And, thirdly, it must be more to your Majesty's honour to accept help from a near kinsman than from an ordinary subject, and one who, I still maintain, sire, has no good designs in his mind.' 'The proof' Henry said sharply.

'Give me that!' 'I can give it in a week from this day.' 'It must be no idle tale, mind you,' the king continued suspiciously.
'You shall have Turenne's designs, sire, from one who had them from his own mouth.' The king looked startled, but after a pause turned and resumed his walk.
'Well,' he said, 'if you do that, I on my part--' The rest I lost, for the two passing to the farther end of the gallery, came to a standstill there, balking my curiosity and Rambouillet's also.
The marquis, indeed, began to betray his impatience, and the great clock immediately over our heads presently striking the half-hour after ten, he started and made as if he would have approached the king.

He checked the impulse, however, but still continued to fidget uneasily, losing his reserve by-and-by so far as to whisper to me that his Majesty would be missed.
I had been, up to this point, a silent and inactive spectator of a scene which appealed to my keenest interests and aroused my most ardent curiosity.

Surprise following surprise, I had begun to doubt my own identity; so little had I expected to find myself first in the presence of the Most Christian King--and that under circumstances as strange and bizarre as could well be imagined--and then an authorised witness at a negotiation upon which the future of all the great land of France stretching for so many hundred leagues on every side of us, depended.

I say I could scarcely believe in my own identity; or that I was the same Gaston de Marsac who had slunk, shabby and out-at-elbows, about St.Jean d'Angely.