It was the body of the Coadjutor, lying face upwards, the eyes open and the teeth bared in a last spasm.  Prostrate on it lay a woman, a young woman, with hair like red gold falling about her neck, and skin like milk.  I did not know whether she was alive or dead; but I noticed that one arm stuck out stiffly and the crowd flying before the sudden impact of the horses must have passed over her, even if she had escaped the iron hoofs which followed.  Still in the fleeting glance I had of her as my horse bounded aside, I saw no wound or disfigurement.  Her one arm was cast about the priest’s breast; her face was hidden on it.  But for all that, I knew her—­knew her, shuddering for the woman whose badges I was even now wearing, whose gift I bore at my side; and I remembered the priest’s vaunt of a few hours before, made in her presence, “There is no man in Paris shall thwart me to-night!”

It had been a vain boast indeed!  No hand in all that host of thousands was more feeble than his now:  for good or ill!  No brain more dull, no voice less heeded.  A righteous retribution indeed had overtaken him.  He had died by the sword he had drawn —­died, a priest, by violence!  The cross he had renounced had crushed him.  And all his schemes and thoughts, and no doubt they had been many, had perished with him.  It had come to this, only this, the sum of the whole matter, that there was one wicked man the less in Paris—­one lump of breathless clay the more.

For her—­the woman on his breast—­what man can judge a woman, knowing her?  And not knowing her, how much less?  For the present I put her out of my mind, feeling for the moment faint and cold.

We were clear of the crowd, and clattering unmolested down a paved street before I fully recovered from the shock which this sight had caused me.  Wonder whither we were going took its place.  To Bezers’ house?  My heart sank at the prospect if that were so.  Before I thought of an alternative, a gateway flanked by huge round towers appeared before us, and we pulled up suddenly, a confused jostling mass in the narrow way; while some words passed between the Vidame and the Captain of the Guard.  A pause of several minutes followed; and then the gates rolled slowly open, and two by two we passed under the arch.  Those gates might have belonged to a fortress or a prison, a dungeon or a palace, for all I knew.

They led, however, to none of these, but to an open space, dirty and littered with rubbish, marked by a hundred ruts and tracks, and fringed with disorderly cabins and make-shift booths.  And beyond this—­oh, ye gods! the joy of it—­beyond this, which we crossed at a rapid trot, lay the open country!