with his head lowered, and
a pistol in each hand, spurred his horse up the nearest road, without
considering whether it was the right one. He had scarcely gone ten
steps, however, when a musket-ball entered the head of his horse, which
fell, entangling D'Harmental's leg. Instantly eight or ten cavaliers
sprang upon him; he fired one pistol by hazard, and put the other to his
head, to blow his brains out, but he had not time, for two musketeers
seized him by the arms, and four others dragged him from beneath the
horse. The pretended prince descended from the carriage, and turned out
to be a valet in disguise; they placed D'Harmental with two officers
inside the carriage, and harnessed another horse in the place of the one
which had been shot. The carriage once more moved forward, taking a new
direction, and escorted by a squadron of musketeers. A quarter of an
hour afterward it rolled over a drawbridge, a heavy door grated upon its
hinges, and D'Harmental passed under a somber and vaulted gateway, on
the inner side of which, an officer in the uniform of a colonel was
waiting for him. It was Monsieur de Launay, the governor of the
Bastille.

If our readers desire to know how the plot had been discovered, they
must recall the conversation between Dubois and La Fillon. The gossip of
the prime minister, it will be remembered, suspected Roquefinette of
being mixed up in some illicit proceeding, and had denounced him on
condition of his life being spared. A few days afterward D'Harmental
came to her house, and she recognized him as the young man who had held
the former conference with Roquefinette. She had consequently mounted
the stairs behind him, and, going into the next room, had, by aid of a
hole bored in the partition, heard everything.

What she had heard was the project for carrying off the regent on his
return from Chelles. Dubois had been informed the same evening, and, in
order to take the conspirators in the act, had put a suit of the
regent's clothes on Monsieur Bourguignon, and, having surrounded the
Bois de Vincennes with a regiment of Gray Musketeers, besides
light-horse and dragoons, had produced the result we have just related.
The head of the plot had been taken in the fact, and as the prime
minister knew the names of all the conspirators, there was little chance
remaining for them of escape from the meshes of the vast net which was
hourly closing around them.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

A PRIME MINISTER'S