ll find on the table in this red portfolio. The color
is remarkable, and you cannot mistake it. I am now going to write to
Ronsard."

"Adieu, sire!"

"Adieu, my father!"

"Your hand?"

"What, my hand? In my arms, in my heart, there is your place! Come, my
old soldier, come!"

And Charles IX., drawing Coligny toward him as he bowed, pressed his
lips to his white hair.

The admiral left the room, wiping away a tear.

Charles IX. followed him with his eyes as long as he could see, and
listened as long as he could catch a sound; then, when he could no
longer hear or see anything, he bent his head over toward his shoulder,
as his custom was, and slowly entered his armory.

This armory was the king's favorite apartment; there he took his
fencing-lessons with Pompee, and his poetry lessons with Ronsard. He had
gathered there a great collection of the most costly weapons he had been
able to find. The walls were hung with axes, shields, spears, halberds,
pistols, and muskets, and that day a famous armorer had brought him a
magnificent arquebuse, on the barrel of which were inlaid in silver
these four lines, composed by the royal poet himself:

"_Pour maintenir la foy,_
_Je suis belle et fidele._
_Aux ennemis du Roi,_
_Je suis belle et cruelle._"[1]

Charles, as we have said, entered this room, and after having shut the
door by which he had entered, he raised the tapestry that masked a
passage leading into a little chamber, where a woman kneeling before a
_priedieu_ was saying her prayers.

As this movement was executed noiselessly, and the footsteps of the
king, deadened by the thick carpet, made no more noise than a phantom's,
the kneeling woman heard no sound, and continued to pray. Charles stood
for a moment pensively looking at her.

She was a woman of thirty-four or thirty-five years of age, whose
vigorous beauty was set off by the costume of the peasants of Caux. She
wore the high cap so much the fashion at the court of France during the
time of Isabel of Bavaria, and her red bodice was embroidered with gold,
like those of the _contadine_ of Nettuno and Sora. The apartment which
she had for nearly twenty years occupied was close to the King's
bed-chamber and presented a singular mixture of elegance and rusticity.
In equal measure the palace had encroached upon the cottage, and the
cottage upon the palace, so that the room combined the simplicity of the
peasant woman and the luxury of the