with his old valet, he had found this open—­a certain and understood sign that the Abbe Quillet, his tutor, awaited him at the accustomed place.  His care to prevent any surprise had made him remain himself to guard the entrance until the arrival of Marie.  Delighted as he was at the punctuality of the good Abbe, he would still scarcely leave his post to thank him.  He was a second father to him in all but authority; and he acted toward the good priest without much ceremony.

The old parish church of St. Eustache was dark.  Besides the perpetual lamp, there were only four flambeaux of yellow wax, which, attached above the fonts against the principal pillars, cast a red glimmer upon the blue and black marble of the empty church.  The light scarcely penetrated the deep niches of the aisles of the sacred building.  In one of the chapels—­the darkest of them—­was the confessional, of which we have before spoken, whose high iron grating and thick double planks left visible only the small dome and the wooden cross.  Here, on either side, knelt Cinq-Mars and Marie de Mantua.  They could scarcely see each other, but found that the Abbe Quillet, seated between them, was there awaiting them.  They could see through the little grating the shadow of his hood.  Henri d’Effiat approached slowly; he was regulating, as it were, the remainder of his destiny.  It was not before his king that he was about to appear, but before a more powerful sovereign, before her for whom he had undertaken his immense work.  He was about to test her faith; and he trembled.

He trembled still more when his young betrothed knelt opposite to him; he trembled, because at the sight of this angel he could not help feeling all the happiness he might lose.  He dared not speak first, and remained for an instant contemplating her head in the shade, that young head upon which rested all his hopes.  Despite his love, whenever he looked upon her he could not refrain from a kind of dread at having undertaken so much for a girl, whose passion was but a feeble reflection of his own, and who perhaps would not appreciate all the sacrifices he had made for her—­bending the firm character of his mind to the compliances of a courtier, condemning it to the intrigues and sufferings of ambition, abandoning it to profound combinations, to criminal meditations, to the gloomy labors of a conspirator.

Hitherto, in their secret interviews, she had always received each fresh intelligence of his progress with the transports of pleasure of a child, but without appreciating the labors of each of these so arduous steps that lead to honors, and always asking him with naivete when he would be Constable, and when they should marry, as if she were asking him when he would come to the Caroussel, or whether the weather was fine.  Hitherto, he had smiled at these questions and this ignorance, pardonable at eighteen, in a girl born to a throne and accustomed to a grandeur natural to her, which she found around her on her entrance into