“I?  ’Tis not I,” the King retorted.  His hair hung damp on his brow, and he dried his hands continually; while his gestures had the ill-measured and eccentric violence of an epileptic.  “Here, you!  Speak, father, and confound him!”

Then Tavannes discovered on the farther side of the circle the priest whom his brother had ridden down that morning.  Father Pezelay’s pale hatchet-face gleamed paler than ordinary; and a great bandage hid one temple and part of his face.  But below the bandage the flame of his eyes was not lessened, nor the venom of his tongue.  To the King he had come—­for no other would deal with his violent opponent; to the King’s presence! and, as he prepared to blast his adversary, now his chance was come, his long lean frame, in its narrow black cassock, seemed to grow longer, leaner, more baleful, more snake-like.  He stood there a fitting representative of the dark fanaticism of Paris, which Charles and his successor—­the last of a doomed line—­alternately used as tool or feared as master; and to which the most debased and the most immoral of courts paid, in its sober hours, a vile and slavish homage.  Even in the midst of the drunken, shameless courtiers—­who stood, if they stood for anything, for that other influence of the day, the Renaissance—­he was to be reckoned with; and Count Hannibal knew it.  He knew that in the eyes not of Charles only, but of nine out of ten who listened to him, a priest was more sacred than a virgin, and a tonsure than all the virtues of spotless innocence.

“Shall the King give with one hand and withdraw with the other?” the priest began, in a voice hoarse yet strident, a voice borne high above the crowd on the wings of passion.  “Shall he spare of the best of the men and the maidens whom God hath doomed, whom the Church hath devoted, whom the King hath given?  Is the King’s hand shortened or his word annulled that a man does as he forbiddeth and leaves undone what he commandeth?  Is God mocked?  Woe, woe unto you,” he continued, turning swiftly, arms uplifted, towards Tavannes, “who please yourself with the red and white of their maidens and take of the best of the spoil, sparing where the King’s word is ‘Spare not’!  Who strike at Holy Church with the sword!  Who—­”

“Answer, sirrah!” Charles cried, spurning the floor in his fury.  He could not listen long to any man.  “Is it so?  Is it so?  Do you do these things?”

Count Hannibal shrugged his shoulders and was about to answer, when a thick, drunken voice rose from the crowd behind him.

“Is it what?  Eh!  Is it what?” it droned.  And a figure with bloodshot eyes, disordered beard, and rich clothes awry, forced its way through the obsequious circle.  It was Marshal Tavannes.  “Eh, what?  You’d beard the King, would you?” he hiccoughed truculently, his eyes on Father Pezelay, his hand on his sword.  “Were you a priest ten times—­”

“Silence!” Charles cried, almost foaming with rage at this fresh interruption.  “It’s not he, fool!  ’Tis your pestilent brother.”