Though Monsieur de Commines travelled, as he said, on the King's service—a service which, I have since concluded, had it been known, might have cost him his head—he travelled without ostentation. And yet our train of twelve mounted guards, six led packhorses and as many body servants was a royal progress compared with our entrance to Paris.
We crossed the river by the ferry that plied from the Louvre gardens, landing near the end of the Rue de Seine, a hundred paces below the Tour de Nesle. Thence we followed the same street till we reached the Rue du Bussy, where we turned to the right, keeping straight on till we reached the pillory which stands, as a terror to evil-doers, at the junction of the Rue du Four and the Rue des Boucheries. There, in the triangular open space used as an occasional market, we were joined by Monsieur de Rochfort, the Chancellor, and Monsieur de Commines, who, so far, had ridden by my side pointing out this or that of interest as we passed, drew apart.
"It is for your sake," said he, with a kindly nod. "The Chancellor and I are both too near the King to wish well to the other's friends."
Once or twice thereafter through the day he reined back alongside Roland, just as he did with each of the three or four gentlemen in his train. But, unless we were out of earshot of the Chancellor's friends, there was an indifferent coldness in his manner which, more than any words could have done, warned me how warily men must walk whose paths lie near a throne. So plain was this coldness to himself that he half-excused it.
"There are three parties at court," said he waving his hand aside as if indicating some point in the landscape. "I call them the party of the present, of the early future, and for all time; or, to put it more clearly, of the King, of the Dauphin, and of France. I am of the last, and so most truly for the King, though all do not see as I do. When the King is well, Monsieur de Rochfort is of the first; when the King is sick, he is of the second; and never, to my thinking, of the third. Now, such a man rarely,—oh ho! here comes one of his friends slipping back to catch what I am saying. Good-morning, Monsieur de Bueil, there is an urgent matter on which I wish to consult you, but without advertisement. Do you think the Chancellor would consider it wise——" and lowering his voice he drew aside, plunging into I know not what story, having in a single sentence flattered not only the Chancellor's wisdom and influence at court, but also Monsieur de Bueil's intimacy with his master.
That night we lay at Anneau where, because of the inn's cramped space, I slept on hay, and was glad of its softness for my wound still stung me. Next night our quarters were at Vend?me, and so Tours was reached before dinner on the third day. There Martin and I dropped off; Plessis, which lay a mile or so to the south-west, was not for us as yet.
"Put up at the Cross of Saint Martin," was Monsieur de Commines' last advice. "It is not the best inn in the city, but the other is in the Rue des Trois Pucelles, and so too near Confrère Tristan's for comfort, unless you have a strong stomach," a hint which, in my innocence, I failed to understand. "Give me a week," he added at parting, "but remember, I promise nothing except that I am at all times the friend of your father's son," and so rode on.
Later I was grateful for his choice of our lodgings. As we gaped about the streets, Martin a discreet half-pace behind me, but talking across my shoulder without a break, touched me.
"Monsieur Tristan's," he said, nodding at the other side. "That a man should make a gallows of the house where he eats and sleeps, and, it maybe, loves his wife and children."
"A gallows? where?"
"For God's sake walk on, Monsieur Gaspard, and don't stare. These nails, and that fag end of a cut rope blowing in the wind make my flesh creep."
That is always the way! The kennel is swimming in mud and a pretty woman crosses the road with her skirts a-tilt; or an unhappy gallant in silks is chasing his bonnet through the self-same mud, and you are bidden to look and not stare! Not stare? That's not in nature; the very warning is a challenge. Of course I stood and stared, though at first there was little to look at, a house, like a hundred others in Tours with a dozen of the kind in the same street. Then, as I looked again, there came a sense of the sinister. It was as when a face, which at the first glance seems one of a score, shows something of a peculiar and personal devil, and with it a fascination that fastens the attention, as all things evil or ugly fasten it.
It was a tall narrow house of four storeys, tapering as if by steps and stairs to a point at the ridge. The wall of the floor on the street level was pierced by two unequal windows, heavily barred. The larger was to the left, and in its position it balanced the stout door raised two steps above the pavement. Above these were three windows, the largest again to the left, and all with similar significant heavy defences; whoso lived there was careful of his safety. The two upper storeys were in the contraction of the roof. Each had but one outlook, and in the case of the lower it was again to the left, leaving a wide expanse of blank wall, and when I understood the tale it told, my gorge rose. Here was the sinister threat, the foul vice writ on an honest seeming; Fran?ois Villon in stone and mortar stared across the road.
The whole wide expanse, and it was a very wide one, for the windows were small, was studded over by stout nails driven between the joints of the masonry. From these fluttered rope-ends, some short, some long, some weather-frayed to rags, others—horrible to think of—newly cut, and there men and women had choked to death while the King's Provost Marshal ate, drank, or took his pleasure within to the music of the dying wretches clattering their boot heels against the wall!
Shuddering and half-sick with disgust I swallowed down my loathing as best I could. And yet it was nothing more than the sordid commentary to the comedy of the Louvre and a plain warning. Everywhere I turned the law of the King's will was a handwriting on the wall, inexorable, inevitable, callous.
Perhaps because of this newly reawakened sense of the dangers that lay behind the walls of Plessis, or perhaps—and I trust it was so—because to the heart of every man who thinks at all there comes the desire to give God thanks for mercies undeserved and unlooked for, and to seek His strength and guidance in the uncertainties of life, I shook off Martin about vespers, and made my way alone to the great church of Saint Gatien. Behind the grated screens of its dim aisles there rarely fails a priest to ease a burdened spirit of that which grows too heavy to be borne.
But before a man can thus cleanse his soul it is fitting he should pray, and so I knelt, but not before the great altar. No! its hard brilliance and gorgeous extravagance of this world's passing splendours repelled me. What had a poor crushed soul in common with such proud display? The God who loved these flaring lights, silver lamps that swung by silver chains, gilt candlesticks of many branches all ablaze, who took complacent pleasure in such ostentation of gold vessels, broidered draperies, fretted carvings, gems that flashed and gems that glowed, how could He stoop to a worm of the earth? True, the pure, pale Face of the suffering Christ looked out from it all, but looked out as if to ask, What have I, the Man of Sorrows acquainted with grief, Who had not where to lay His head, what have I to do with all this arrogance of flaunted wealth? Either I am the Son of God in My heaven of heavens, and what to Me are your tinsel glories! or I am the Son of Man working out salvation in anguish and alone, sweating, as it were, great drops of blood, no man ministering to Me, and what have I to do with all this splendour! The God of the high altar is either the God of the very great or the very poor; of the man who says in his pride, I, too, am a god, a god to myself, a god upon earth for the people's worship, and so we are a-kin, thou and I! Or else it is for those ignorants who find the incense of heaven in the smell of the unsnuffed guttering candles; for myself, I could not pray there. I found instead a small remote chapel, where a single rushlight trembled before a darkened shrine, faint and small like a soul facing the unknowable; shrinking, and yet persistent because of the Love unseen that watched and waited, yearning to be gracious. Nor was I alone. A ............