“Now let him go,” said a voice at the corner of the street; and at the same moment was heard the galloping of horses.

“Grandchamp, wilt thou answer?” cried Cinq-Mars.

“Help, Henri, my dear boy!” exclaimed the voice of the Abbe Quillet.

“Whence come you?  You endanger me,” said the grand ecuyer, approaching him.

But he saw that his poor tutor, without a hat in the falling snow, was in a most deplorable condition.

“They stopped me, and they robbed me,” he cried.  “The villains, the assassins! they prevented me from calling out; they stopped my mouth with a handkerchief.”

At this noise, Grandchamp at length came, rubbing his eyes, like one just awakened.  Laure, terrified, ran into the church to her mistress; all hastily followed her to reassure Marie, and then surrounded the old Abbe.

“The villains! they bound my hands, as you see.  There were more than twenty of them; they took from me the key of the side door of the church.”

“How! just now?” said Cinq-Mars; “and why did you quit us?”

“Quit you! why, they have kept me there two hours.”

“Two hours!” cried Henri, terrified.

“Ah, miserable old man that I am!” said Grandchamp; “I have slept while my master was in danger.  It is the first time.”

“You were not with us, then, in the confessional?” continued Cinq-Mars, anxiously, while Marie tremblingly pressed against his arm.

“What!” said the Abbe, “did you not see the rascal to whom they gave my key?”

“No! whom?” cried all at once.

“Father Joseph,” answered the good priest.

“Fly! you are lost!” cried Marie.

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     They have believed me incapable because I was kind
     They tremble while they threaten

CINQ MARS

By ALFRED DE VIGNY

BOOK 6

CHAPTER XXII

THE STORM

’Blow, blow, thou winter wind;
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude. 
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude. 
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly. 
Most friendship is feigning; most loving mere folly.’

Shakespeare.

Amid that long and superb chain of the Pyrenees which forms the embattled isthmus of the peninsula, in the centre of those blue pyramids, covered in gradation with snow, forests, and downs, there opens a narrow defile, a path cut in the dried-up bed of a perpendicular torrent; it circulates among rocks, glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges of inundated precipices to scale the adjacent mountains of Urdoz and Oleron, and at last rising over their unequal ridges, turns their nebulous peak into a new country which has also its mountains and its depths, and, quitting France, descends into Spain.  Never has the hoof of the mule left its trace in these windings; man himself can with difficulty stand upright there, even with the hempen boots which can not slip, and the hook of the pikestaff to force into the crevices of the rocks.