lance in the face to Ximenes, as did Cardinal Richelieu
in after days. These five great cardinals all had sly, mean, and yet
terrible faces; while the warriors, on the other hand, were of that type
of Basque mountaineer which we see in Henri IV. The two Balafres, father
and son, wounded and scarred in the same manner, lost something of this
type, but not the grace and affability by which, as much as by their
bravery, they won the hearts of the soldiery.

It is not useless to relate how the present Grand Master received his
wound; for it was healed by the heroic measures of a personage of our
drama,--by Ambroise Pare, the man we have already mentioned as under
obligations to Lecamus, syndic of the guild of furriers. At the siege of
Calais the duke had his face pierced through and through by a lance, the
point of which, after entering the cheek just below the right eye, went
through to the neck, below the left eye, and remained, broken off,
in the face. The duke lay dying in his tent in the midst of universal
distress, and he would have died had it not been for the devotion and
prompt courage of Ambroise Pare. "The duke is not dead, gentlemen,"
he said to the weeping attendants, "but he soon will die if I dare not
treat him as I would a dead man; and I shall risk doing so, no matter
what it may cost me in the end. See!" And with that he put his left foot
on the duke's breast, took the broken wooden end of the lance in his
fingers, shook and loosened it by degrees in the wound, and finally
succeeded in drawing out the iron head, as if he were handling a thing
and not a man. Though he saved the prince by this heroic treatment, he
could not prevent the horrible scar which gave the great soldier his
nickname,--Le Balafre, the Scarred. This name descended to the son, and
for a similar reason.

Absolutely masters of Francois II., whom his wife ruled through their
mutual and excessive passion, these two great Lorrain princes, the duke
and the cardinal, were masters of France, and had no other enemy at
court than Catherine de' Medici. No great statesmen ever played a closer
or more watchful game.

The mutual position of the ambitious widow of Henri II. and the
ambitious house of Lorraine was pictured, as it were, to the eye by a
scene which took place on the terrace of the chateau de Blois very early
in the morning of the day on which Christophe Lecamus was destined to
arrive there. The queen-mother, who feigned an extreme atta