too great a lady to allow herself to be seen, and too well known to utter any words but the sounds of love.  No light will you need, for her eyes flash fire, and attempt no conversation, since she speaks only with movements and twistings more rapid than those of a deer surprised in the forest.  Only, my dear Raoul, but so merry a nag look to your stirrups, sit light in the saddle, since with one plunge she would hurl thee to the ceiling, if you are not careful.  She burns always, and is always longing for male society.  Our poor dead friend, the young Sire de Giac, met his death through her; she drained his marrow in one springtime.  God’s truth! to know such bliss as that of which she rings the bells and lights the fires, what man would not forfeit a third of his future happiness? and he who has known her once would for a second night forfeit without regret eternity.”

“But,” said Raoul, “in things which should be so much alike, how is it that there is so great a difference?”

“Ha!  Ha!  Ha!”

Thereupon the company burst out laughing, and animated by the wine and a wink from their master, they all commenced relating droll and quaint conceits, laughing, shouting, and making a great noise.  Now, knowing not that an innocent scholar was there, these jokers, who had drowned their sense of shame in the wine-cups, said things to make the figures on the mantel shake, the walls and the ceilings blush; and the duke surpassed them all, saying, that the lady who was in bed in the next room awaiting a gallant should be the empress of these warm imaginations, because she practised them every night.  Upon this the flagons being empty, the duke pushed Raoul, who let himself be pushed willingly, into the room, and by this means the prince compelled the lady to deliberate by which dagger she would live or die.  At midnight the Sire d’Hocquetonville came out gleefully, not without remorse at having been false to his good wife.  Then the Duc d’Orleans led Madame d’Hocquetonville out by a garden door, so that she gained her residence before her husband arrived here.

“This,” said she, in the prince’s ear, as she passed the postern, “will cost us all dear.”

One year afterwards, in the old Rue du Temple, Raoul d’Hocquetonville, who had quitted the service of the Duke for that of Jehan of Burgundy, gave the king’s brother a blow on the head with a club, and killed him, as everyone knows.  In the same year died the Lady d’Hocquetonville, having faded like a flower deprived of air and eaten by a worm.  Her good husband had engraved upon her marble tomb, which is in one of the cloisters of Peronne, the following inscription—­

Herelies
Bertha de BOURGONGE
the noble and comely wife
of
Raoul, sire de Hocquetonville.