However much Christophe Lecamus had been warned, it was impossible for him to really apprehend the cold ferocity of the interests between which Chaudieu had slipped him.  To an observer of this scene, who had known the secrets of it as the historian understands it in the light of to-day, there was indeed cause to tremble for this young man,—­the hope of two families,—­thrust between those powerful and pitiless machines, Catherine and the Guises.  But do courageous beings, as a rule, measure the full extent of their dangers?  By the way in which the port of Blois, the chateau, and the town were guarded, Christophe was prepared to find spies and traps everywhere; and he therefore resolved to conceal the importance of his mission and the tension of his mind under the empty-headed and shopkeeping appearance with which he presented himself to the eyes of young Pardaillan, the officer of the guard, and the Scottish captain.

The agitation which, in a royal castle, always attends the hour of the king’s rising, was beginning to show itself.  The great lords, whose horses, pages, or grooms remained in the outer courtyard,—­for no one, except the king and the queens, had the right to enter the inner courtyard on horseback,—­were mounting by groups the magnificent staircase, and filling by degrees the vast hall, the beams of which are now stripped of the decorations that then adorned them.  Miserable little red tiles have replaced the ingenious mosaics of the floors; and the thick walls, then draped with the crown tapestries and glowing with all the arts of that unique period of the splendors of humanity, are now denuded and whitewashed!  Reformers and Catholics were pressing in to hear the news and to watch faces, quite as much as to pay their duty to the king.  Francois II.’s excessive love for Mary Stuart, to which neither the queen-mother nor the Guises made any opposition, and the politic compliance of Mary Stuart herself, deprived the king of all regal power.  At seventeen years of age he knew nothing of royalty but its pleasures, or of marriage beyond the indulgence of first passion.  As a matter of fact, all present paid their court to Queen Mary and to her uncles, the Cardinal de Lorraine and the Duc de Guise, rather than to the king.

This stir took place before Christophe, who watched the arrival of each new personage with natural eagerness.  A magnificent portiere, on either side of which stood two pages and two soldiers of the Scotch guard, then on duty, showed him the entrance to the royal chamber, —­the chamber so fatal to the son of the present Duc de Guise, the second Balafre, who fell at the foot of the bed now occupied by Mary Stuart and Francois II.  The queen’s maids of honor surrounded the fireplace opposite to that where Christophe was being “talked with” by the captain of the guard.  This second fireplace was considered the chimney of honor.  It was built in the thick wall of the Salle de Conseil, between the