And now Sampiero, leaving the Turkish court, where Soliman had for a while wonderingly entertained the famous Corsican, returned to Marseilles, giving himself up to his own personal anxieties. At Marseilles, he found Antonio, who related to him what had occurred, and endeavoured to restrain his friend's gathering wrath. One of Sampiero's relations, Pier Giovanni of Calvi, let fall the imprudent remark that he had long foreseen Vannina's flight. "And you concealed what you foresaw?" cried Sampiero, and stabbed him dead with a single thrust of his dagger. He threw himself on horseback, and rode in furious haste to Aix, where his trembling wife waited for him in the castle of Zaisi. Antonio hurried after him, agonized with the fear that all efforts of his to avert some dreadful catastrophe might be unavailing. Sampiero waited beneath the windows of the castle till morning. He then went to his wife, and took her away with him to Marseilles. No one could read his silent purposings in his stern face. As he entered his house with her, and saw it standing desolate and empty, the whole significance of the affront--the full consciousness of her treason and its possible results, sank upon his heart; once more the intolerable thought shot through him that it was his own wife who had basely sold herself and his child into the detested hands of his country's enemies; the demon of phrenzy took possession of his soul, and he slew her with his own hand. Sampiero, says the Corsican historian, loved his wife passionately, but as a Corsican--that is, to the last Vendetta. He buried his dead in the Church of St. Francis, and did not spare funereal pomp. He then went to show himself at the court of Paris. This occurred in the year 1562. CHAPTER XVII. RETURN OF SAMPIERO--STEPHEN DORIA. Sampiero was coldly received at the French court; the courtiers whispered, avoided him, sneered at him from behind their virtuous mask. Sampiero was not the man to be dismayed by courtiers, nor was the court of Catherine de Medici a tribunal before which the fearful deed of one of the most remarkable men of his time could be tried. Catherine and Henry II. forgot that Sampiero had murdered his wife, but they would do no more for Corsica than willingly look on while it was freed by the exertions of others.