serious talk were the fashion of the hour. It was no longer the lucky
_coup_ at the lansquenet table, the last comedy of Moliere, or the new
opera of Lully about which they gossiped, but it was on the evils of
Jansenism, on the expulsion of Arnauld from the Sorbonne, on the
insolence of Pascal, or on the comparative merits of two such popular
preachers as Bourdaloue and Massilon. So, under a radiant ceiling and
over a many-coloured floor, surrounded by immortal paintings, set
thickly in gold and ornament, there moved these nobles and ladies of
France, all moulding themselves upon the one little dark figure in their
midst, who was himself so far from being his own master that he hung
balanced even now between two rival women, who were playing a game in
which the future of France and his own destiny were the stakes.



CHAPTER V.


CHILDREN OF BELIAL.

The elderly Huguenot had stood silent after his repulse by the king,
with his eyes cast moodily downwards, and a face in which doubt, sorrow,
and anger contended for the mastery. He was a very large, gaunt man,
raw-boned and haggard, with a wide forehead, a large, fleshy nose, and a
powerful chin. He wore neither wig nor powder, but Nature had put her
own silvering upon his thick grizzled locks, and the thousand puckers
which clustered round the edges of his eyes, or drew at the corners of
his mouth, gave a set gravity to his face which needed no device of the
barber to increase it. Yet in spite of his mature years, the swift
anger with which he had sprung up when the king refused his plaint, and