“Ah, Cinq-Mars, I no longer recognize you! how different you were formerly!  I do not conceal from you that you appear to me to have degenerated.  In those walks of our childhood, when the life, and, above all, the death of Socrates, caused tears of admiration and envy to flow from our eyes; when, raising ourselves to the ideal of the highest virtue, we wished that those illustrious sorrows, those sublime misfortunes, which create great men, might in the future come upon us; when we constructed for ourselves imaginary occasions of sacrifices and devotion—­if the voice of a man had pronounced, between us two, the single world, ‘ambition,’ we should have believed that we were touching a serpent.”

De Thou spoke with the heat of enthusiasm and of reproach.  Cinq-Mars went on without answering, and still with his face in his hands.  After an instant of silence he removed them, and allowed his eyes to be seen, full of generous tears.  He pressed the hand of his friend warmly, and said to him, with a penetrating accent: 

“Monsieur de Thou, you have recalled to me the most beautiful thoughts of my earliest youth.  Do not believe that I have fallen; I am consumed by a secret hope which I can not confide even to you.  I despise, as much as you, the ambition which will seem to possess me.  All the world will believe in it; but what do I care for the world?  As for you, noble friend, promise me that you will not cease to esteem me, whatever you may see me do.  I swear that my thoughts are as pure as heaven itself!”

“Well,” said De Thou, “I swear by heaven that I believe you blindly; you give me back my life!”

They shook hands again with effusion of heart, and then perceived that they had arrived almost before the tent of the King.

Day was nearly over; but one might have believed that a softer day was rising, for the moon issued from the sea in all her splendor.  The transparent sky of the south showed not a single cloud, and it seemed like a veil of pale blue sown with silver spangles; the air, still hot, was agitated only by the rare passage of breezes from the Mediterranean; and all sounds had ceased upon the earth.  The fatigued army reposed beneath their tents, the line of which was marked by the fires, and the besieged city seemed oppressed by the same slumber; upon its ramparts nothing was to be seen but the arms of the sentinels, which shone in the rays of the moon, or the wandering fire of the night-rounds.  Nothing was to be heard but the gloomy and prolonged cries of its guards, who warned one another not to sleep.

It was only around the King that all things waked, but at a great distance from him.  This Prince had dismissed all his suite; he walked alone before his tent, and, pausing sometimes to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, he appeared plunged in melancholy meditation.  No one dared to interrupt him; and those of the nobility who had remained in the royal quarters had gathered about the Cardinal, who, at twenty