s eyed
Her, and the horrible pitside"

--for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions'
dens were placed. The black Arab keeper was told to stir up the great
beast, Bluebeard. A firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose
door had been opened . . . they all waited breathless, with beating
hearts . . .

"Then earth in a sudden contortion
Gave out to our gaze her abortion.
Such a brute! . . .
One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy
To see the black mane, vast and heapy,
The tail in the air stiff and straining,
The wide eyes nor waxing nor waning."

And the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of
noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered,
and he was free again.

"Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead!
And you saw by the flash on his forehead,
By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,
He was leagues in the desert already."

The King laughed: "Was there a man among them all who would brave
Bluebeard?" Not as a challenge did he say this--he knew well that it
were almost certain death:

"Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!"

But Francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows)
a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. It was
the glove of De Lorge's lady. They were sitting together, and he had
been, as Ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a
balance." . . . He now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the
barrier and walked straight up to the glove. The lion never moved; he
was still staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an
one stare from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land. . . . De
Lorge picked up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place
where he had leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more,
as all the world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. Every eye
was on them. The King cried out in applause that _he_ would have done
the same:

". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
Not love, set that task to humanity!"

--and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned
with loathing from De Lorge's "queen dethroned."

All but Peter Ronsard. _He_ noticed that she retained undisturbed her
self-possession amid the Court's mockery.

"As if from no pleasing experiment
She rose, yet o