ut
twelve. You will refer back this account."

He turned his back on the cage, and set out to leave the room. The
miserable prisoner divined from the removal of the torches and the
noise, that the king was taking his departure.

"Sire! sire!" he cried in despair.

The door closed again. He no longer saw anything, and heard only the
hoarse voice of the turnkey, singing in his ears this ditty,--

"_Maitre Jean Balue,
A perdu la vue
De ses eveches.
Monsieur de Verdun.
N'en a plus pas un;
Tous sont depeches_."*

* Master Jean Balue has lost sight of his bishoprics.
Monsieur of Verdun has no longer one; all have been killed off.

The king reascended in silence to his retreat, and his suite followed
him, terrified by the last groans of the condemned man. All at once his
majesty turned to the Governor of the Bastille,--

"By the way," said he, "was there not some one in that cage?"

"Pardieu, yes sire!" replied the governor, astounded by the question.

"And who was it?"

"Monsieur the Bishop of Verdun."

The king knew this better than any one else. But it was a mania of his.

"Ah!" said he, with the innocent air of thinking of it for the first
time, "Guillaume de Harancourt, the friend of Monsieur the Cardinal
Balue. A good devil of a bishop!"

At the expiration of a few moments, the door of the retreat had opened
again, then closed upon the five personages whom the reader has seen
at the beginning of this chapter, and who resumed their places, their
whispered conversations, and their attitudes.

During the king's absence, several despatches had been placed on his
table, and he broke the seals himself. Then he began to read them
promptly, one after the other, made a sign to Master Olivier who
appeared to exercise the office of minister, to take a pen, and without
communicating to him the contents of the despatches, he began to dictate
in a low voice, the replies which the latter wrote, on his knees, in an
inconvenient attitude before the table.

Guillaume Rym was on the watch.

The king spoke so low that the Flemings heard nothing of his dictation,
except some isolated and rather unintelligible scraps, such as,--

"To maintain the fertile places by commerce, and the sterile by
manufactures....--To show the English lords our four bombards, London,
Brabant, Bourg-en-Bresse, Saint-Omer....--Artillery is the cause of
war being made more judici