Nevertheless, neither President de Thou’s visit, nor the seductions of Babette, nor the urgency of his mother, were sufficient to shake the constancy of the martyr of the Reformation.  Christophe held to his religion all the more because he had suffered for it.

“My father will never let me marry a heretic,” whispered Babette in his ear.

Christophe answered only by tears, which made the young girl silent and thoughtful.

Old Lecamus maintained his paternal and magisterial dignity; he observed his son and said little.  The stern old man, after recovering his dear Christophe, was dissatisfied with himself; he repented the tenderness he had shown for this only son; but he admired him secretly.  At no period of his life did the syndic pull more wires to reach his ends, for he saw the field ripe for the harvest so painfully sown, and he wanted to gather the whole of it.  Some days before the morning of which we write, he had had, being alone with Christophe, a long conversation with him in which he endeavored to discover the secret reason of the young man’s resistance.  Christophe, who was not without ambition, betrayed his faith in the Prince de Conde.  The generous promise of the prince, who, of course, was only exercising his profession of prince, remained graven on his heart; little did he think that Conde had sent him, mentally, to the devil in Orleans, muttering, “A Gascon would have understood me better,” when Christophe called out a touching farewell as the prince passed the window of his dungeon.

But besides this sentiment of admiration for the prince, Christophe had also conceived a profound reverence for the great queen, who had explained to him by a single look the necessity which compelled her to sacrifice him; and who during his agony had given him an illimitable promise in a single tear.  During the silent months of his weakness, as he lay there waiting for recovery, he thought over each event at Blois and at Orleans.  He weighed, one might almost say in spite of himself, the relative worth of these two protections.  He floated between the queen and the prince.  He had certainly served Catherine more than he had served the Reformation, and in a young man both heart and mind would naturally incline toward the queen; less because she was a queen than because she was a woman.  Under such circumstances a man will always hope more from a woman than from a man.

“I sacrificed myself for her; what will she do for me?”

This question Christophe put to himself almost involuntarily as he remembered the tone in which she had said the words, Povero mio!  It is difficult to believe how egotistical a man can become when he lies on a bed of sickness.  Everything, even the exclusive devotion of which he is the object, drives him to think only of himself.  By exaggerating in his own mind the obligation which the Prince de Conde was under to him he had come to expect that some office