ted. He was obliged to rise at three the next morning, he
said, enumerating pressing and most important work which Henry required
to be completed with all possible haste. "The King said you would be very
angry," replied Praslin; "but there is no help for it. Come you must, for
the man you know of has gone out of the country, as you said he would,
and has carried away the lady on the crupper behind him."

"Ho, ho," said the Duke, "I am wanted for that affair, am I?" And the two
proceeded straightway to the Louvre, and were ushered, of all apartments
in the world, into the Queen's bedchamber. Mary de' Medici had given
birth only four days before to an infant, Henrietta Maria, future queen
of Charles I. of England. The room was crowded with ministers and
courtiers; Villeroy, the Chancellor, Bassompierre, and others, being
stuck against the wall at small intervals like statues, dumb, motionless,
scarcely daring to breathe. The King, with his hands behind him and his
grey beard sunk on his breast, was pacing up and down the room in a
paroxysm of rage and despair.

"Well," said he, turning to Sully as he entered, "our man has gone off
and carried everything with him. What do you say to that?"

The Duke beyond the boding "I told you so" phrase of consolation which he
was entitled to use, having repeatedly warned his sovereign that
precisely this catastrophe was impending, declined that night to offer
advice. He insisted on sleeping on it. The manner in which the
proceedings of the King at this juncture would be regarded by the
Archdukes Albert and Isabella--for there could be no doubt that Conde had
escaped to their territory--and by the King of Spain, in complicity with
whom the step had unquestionably been taken--was of gravest political
importance.

Henry had heard the intelligence but an hour before. He was at cards in
his cabinet with Bassompierre and others when d'Elbene entered and made a
private communication to him. "Bassompierre, my friend," whispered the
King immediately in that courtier's ear, "I am lost. This man has carried
his wife off into a wood. I don't know if it is to kill her or to take
her out of France. Take care of my money and keep up the game."

Bassompierre followed the king shortly afterwards and brought him his
money. He said that he had never seen a man so desperate, so transported.

The matter was indeed one of deepest and universal import. The reader has
seen by the preceding narrative how