ed the letters, according to the general order
of the cardinal, to the provost-marshal. By displaying such unheard-of
cruelty the Guises knew that they incurred great dangers from revenge,
and never did they take such precautions for their safety as they did
while the court was at Amboise; consequently, neither the greatest of
all corrupters, gold, nor the incessant and active search which the old
furrier instituted gave him the slightest gleam of light on the fate of
his son. He went about the little town with a mournful air, watching the
great preparations made by order of the cardinal for the dreadful show
at which the Prince de Conde had agreed to be present.

Public curiosity was stimulated from Paris to Nantes by the means
adopted on this occasion. The execution was announced from all pulpits
by the rectors of the churches, while at the same time they gave thanks
for the victory of the king over the heretics. Three handsome balconies,
the middle one more sumptuous than the other two, were built against the
terrace of the chateau of Amboise, at the foot of which the executions
were appointed to take place. Around the open square, stagings were
erected, and these were filled with an immense crowd of people attracted
by the wide-spread notoriety given to this "act of faith." Ten thousand
persons camped in the adjoining fields the night before the day on which
the horrible spectacle was appointed to take place. The roofs on the
houses were crowded with spectators, and windows were let at ten pounds
apiece,--an enormous sum in those days. The poor old father had engaged,
as we may well believe, one of the best places from which the eye could
take in the whole of the terrible scene, where so many men of noble
blood were to perish on a vast scaffold covered with black cloth,
erected in the middle of the open square. Thither, on the morning of the
fatal day, they brought the _chouquet_,--a name given to the block on
which the condemned man laid his head as he knelt before it. After
this they brought an arm-chair draped with black, for the clerk of the
Parliament, whose business it was to call up the condemned noblemen to
their death and read their sentences. The whole square was guarded from
early morning by the Scottish guard and the gendarmes of the king's
household, in order to keep back the crowd which threatened to fill it
before the hour of the execution.

After a solemn mass said at the chateau and in the churches