“Not so foolish as you imagine, only he is a little behindhand for our affair.”

   “I can not but approve this generous project, and I pray you give me
   to wot all your proceedings—­”

“Ah! the old language of the last reign!” said Olivier.  “He can’t say ‘Make me acquainted with your proceedings,’ as we now say.”

“Let me read, for Heaven’s sake!” said the Abbe; “a hundred years hence they’ll laugh at our phrases.”  He continued: 

   “I can counsel you, notwithstanding my great age, in relating to you
   what happened to me in 1560.”

“Ah, faith!  I’ve not time to waste in reading it all.  Let us see the end.

“When I remember my dining at the house of Madame la Marechale d’Effiat, your mother, and ask myself what has become of all the guests, I am really afflicted.  My poor Puy-Laurens has died at Vincennes, of grief at being forgotten by Monsieur in his prison; De Launay killed in a duel, and I am grieved at it, for although I was little satisfied with my arrest, he did it with courtesy, and I have always thought him a gentleman.  As for me, I am under lock and key until the death of M. le Cardinal.  Ah, my child! we were thirteen at table.  We must not laugh at old superstitions.  Thank God that you are the only one to whom evil has not arrived!”

“There again!” said Olivier, laughing heartily; and this time the Abbe de Gondi could not maintain his gravity, despite all his efforts.

They tore the useless letter to pieces, that it might not prolong the detention of the old marechal, should it be found, and drew near the Place des Terreaux and the line of guards, whom they were to attack when the signal of the hat should be given by the young prisoner.

They beheld with satisfaction all their friends at their posts, and ready “to play with their knives,” to use their own expression.  The people, pressing around them, favored them without being aware of it.  There came near the Abbe a troop of young ladies dressed in white and veiled.  They were going to church to communicate; and the nuns who conducted them, thinking, like most of the people, that the preparations were intended to do honor to some great personage, allowed them to mount upon some large hewn stones, collected behind the soldiers.  There they grouped themselves with the grace natural to their age, like twenty beautiful statues upon a single pedestal.  One would have taken them for those vestals whom antiquity invited to the sanguinary shows of the gladiators.  They whispered to each other, looking around them, laughing and blushing together like children.

The Abbe de Gondi saw with impatience that Olivier was again forgetting his character of conspirator and his costume of a bricklayer in ogling these girls, and assuming a mien too elegant, an attitude too refined, for the position in life he was supposed to occupy.  He already began to approach them, turning his hair with his fingers, when Fontrailles and Montresor fortunately arrived in the dress of Swiss soldiers.  A group of gentlemen, disguised as sailors, followed them with iron-shod staves in their hands.  There was a paleness on their faces which announced no good.