the courtyard to question Lecamus, all the while
watching him covertly and narrowly.

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.