icated its superiority in swordcraft by despatching their
antagonists. After this victory the gentlemen of the Musketeers,
remembering the rigor of the cardinal's antipathy to duelling, made a
vain effort to put some distance between them and the king's justice.
They were arrested in their flight, brought back to Paris, and perished
miserably on the scaffold by the pointless sword of the executioner. Each
of these events proved in its degree that Monsieur de Richelieu had very
little respect for tradition, and that if he disliked an institution, no
matter how time-hallowed and admired by gentlemen, he did away with it in
the most uncompromising and arbitrary manner. There were many other
doings during the days of the cardinal's glory that are of no account in
this chronicle, though they were vastly of importance to the people of
France. But many things had happened that are of moment to this
chronicle, and these, therefore, shall be set down as briefly as may be.

News did not travel, when the seventeenth century was still young, from
one end of the kingdom to the other with any desperate rapidity. Even
when the posts rode at a hand gallop, the long leagues took their long
time to cover, and, after all, of most of the news that came to the
capital from abroad and afar it was generally safe to disbelieve a full
half, to discredit the third quarter, and to be justifiably sceptical as
to the remaining portion. But, credible or incredible, all news is blown
to Paris, as all roads lead to Rome, and in the fulness of time it got to
be known in Paris that the Duke Louis de Nevers, the young, the
beautiful, the brilliant, had come to his death in an extraordinary and
horrible manner hard by the Spanish frontier, having been, as it seemed,
deliberately butchered by a party of assassins employed, so it was said,
by his father-in-law, the old Count of Caylus.

It was not difficult for the well-informed in Paris to credit the ignoble
rumor. The old feud between the house of Caylus, on the one hand, and the
house of Nevers on the other, was familiar to those who made it their
business to be familiar with the movements of high persons in high
places; and when on the top of this inherited feud you had the secret
marriage between the son of the house of Nevers and the daughter of the
house of Caylus, there was every reason, at least, to believe in a bloody
end to the business. There was, however, no jot of definite proof against
the ma