Probably it was to this that one man hunted through Paris owed his escape that day.  He sprang from a narrow passage full in Tavannes’ view, and, hair on end, his eyes starting from his head, ran blindly—­as a hare will run when chased—­along the street to meet Count Hannibal’s company.  The man’s face was wet with the dews of death, his lungs seemed cracking, his breath hissed from him as he ran.  His pursuers were hard on him, and, seeing him headed by Count Hannibal’s party, yelled in triumph, holding him for dead.  And dead he would have been within thirty seconds had Tavannes played his part.  But his thoughts were elsewhere.  Either he took the poor wretch for Tignonville, or for the minister on whom his mind was running; anyway he suffered him to slip under the belly of his horse; then, to make matters worse, he wheeled to follow him in so untimely and clumsy a fashion that his horse blocked the way and stopped the pursuers in their tracks.  The quarry slipped into an alley and vanished.  The hunters stood and blasphemed, and even for a moment seemed inclined to resent the mistake.  But Tavannes smiled; a broader smile lightened the faces of the six iron-clad men behind him; and for some reason the gang of ruffians thought better of it and slunk aside.

There are hard men, who feel scorn of the things which in the breasts of others excite pity.  Tavannes’ lip curled as he rode on through the streets, looking this way and that, and seeing what a King twenty-two years old had made of his capital.  His lip curled most of all when he came, passing between the two tennis-courts, to the east gate of the Louvre, and found the entrance locked and guarded, and all communication between city and palace cut off.  Such a proof of unkingly panic, in a crisis wrought by the King himself, astonished him less a few minutes later, when, the keys having been brought and the door opened, he entered the courtyard of the fortress.

Within and about the door of the gatehouse some three-score archers and arquebusiers stood to their arms; not in array, but in disorderly groups, from which the babble of voices, of feverish laughter, and strained jests rose without ceasing.  The weltering sun, of which the beams just topped the farther side of the quadrangle, fell slantwise on their armour, and heightened their exaggerated and restless movements.  To a calm eye they seemed like men acting in a nightmare.  Their fitful talk and disjointed gestures, their sweating brows and damp hair, no less than the sullen, brooding silence of one here and there, bespoke the abnormal and the terrible.  There were livid faces among them, and twitching cheeks, and some who swallowed much; and some again who bared their crimson arms and bragged insanely of the part they had played.  But perhaps the most striking thing was the thirst, the desire, the demand for news, and for fresh excitement.  In the space of time it took him to pass through them,