for its new king, following, through doubtful rumour, his circuitous
journey to the throne, by Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Turin, over
Mont Cenis, by Lyons, to French [137] soil, still building
confidently on the prestige of his early manhood. Seeing him at
last, all were conscious in a moment of the inversion of their hopes.
Had the old witchcrafts of Poland, the old devilries of his race,
laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take
purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with a programme
which looked like formal irony on the kingly position, a premeditated
mockery of those who yielded him, on demand, a servile reverence
never before paid to any French monarch? Well! the amusement, or
business, of Parisians, at all events, would still be that of
spectators, assisting at the last act of the Valois tragedy, in the
course of which fantastic traits and incidents would naturally be
multiplied. Fantastic humour seemed at its height in the institution
of a new order of knighthood, the enigmatic splendours of which were
to be a monument of Henry's superstitious care, or, as some said, of
his impious contempt, of the day which had made him master of his
destiny,--that great Church festival, towards the emphatic marking of
which he was ever afterwards ready to welcome any novel or striking
device for the spending of an hour.

It was on such an occasion, then,--on a Whitsunday afternoon, amid
the gaudy red hues of the season, that Gaston listened to one, who,
as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event then
commemorated, had a great [138] deal to say concerning the Spirit;
above all, of the freedom, the indifference, of its operations; and
who would give a strangely altered colour, for a long time to come,
to the thoughts, to the very words, associated with the celebration
of Pentecost. The speaker, though understood to be a brother of the