The countess, who was now in her nineteenth year, made a painful contrast to that large, repulsive figure.  She was fair and slim.  Her chestnut locks, threaded with gold, played upon her neck like russet shadows, and defined a face such as Carlo Dolce has painted for his ivory-toned madonnas,—­a face which now seemed ready to expire under the increasing attacks of physical pain.  You might have thought her the apparition of an angel sent from heaven to soften the iron will of the terrible count.

“No, he will not kill us!” she cried to herself mentally, after contemplating her husband for a long time.  “He is frank, courageous, faithful to his word—­faithful to his word!”

Repeating that last sentence in her thoughts, she trembled violently, and remained as if stupefied.

To understand the horror of her present situation, we must add that this nocturnal scene took place in 1591, a period when civil war raged throughout France, and the laws had no vigor.  The excesses of the League, opposed to the accession of Henri IV., surpassed the calamities of the religious wars.  License was so universal that no one was surprised to see a great lord kill his enemy in open day.  When a military expedition, having a private object, was led in the name of the King or of the League, one or other of these parties applauded it.  It was thus that Blagny, a soldier, came near becoming a sovereign prince at the gates of France.  Sometime before Henri III.’s death, a court lady murdered a nobleman who made offensive remarks about her.  One of the king’s minions remarked to him:—­

“Hey! vive Dieu! sire, she daggered him finely!”

The Comte d’Herouville, one of the most rabid royalists in Normandy, kept the part of that province which adjoins Brittany under subjection to Henri IV. by the rigor of his executions.  The head of one of the richest families in France, he had considerably increased the revenues of his great estates by marrying seven months before the night on which this history begins, Jeanne de Saint-Savin, a young lady who, by a not uncommon chance in days when people were killed off like flies, had suddenly become the representative of both branches of the Saint-Savin family.  Necessity and terror were the causes which led to this union.  At a banquet given, two months after the marriage, to the Comte and Comtesse d’Herouville, a discussion arose on a topic which in those days of ignorance was thought amusing:  namely, the legitimacy of children coming into the world ten months after the death of their fathers, or seven months after the wedding day.

“Madame,” said the count brutally, turning to his wife, “if you give me a child ten months after my death, I cannot help it; but be careful that you are not brought to bed in seven months!”

“What would you do then, old bear?” asked the young Marquis de Verneuil, thinking that the count was joking.

“I should wring the necks of mother and child!”