The Marshal went back laughing, and, slapping his thigh as he entered the hall, jostled by accident a gentleman who was passing out.

“What is it?” the Gascon cried hotly; for it was Chicot he had jostled.

“Who touches my brother touches Tavannes!” the Marshal hiccoughed.  And, smiting his thigh anew, he went off into another fit of laughter.

CHAPTER XIII.  DIPLOMACY.

Where the old wall of Paris, of which no vestige remains, ran down on the east to the north bank of the river, the space in the angle between the Seine and the ramparts beyond the Rue St. Pol wore at this date an aspect typical of the troubles of the time.  Along the waterside the gloomy old Palace of St. Pol, once the residence of the mad King Charles the Sixth—­and his wife, the abandoned Isabeau de Baviere—­sprawled its maze of mouldering courts and ruined galleries; a dreary monument of the Gothic days which were passing from France.  Its spacious curtilage and dark pleasaunces covered all the ground between the river and the Rue St. Antoine; and north of this, under the shadow of the eight great towers of the Bastille, which looked, four outward to check the stranger, four inward to bridle the town, a second palace, beginning where St. Pol ended, carried the realm of decay to the city wall.

This second palace was the Hotel des Tournelles, a fantastic medley of turrets, spires, and gables, that equally with its neighbour recalled the days of the English domination; it had been the abode of the Regent Bedford.  From his time it had remained for a hundred years the town residence of the kings of France; but the death of Henry II., slain in its lists by the lance of the same Montgomery who was this day fleeing for his life before Guise, had given his widow a distaste for it.  Catherine de Medicis, her sons, and the Court had abandoned it; already its gardens lay a tangled wilderness, its roofs let in the rain, rats played where kings had slept; and in “our palace of the Tournelles” reigned only silence and decay.  Unless, indeed, as was whispered abroad, the grim shade of the eleventh Louis sometimes walked in its desolate precincts.

In the innermost angle between the ramparts and the river, shut off from the rest of Paris by the decaying courts and enceintes of these forsaken palaces, stood the Arsenal.  Destroyed in great part by the explosion of a powder-mill a few years earlier, it was in the main new; and by reason of its river frontage, which terminated at the ruined tower of Billy, and its proximity to the Bastille, it was esteemed one of the keys of Paris.  It was the appanage of the Master of the Ordnance, and within its walls M. de Biron, a Huguenot in politics, if not in creed, who held the office at this time, had secured himself on the first alarm.  During the day he had admitted a number of refugees, whose courage or good luck had led them to his gate; and as night fell—­on such a carnage as the hapless city had not beheld since the great slaughter of the Armagnacs, one hundred and fifty-four years earlier—­the glow of his matches through the dusk, and the sullen tramp of his watchmen as they paced the walls, indicated that there was still one place in Paris where the King’s will did not run.