The foremost rank hesitated, awed by his manner and his name; while the rearmost, attracted by the prospect of easier pillage, had gone off already.  The rest wavered; and another and another broke away.  The archer who had put himself forward saw which way the wind was blowing, and he shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, my lord, as you will,” he said sullenly.  “All the same I would advise you to close the door and bolt and bar.  We shall not be the last to call to-day.”  And he turned his horse in ill-humour, and forced it, snorting and plunging, through the crowd.

“Bolt and bar?” Tavannes cried after him in fury.  “See you my answer to that!” And turning on the threshold, “Within there!” he cried.  “Open the shutters and set lights, and the table!  Light, I say; light!  And lay on quickly, if you value your lives!  And throw open, for I sup with your mistress to-night, if it rain blood without!  Do you hear me, rogues?  Set on!”

He flung the last word at the quaking servants; then he turned again to the street.  He saw that the crowd was melting, and, looking in Tignonville’s face, he laughed aloud.

“Does Monsieur sup with us?” he said.  “To complete the party?  Or will he choose to sup with our friends yonder?  It is for him to say.  I confess, for my part,” with an awful smile, “their hospitality seems a trifle crude, and boisterous.”

Tignonville looked behind him and shuddered.  The same horde which had so lately pressed about the door had found a victim lower down the street, and, as Tavannes spoke, came driving back along the roadway, a mass of tossing lights and leaping, running figures, from the heart of which rose the screams of a creature in torture.  So terrible were the sounds that Tignonville leant half swooning against the door-post; and even the iron heart of Tavannes seemed moved for a moment.

For a moment only:  then he looked at his companion, and his lip curled.

“You’ll join us, I think?” he said, with an undisguised sneer.  “Then, after you, Monsieur.  They are opening the shutters.  Doubtless the table is laid, and Mademoiselle is expecting us.  After you, Monsieur, if you please.  A few hours ago I should have gone first, for you, in this house”—­with a sinister smile—­“were at home!  Now, we have changed places.”

Whatever he meant by the gibe—­and some smack of an evil jest lurked in his tone—­he played the host so far as to urge his bewildered companion along the passage and into the living-chamber on the left, where he had seen from without that his orders to light and lay were being executed.  A dozen candles shone on the board, and lit up the apartment.  What the house contained of food and wine had been got together and set on the table; from the low, wide window, beetle-browed and diamond-paned, which extended the whole length of the room and looked on the street at the height of a man’s head above the roadway, the shutters had been removed—­doubtless by trembling and reluctant fingers.  To such eyes of passers-by as looked in, from the inferno of driving crowds and gleaming weapons which prevailed outside—­and not outside only, but throughout Paris—­the brilliant room and the laid table must have seemed strange indeed!