e walnut tree, well planted, well grown, worth looking
at, worth keeping, although a little empty; a nut tree always fresh,
sweet-smelling, the tree which you would not leave if you once saw it,
a tree of love which seemed the tree of good and evil, forbidden by
the Lord, through which were banished our mother Eve and the gentleman
her husband. Now, my lords, this said walnut tree was the subject of a
slight dispute between the two, and one of those many wagers which are
occasionally made between friends. The younger boasted that he could
throw twelve times through it a stick which he had in his hand at the
time--as many people have who walk in a garden--and with each flight
of the stick he would send a nut to the ground--"

"That is, I believe the knotty point of the case," said Jacques
turning towards the Regent.

"Yes, gentlemen," replied she, surprised at the craft of her squire.

"The other wagered to the contrary," went on the pleader. "Now the
first named throws his stick with such precision of aim, so gently,
and so well that both derived pleasure therefrom, and by the joyous
protection of the saints, who no doubt were amused spectators, with
each throw there fell a nut; in fact, there fell twelve. But by chance
the last of the fallen nuts was empty, and had no nourishing pulp from
which could have come another nut tree, had the gardener planted it.
Has the man with the stick gained his wager? Judge."

"The thing is clear enough," said Messire Adam Fumee, a Tourainian,
who at that time was the keeper of the seals. "There is only one thing
for the other to do."

"What is that?" said the Regent.

"To pay the wager, Madame."

"He is rather too clever," said she, tapping her squire on the cheek.
"He will be hanged one of these days."

She meant it as a joke, but these words were the real horoscope of the
steward, who mounted the gallows by the ladder of royal favour,
through the vengeance of another old woman, and the notorious treason
of a man of Ballan, his secretary, whose fortune he had made, and
whose name was Prevost, and not Rene Gentil, as certain persons have
wrongly called him. The Ganelon and bad servant gave, it is said, to
Madame d'Angouleme, the receipt for the money which had been given him
by Jacques de Beaune, then become Baron of Samblancay, lord of La
Carte and Azay, and one of the foremost men in the state. Of his two
sons, one was Archbishop of Tours the other Minister of Finance and
G