“He is cold,” said the page.

“He is covered with blood,” said the butler, who while feeling his pulse had wetted his hand.

“If he revives,” said the guilty one, “I will pay for a mass to St. Gatien.”

“Madame takes after her late father, and if she does not have thee hanged, the least mitigation of thy penalty will be that thou wilt be kicked out of her house and service,” said another.  “Certes, he’s dead enough, he is so heavy.”

“Ah!  I am in the house of a very great lady,” thought Jacques.

“Alas! is he really dead?” demanded the author of the calamity.  While with great labour the Tourainian was being carried up the stairs, his doublet caught on a projection, and the dead man cried, “Ah, my doublet!”

“He groans,” said the culprit, with a sigh of relief.  The Regent’s servants (for this was the house of the Regent, the daughter of King Louis XI. of virtuous memory) brought Jacques de Beaune into a room, and laid him stiff and stark upon a table, not thinking for a moment that he could be saved.

“Run and fetch a surgeon,” cried Madame de Beaujeu.  “Run here, run there!”

The servants were down the stairs in a trice.  The good lady Regent dispatched her attendants for ointment, for linen to bind the wounds, for goulard-water, for so many things, that she remained alone.  Gazing upon this splendid and senseless man, she cried aloud, admiring his presence and his features, handsome even in death.  “Ah!  God wishes to punish me.  Just for one little time in my life has there been born in me, and taken possession of me, a naughty idea, and my patron saint is angry, and deprives me of the sweetest gentleman I have ever seen.  By the rood, and by the soul of my father, I will hang every man who has had a hand in this!”

“Madame,” cried Jacques de Beaune, springing from the table, and falling at the feet of the Regent, “I will live to serve you, and am so little bruised that that I promise you this night as many joys as there are months in the year, in imitation of the Sieur Hercules, a pagan baron.  For the last twenty days,” he went on (thinking that matters would be smoothed by a little lying), “I have met you again and again.  I fell madly in love with you, yet dared not, by reason of my great respect for your person, make an advance.  You can imagine how intoxicated I must have been with your royal beauties, to have invented the trick to which I owe the happiness of being at your feet.”

Thereupon he kissed her amorously, and gave her a look that would have overcome any scruples.  The Regent, by means of time, which respects not queens, was, as everyone knows, in her middle age.  In this critical and autumnal season, women formally virtuous and loveless desire now here, now there, to enjoy, unknown to the world, certain hours of love, in order that they may not arrive in the other world with hands and heart alike empty, through having left