Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845

"No, sir; after passing my sword through your body."

Coconnas became purple, and his grey eye flashed fire.

"Really," said he, with a sneer; "to yonder rail? You are not quite tall enough for that, my little gentleman."

"Then I will get upon your horse," replied La Mole. "Ah! you think, my dear M. Hannibal de Coconnas, that you may assassinate people with impunity under the loyal and honourable pretext of being a hundred to one. Not so. A day comes when every man finds his man, and for you that day is come now. I am almost tempted to break your ugly head with a pistol shot; but pshaw! I should perhaps miss you, for my hand still shakes with the wounds you so treacherously gave me.

"My ugly head!" roared Coconnas, throwing himself off his horse. "On foot! Monsieur le Compte – out with your blade!" And he drew his sword.

"I think your Huguenot called him ugly," whispered the Duchess of Nevers to Margaret. "Do you find him so?"

"He is charming," cried Margaret laughing, "and Monsieur de la Mole's anger renders him unjust. But hush! let us observe them."

La Mole got off his horse with as much deliberation as Coconnas had shown haste, drew his sword, and put himself on guard.

"Ah!" cried he, as he extended his arm.

"Oh!" exclaimed Coconnas, as he stretched out his.

Both, it will be remembered, were wounded in the shoulder, and a sudden movement still caused them acute suffering. A stifled laugh was audible from behind the trees. The princesses had been unable to restrain it when they saw the two champions rubbing their shoulders and grimacing with pain. The laughed reached the ears of La Mole and Coconnas, who had been hitherto unaware of the presence of witnesses, but who now, on looking round, perceived the ladies. La Mole again put himself on guard, steady as an automaton, and Coconnas, as their swords crossed, uttered an energetic Mordieu!

"Ah ça!" exclaimed Margaret, "they are in earnest, and will kill one another if we do not prevent it. This is going too far. Stop, gentlemen, I entreat you."

"Let them go on," said Henriette, who, having already seen Coconnas make head successfully against three antagonists at once, trusted that he would have at least as easy a bargain of La Mole.

At the first clash of the steel, the combatants became silent. They were neither of them confident in their strength, and, at each pass or parry, their imperfectly healed wounds caused them sharp pain. Nevertheless, with fixed and ardent eye, his lips slightly parted, his teeth firmly-set, La Mole advanced with short steady steps upon his adversary; who, perceiving that he had to do with a master of fence, retreated – gradually, it is true, but still retreated. In this manner they reached the edge of the moat, or dry ditch, on the other side of which the spectators had stationed themselves. There, as if he had only retired with the view of getting nearer to the duchess, Coconnas stopped, and made a rapid thrust. At the same instant a sanguine spot, which grew each second larger, appeared upon the white satin of La Mole's doublet.

"Courage!" cried the Duchess of Nevers.

"Poor La Mole!" exclaimed Margaret, with a cry of sorrow.

La Mole heard the exclamation, threw one expressive glance to the queen, and making a skilful feint, followed it up by a pass of lightning swiftness. This time both the women shrieked. The point of La Mole's rapier had appeared, crimson with blood, behind the back of Coconnas.

Neither of the combatants fell; they remained on their feet, staring at each other, each of them feeling that at the first movement he made he should lose his balance. At last the Piedmontese, more dangerously wounded than his antagonist, and feeling that his strength was ebbing away with his blood, threw himself forward upon La Mole, and seized hill with one arm, whilst with the other hand he felt for his dagger. La Mole mustered all his remaining strength, raised his hand, and struck Coconnas on the forehead with his sword-hilt. Coconnas fell, but in falling he dragged his adversary after him, and both rolled into the ditch. Then Margaret and the Duchess of Nevers, seeing that although, apparently dying, they still sought to finish each other, sprang forward, preceded by the captain of the guards. But before they reached the wounded men, the eyes of the latter closed, their grasp was loosened, and, letting fall their weapons, they stretched themselves out stiff and convulsed. A pool of blood had already formed itself around them.

"Oh! brave, brave La Mole!" exclaimed Margaret, unable to repress her admiration. "How can I forgive myself for having suspected you?" And her eyes filled with tears.

"Alas! alas!" cried the duchess, sobbing violently. "Say, madam, did you ever see such intrepid champions?"

"Tudieu!– What hard knocks!" exclaimed the captain, trying to stanch the blood that flowed from the wounds. "Hola! you who are coming, come more quickly."

A man, seated on the front of a sort of cart painted of a red colour, was seen slowly approaching.

"Hola!" repeated the captain, "will you come, then, when you are called? Do you not see that these gentlemen are in want of assistance?"

The man in the cart, whose appearance was in the highest degree coarse and repulsive, stopped his horse, got down, and stepped over the two bodies.

"These are pretty wounds," said he, "but I make better ones."

"Who, then, are you?" said Margaret, experiencing, in spite of herself, a vague and unconquerable sensation of terror.

"Madam," replied the man, bowing to the ground, "I an Maître Caboche, executioner of the city of Paris; and I am come to suspend to this gibbet some companions for the admiral."

"And I am the Queen of Navarre; throw out your dead bodies, place our horses' clothes in your cart, and bring these two gentlemen carefully to the Louvre."

La Mole recovers from his wounds before Coconnas is out of danger. The latter is, in great measure, restored to health through the care and attention which his late antagonist generously lavishes on him; they become intimate friends, and Coconnas is appointed to the household of the Duke of Alençon, to which La Mole already belongs. The duke, out of opposition to his brothers, the king and the Duke of Anjou, has a leaning towards the Huguenot party. De Mouy, a Protestant leader, whose father has been assassinated by Maurevel, comes in disguise to the Louvre, to communicate with Henry of Navarre, in the sincerity of whose conversion the Huguenots do not believe. Henry, however, who knows that the walls of the Louvre have ears, refuses to listen to De Mouy, and declares himself Catholic to the backbone; and De Mouy, despairing and indignant, leaves the king's apartment. The Duke of Alençon, who has overheard their conference, as Henry suspected, stops the Huguenot emissary, and shows a disposition to put himself at the head of that party and become King of Navarre. There is a great deal of intrigue and manœuvring, very skilfully managed by Henry, who makes D'Alençon believe that he has no wish to become any thing more than a simple country-gentleman, and that he is willing to aid him in his ambitious designs. He proposes that they should watch for an opportunity of leaving Paris and repairing to Navarre. Before the negotiations between the two princes are completed, however, the Duke of Anjou has been elected King of Poland, and has had his election ratified by the Pope; and D'Alençon then begins to think that it would be advisable to remain at Paris on the chance of himself becoming King of France. Charles IX. is delicate and sickly, subject to tremendous outbursts of passion which leave him weak and exhausted; his life is not likely to be a long one. Should he die, and even if the Poles should allow their new king to return to France, D'Alençon would have time, he thinks, before the arrival of the latter, to seize upon the vacant throne. Even the reversion of the crown of Poland would perhaps be preferable to the possession of that of Navarre. Whilst ruminating these plans, one of the king's frequent hunting parties takes place in the forest of Bondy, and is attended by all the royal family except the Duke of Anjou, then absent at the siege of La Rochelle. At this hunting party the following striking incidents occur.

The piqueur who had told the king that the boar was still in the enclosure, had spoken the truth. Hardly was the bloodhound put upon the scent, when he plunged into a thicket, and drove the animal, an enormous one of its kind, from its retreat in a cluster of thorn-bushes. The boar made straight across the road, at about fifty paces from the king. The leashes of a score of dogs were immediately slipped, and the eager hounds rushed headlong in pursuit.

The chase was Charles's strongest passion. Scarcely had the boar crossed the road, when he spurred after him, sounding the view upon his horn, and followed by the Duke of Alençon, and by Henry of Navarre. All the other chasseurs followed.

The royal forests, at the period referred to, were not, as at present, extensive parks intersected by carriage roads. Kings had not yet had the happy idea of becoming timber-merchants, and of dividing their woods into tailles and futaies. The trees, planted, not by scientific foresters but by the hand of God, who let the seed fall where the wind chose to bear it, were not arranged in quincunxes, but sprang up without order, and as they now do in the virgin forests of America. Consequently a forest at that period was a place in which boars and stags, wolves and robbers, were to be found in abundance.

The wood of Bondy was surrounded by a circular road, like the tire of a wheel and crossed by a dozen paths which might be called the spokes. To complete the comparison, the axle, was represented by carrefour, or open space, in the centre of the wood, whence all these paths diverged, and whither any of the sportsmen who might be thrown out were in the habit of repairing, till some sight or sound of the chase enabled them to rejoin it.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, it happened, as it usually did at these hunts, that insurmountable obstacles had opposed themselves to the progress of the hunters, the baying of the hounds had become inaudible in the distance, and the king himself had returned to the carrefour, swearing and cursing according to his custom.

"Well, D'Alençon! Well, Henriot!" cried he – "here you are, mordieu! as calm and quiet as nuns following their abbess. That is not hunting. You, D'Alençon – you look as if you had just come out of a band-box; and you are so perfumed, that if you got between the boar and my dogs, you would make them lose the scent. And you, Henriot – where is your boar-spear? Where your arquebuss?"

"Sire," replied Henry, "an arquebuss would be useless to me. I know that your majesty likes to shoot the boar himself when it is brought to bay. As to the spear, I handle it very clumsily. We are not used to it in our mountains, where we hunt the bear with nothing but a dagger."

"By the mordieu, Henry, when you return to your Pyrenees you shall send me a cart-load of bears. It must be noble sport to contend with an animal that can stifle you with a hug. But hark! I hear the dogs! No, I was mistaken."

The king put his horn to his mouth and sounded fanfare. Several horns replied to him. Suddenly a piqueur appeared, sounding a different call.

"The view! the view!" cried the king; and he galloped off, followed by the other sportsmen.

The piqueur was not mistaken. As the king advanced he heard the baying of the pack, which was now composed of more than sixty dogs, fresh relays having been slipped at different places near which the boar had passed. At last Charles caught a second glimpse of the animal, and, profiting by the height of the adjacent trees, which enabled him to ride beneath their branches, he turned into the wood, sounding his horn with all his strength. The princes followed him for some time, but the king had so vigorous a horse, and, carried away by his eagerness, he dashed over such steep and broken ground, and through such dense thickets, that first the ladies, then the Duke of Guise and his gentlemen, and at last the two princes, were forced to abandon him. All the hunters therefore, with the exception of Charles and a few piqueurs, found themselves reassembled at the carrefour. D'Alençon and Henry were standing near each other in a long alley. At about a hundred paces from them the Duke of Guise had halted, with his retinue of twenty or thirty gentlemen, who were armed, it might have been thought, rather for the battle-field than the hunting-ground. The ladies were in the carrefour itself.

"Would it not seem," said the Duke of Alençon to Henry, glancing at the Duke of Guise with the corner of his eye, "that yonder man with his steel-clad escort is the true king? He does not even vouchsafe a glance to us poor princes."

"Why should he treat us better than our own relations do?" replied Henry. "Are we not, you and I, prisoners at the court of France, hostages for our party?"

The Duke Francis started, and looked at Henry as if to provoke a further explanation; but Henry had gone further than was his wont, and he remained silent.

"What do you mean, Henry?" enquired the duke, evidently vexed that his brother-in-law, by his taciturnity, compelled him to put the question.

"I mean, brother," answered Henry, "that those armed men who seem so careful not to lose sight of us, have quite the appearance of guards charged to prevent us from escaping."

"Escaping! Why? How?" cried D'Alençon, with a well-feigned air of surprise and simplicity.

"You have a magnificent jennet there, Francis," said Henry, following up the subject, whilst appearing to change the conversation. "I am sure he would get over seven leagues in an hour, and twenty from now till noon. It is a fine day for a ride. Look at that cross-road – how level and pleasant it is! Are you not tempted, Francis? For my part, my spurs are burning my heels."

Francis made no answer. He turned red and pale alternately, and appeared to be straining his hearing to catch some sound of the chase.

"The news from Poland have produced their effect," said Henry to himself, "and my good brother-in-law has a plan of his own. He would like to see me escape, but I shall not go alone."

He had scarcely made the reflection, when several of the recently converted Huguenots, who within the last two or three months had returned to the court and the Romish church, came up at a canter, and saluted the two princes with a most engaging smile. The Duke of Alençon, already urged on by Henry's overtures, had but to utter a word or make a sign, and it was evident that his flight would be favoured by the thirty or forty cavaliers who had collected around him, as if to oppose themselves to the followers of the Duke of Guise. But that word he did not utter. He turned away his head, and, putting his horn to his mouth, sounded the rally.