“Room for the king!” cried De Loignac.  Gorenflot, delighted with the scene, extended his powerful arm and blessed the king from his balcony.  Henri saw him, and bowed smilingly, and at this mark of favor Gorenflot gave out a “Vive le Roi!” with his stentorian voice.  The rest, however, remained mute:  they expected a different result from their two months’ training.  But Borromee, feeling certain from the absence of the duchess’s troops of the fate of the enterprise, knew that to hesitate a moment was to be ruined, and he answered with a “Vive le Roi!” almost as sonorous as Gorenflot’s.  Then all the rest took it up.

“Thanks, reverend father, thanks,” cried Henri; and then he passed the convent, where his course was to have terminated, like a whirlwind of fire, noise, and glory, leaving behind him Bel-Esbat in obscurity.

From her balcony, hidden by the golden scutcheon, behind which she was kneeling, the duchess saw and examined each face on which the light of the torches fell.

“Oh!” cried she, “look, Mayneville!  That young man, my brother’s messenger, is in the king’s service!  We are lost!”

“We must fly immediately, madame, now the Valois is conqueror.”

“We have been betrayed; it must have been by that young man, he must have known all.”

The king had already, with all his escort, entered the Porte St. Antoine, which had opened before him and shut behind him.

CHAPTER XLIII.

How Chicot blessed king Louis II.  For having invented posting, and resolved to profit by it.

Chicot, to whom our readers will now permit us to return, after his last adventure, went on as rapidly as possible.  Between the duke and him would now exist a mortal struggle, which would end only with life.  Mayenne, wounded in his body, and still more grievously in his self-love, would never forgive him.  Skillful in all mimicry, Chicot now pretended to be a great lord, as he had before imitated a good bourgeois, and thus never prince was served with more zeal than M. Chicot, when he had sold Ernanton’s horse and had talked for a quarter of an hour with the postmaster.  Chicot, once in the saddle, was determined not to stop until he reached a place of safety, and he went as quickly as constant fresh relays of horses could manage.  He himself seemed made of iron, and, at the end of sixty leagues, accomplished in twenty hours, to feel no fatigue.  When, thanks to this rapidity, in three days he reached Bordeaux, he thought he might take breath.  A man can think while he gallops, and Chicot thought much.  What kind of prince was he about to find in that strange Henri, whom some thought a fool, others a coward, and all a renegade without firmness.  But Chicot’s opinion was rather different to that of the rest of the world; and he was clever at divining what lay