idnight had long passed, when Ernanton
hastened away, his cloak concealing his face, while Madame la Duchesse
de Montpensier returned to her litter.

"Now," murmured Chicot, as he descended his own staircase, "what is that
chance of death which is to deliver the Duc de Guise from the
presumptive heir of the crown? who are those defunct persons who were
thought to be dead, but are still living?

"Mordioux! I shall trace them before long."

CHAPTER LXXXIV.

LE CARDINAL DE JOYEUSE.

Youth has its obstinate resolutions, both as regards good and evil in
the world, which are by no means inferior to the inflexibility of
purpose of maturer years.

When directed toward good purposes, instances of this dogged obstinacy
of character produce what are termed the great actions of life, and
impress on the man who enters life an impulse which bears him onward, by
a natural course, toward a heroism of character of some kind or another.

In this way Bayard and Du Gueselin became great captains, from having
been the most ill-tempered and most intractable children that ever
existed; in the same way, too, the swineherd, whom nature had made the
herdsman of Montalte, and whose genius had converted him into
Sexte-Quinte, became a great pope, because he had persisted in
performing his duties as a swineherd in an indifferent manner.

Again, in the same way were the worst Spartan natures displayed in a
heroic sense, after they had commenced life by a persistence in
dissimulation and cruelty.

All we have now to sketch is the portrait of a man of an ordinary stamp;
and yet, more than one biographer would have found in Henri du Bouchage,
at twenty years of age, the materials for a great man.

Henri obstinately persisted in his affection and in his seclusion from
the world; as his brother had begged and as the king had required him to
do, he remained for some days closeted alone with his one enduring
thought; and then, when that thought had become more and more fixed and
unchangeable in its nature, he one morning decided to pay a visit to his
brother the cardinal, an important personage, who, at the age of
twenty-six, had already for two years past been a cardinal, and who,
from the archbishopric of Narbonne, had passed to the highest degrees of
ecclesiastical dignity, a position to which he was indebted as much to
his noble descent as to his powerful intellect.

Francois de Joyeuse, whom we have already introduced with the obj