e entrance by which he had
come.

The favorite went out; but his master's anxiety had not escaped him.

He slowly descended, and tried to divine the cause of it in his
mind, when he thought he heard the sound of feet ascending the other
staircase. He stopped; they stopped. He re-ascended; they seemed to him
to descend. He knew that nothing could be seen between the interstices
of the architecture; and he quitted the place, impatient and very
uneasy, and determined to remain at the door of the entrance to see who
should come out. But he had scarcely raised the tapestry which veiled
the entrance to the guardroom than he was surrounded by a crowd of
courtiers who had been awaiting him, and was fain to proceed to the work
of issuing the orders connected with his post, or to receive respects,
communications, solicitations, presentations, recommendations,
embraces--to observe that infinitude of relations which surround a
favorite, and which require constant and sustained attention, for any
absence of mind might cause great misfortunes. He thus almost forgot the
trifling circumstance which had made him uneasy, and which he thought
might after all have only been a freak of the imagination. Giving
himself up to the sweets of a kind of continual apotheosis, he
mounted his horse in the great courtyard, attended by noble pages, and
surrounded by brilliant gentlemen.

Monsieur soon arrived, followed by his people; and in an hour the King
appeared, pale, languishing, and supported by four men. Cinq-Mars,
dismounting, assisted him into a kind of small and very low carriage,
called a brouette, and the horses of which, very docile and quiet ones,
the King himself drove. The prickers on foot at the doors held the dogs
in leash; and at the sound of the horn scores of young nobles mounted,
and all set out to the place of meeting.

It was a farm called L'Ormage that the King had fixed upon; and the
court, accustomed to his ways, followed the many roads of the park,
while the King slowly followed an isolated path, having at his side the
grand ecuyer and four persons whom he had signed to approach him.

The aspect of this pleasure party was sinister. The approach of winter
had stripped well-nigh all the leaves from the great oaks in the park,
whose dark branches now stood up against a gray sky, like branches of
funereal candelabra. A light fog seemed to indicate rain; through the
melancholy boughs of the thinned wood the heavy carriages