All that sounds very fine, good father,' I said, waxing impatient, and a little scornful; for I saw that he was one of those wandering and often crazy monks in whom the League found their most useful emissaries.

'But I should profit more by your gentle words, if I knew whom you were cursing.' 'The man of blood!' he cried; 'through whom the last but not the least of God's saints and martyrs entered into glory on the Friday before Christmas.' Moved by such profanity, and judging him, notwithstanding the extravagance of his words and gestures, to be less mad than he seemed, and at least as much knave as fool, I bade him sternly have done with his cursing, and proceed to his story if he had one.
He glowered at me for a moment, as though he were minded to launch his spiritual weapons at my head; but as I returned his glare with an unmoved eye--and my four rascals, who were as impatient as myself to learn the news, and had scarce more reverence for a shaven crown, began to murmur--he thought better of it, and cooling as suddenly as he had flamed up, lost no more time in satisfying our curiosity.
It would ill become me, however, to set down the extravagant and often blasphemous harangue in which, styling M.de Guise the martyr of God, he told the story now so familiar--the story of that dark wintry morning at Blois, when the king's messenger, knocking early at the duke's door, bade him hurry, for the king wanted him.

The story is trite enough now.
When I heard it first in the inn on the Clain, it was all new and all marvellous.
The monk, too, telling the story as if he had seen the events with his own eyes, omitted nothing which might impress his hearers.

He told us how the duke received warning after warning, and answered in the very antechamber, 'He dare not!' How his blood, mysteriously advised of coming dissolution, grew chill, and his eye, wounded at Chateau Thierry, began to run, so that he had to send for the handkerchief he had forgotten to bring.

He told us, even, how the duke drew his assassins up and down the chamber, how he cried for mercy, and how he died at last at the foot of the king's bed, and how the king, who had never dared to face him living, came and spurned him dead! There were pale faces round the fire when he ceased, and bent brows and lips hard pressed together.