting-places of well-known thieves and felons. It was of dark-gray freestone, and it bore these brief words--brief words, but in that situation speaking the voice of volumes:-- “Ci git Armand, Le dernier Comte de Laguy.” Three forms stood by the grave--stood till the last clod had been heaped upon its kindred clay, and the dark headstone planted: Henry the king; and Charles the baron de La-Hirè; and Marguerite de Vaudreuil. And as the last clod was flattened down upon the dead--after the stone was fixed--De La-Hirè crossed the grave to the despairing girl, where she had stood gazing with a fixed, rayless eye on the sad ceremony, and took her by the hand, and spoke so loud that all might hear his words, while Henry looked on calmly, but not without an air of wondering excitement:--