“Were the accomplices of Ravaillac or of Jacques Clement ever known?”

“No; for perhaps they were too high-placed for anyone to dare look for them where they were.  The Palace of Justice would not be burned down for everybody, monseigneur.”

“You think, then, that the fire at the Palace of Justice was not caused by chance?” asked Richelieu, in the tone with which he would have put a question of no importance.

“I, monseigneur?” replied Milady.  “I think nothing; I quote a fact, that is all.  Only I say that if I were named Madame de Montpensier, or the Queen Marie de Medicis, I should use less precautions than I take, being simply called Milady Clarik.”

“That is just,” said Richelieu.  “What do you require, then?”

“I require an order which would ratify beforehand all that I should think proper to do for the greatest good of France.”

“But in the first place, this woman I have described must be found who is desirous of avenging herself upon the duke.”

“She is found,” said Milady.

“Then the miserable fanatic must be found who will serve as an instrument of God’s justice.”

“He will be found.”

“Well,” said the cardinal, “then it will be time to claim the order which you just now required.”

“Your Eminence is right,” replied Milady; “and I have been wrong in seeing in the mission with which you honor me anything but that which it really is—­that is, to announce to his Grace, on the part of your Eminence, that you are acquainted with the different disguises by means of which he succeeded in approaching the queen during the fete given by Madame the Constable; that you have proofs of the interview granted at the Louvre by the queen to a certain Italian astrologer who was no other than the Duke of Buckingham; that you have ordered a little romance of a satirical nature to be written upon the adventures of Amiens, with a plan of the gardens in which those adventures took place, and portraits of the actors who figured in them; that Montague is in the Bastille, and that the torture may make him say things he remembers, and even things he has forgotten; that you possess a certain letter from Madame de Chevreuse, found in his Grace’s lodging, which singularly compromises not only her who wrote it, but her in whose name it was written.  Then, if he persists, notwithstanding all this—­as that is, as I have said, the limit of my mission—­I shall have nothing to do but to pray God to work a miracle for the salvation of France.  That is it, is it not, monseigneur, and I shall have nothing else to do?”

“That is it,” replied the cardinal, dryly.

“And now,” said Milady, without appearing to remark the change of the duke’s tone toward her—­“now that I have received the instructions of your Eminence as concerns your enemies, Monseigneur will permit me to say a few words to him of mine?”

“Have you enemies, then?” asked Richelieu.