It is a remarkable fact in the mind of man that the most devoted spirits, even while devoting themselves, build romantic hopes upon their perilous enterprises.  When the prince, the soldier, and the minister had asked Christophe, under the bridge, to convey to Catherine the treaty which, if discovered, would in all probability cost him his life, the lad had relied on his nerve, upon chance, upon the powers of his mind, and confident in such hopes he bravely, nay, audaciously put himself between those terrible adversaries, the Guises and Catherine.  During the torture he still kept saying to himself:  “I shall come out of it! it is only pain!” But when this second and brutal demand, “Die, we want your life,” was made upon a boy who was still almost helpless, scarcely recovered from his late torture, and clinging all the more to life because he had just seen death so near, it was impossible for him to launch into further illusions.

Christophe answered quietly:—­

“What is it now?”

“To fire a pistol courageously, as Stuart did on Minard.”

“On whom?”

“The Duc de Guise.”

“A murder?”

“A vengeance.  Have you forgotten the hundred gentlemen massacred on the scaffold at Amboise?  A child who saw that butchery, the little d’Aubigne cried out, ‘They have slaughtered France!’”

“You should receive the blows of others and give none; that is the religion of the gospel,” said Christophe.  “If you imitate the Catholics in their cruelty, of what good is it to reform the Church?”

“Oh!  Christophe, they have made you a lawyer, and now you argue!” said Chaudieu.

“No, my friend,” replied the young man, “but parties are ungrateful; and you will be, both you and yours, nothing more than puppets of the Bourbons.”

“Christophe, if you could hear Calvin, you would know how we wear them like gloves!  The Bourbons are the gloves, we are the hand.”

“Read that,” said Christophe, giving Chaudieu Pibrac’s letter containing the answer of the Prince de Conde.

“Oh! my son; you are ambitious, you can no longer make the sacrifice of yourself!—­I pity you!”

With those fine words Chaudieu turned and left him.

Some days after that scene, the Lallier family and the Lecamus family were gathered together in honor of the formal betrothal of Christophe and Babette, in the old brown hall, from which Christophe’s bed had been removed; for he was now able to drag himself about and even mount the stairs without his crutches.  It was nine o’clock in the evening and the company were awaiting Ambroise Pare.  The family notary sat before a table on which lay various contracts.  The furrier was selling his house and business to his head-clerk, who was to pay down forty thousand francs for the house and then mortgage it as security for the payment of the goods, for which, however, he paid twenty thousand francs on account.