t 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.

"Stop here!" said one of them to his suite; "this is the place."

The sombre air and the silence of these spectators contrasted with the
gay and anxious looks of the girls, and their childish exclamations.

"Ah, the fine procession!" they cried; "there are at least five hundred
men with cuirasses and red uniforms, upon fine horses. They've got
yellow feathers in their large hats."

"They are strangers--Catalonians," said a French guard.

"Whom are they conducting here? Ah, here is a fine gilt coach! but
there's no one in it."

"Ah! I see three men on foot; where are they going?"

"To death!" said Fontrailles, in a deep, stern voice which silenced
all around. Nothin