w permit us to return, after his last
adventure, went on as rapidly as possible. Between the duke and him
would now exist a mortal struggle, which would end only with life.
Mayenne, wounded in his body, and still more grievously in his
self-love, would never forgive him. Skillful in all mimicry, Chicot now
pretended to be a great lord, as he had before imitated a good
bourgeois, and thus never prince was served with more zeal than M.
Chicot, when he had sold Ernanton's horse and had talked for a quarter
of an hour with the postmaster. Chicot, once in the saddle, was
determined not to stop until he reached a place of safety, and he went
as quickly as constant fresh relays of horses could manage. He himself
seemed made of iron, and, at the end of sixty leagues, accomplished in
twenty hours, to feel no fatigue. When, thanks to this rapidity, in
three days he reached Bordeaux, he thought he might take breath. A man
can think while he gallops, and Chicot thought much. What kind of prince
was he about to find in that strange Henri, whom some thought a fool,
others a coward, and all a renegade without firmness. But Chicot's
opinion was rather different to that of the rest of the world; and he
was clever at divining what lay below the surface. Henri of Navarre was
to him an enigma, although an unsolved one. But to know that he was an
enigma was to have found out much. Chicot knew more than others, by
knowing, like the old Grecian sage, that he knew nothing. Therefore,
where most people would have gone to speak freely, and with their hearts
on their lips, Chicot felt that he must proceed cautiously and with
carefully-guarded words. All this was impressed on his mind by his
natural penetration, and also by the aspect of the country through which
he was passing. Once within the limits of the little principality of
Navarre, a country whose poverty was proverbial in France, Chicot, to
his great astonishment, ceased to see the impress of that misery which
showed itself in every house and on every face in the finest provinces
of that fertile France which he had just left. The woodcutter who passed
along, with his arm leaning on the yoke of his favorite ox, the girl
with short petticoats and quiet steps, carrying water on her head, the
old man humming a song of his youthful days, the tame bird who warbled
in his cage, or pecked at his plentiful supply of food, the brown, thin,
but healthy children playing about the roads, all said in a l