“You have come at last!” he exclaimed from a distance, running to meet them.  “Come! quick!  What is going on?  What are they doing there?  Who are these assassins?  What are these cries?”

“They cry, ‘Long live Monsieur!’”

Gaston, without appearing to hear, and holding the door of his chamber open for an instant, that his voice might reach the galleries in which were the people of his household, continued to cry with all his strength, gesticulating violently: 

“I know nothing of all this, and I have authorized nothing.  I will not hear anything!  I will not know anything!  I will never enter into any project!  These are rioters who make all this noise; do not speak to me of them, if you wish to be well received here.  I am the enemy of no man; I detest such scenes!”

Fontrailles, who knew the man with whom he had to deal, said nothing, but entered with his friend, that Monsieur might have time to discharge his first fury; and when all was said, and the door carefully shut, he began to speak: 

“Monseigneur,” said he, “we come to ask you a thousand pardons for the impertinence of these people, who will persist in crying out that they desire the death of your enemy, and that they would even wish to make you regent should we have the misfortune to lose his Majesty.  Yes, the people are always frank in their discourse; but they are so numerous that all our efforts could not restrain them.  It was truly a cry from the heart—­an explosion of love, which reason could not restrain, and which escaped all bounds.”

“But what has happened, then?” interrupted Gaston, somewhat calmed.  “What have they been doing these four hours that I have heard them?”

“That love,” said Montresor, coldly, “as Monsieur de Fontrailles had the honor of telling you, so escaped all rule and bounds that we ourselves were carried away by it, and felt seized with that enthusiasm which always transports us at the mere name of Monsieur, and which leads us on to things which we had not premeditated.”

“But what, then, have you done?” said the Prince.

“Those things,” replied Fontrailles, “of which Monsieur de Montresor had the honor to speak to Monsieur are precisely those which I foresaw here yesterday evening, when I had the honor of conversing with you.”

“That is not the question,” interrupted Gaston.  “You cannot say that I have ordered or authorized anything.  I meddle with nothing; I know nothing of government.”

“I admit,” continued Fontrailles, “that your Highness ordered nothing, but you permitted me to tell you that I foresaw that this night would be a troubled one about two o’clock, and I hoped that your astonishment would not have been too great.”

The Prince, recovering himself little by little, and seeing that he did not alarm the two champions, having also upon his conscience and reading in their eyes the recollection of the consent which he had given them the evening before, sat down upon the side of his bed, crossed his arms, and, looking at them with the air of a judge, again said in a commanding tone: