mentally pliable. Meanwhile they led him to their daintiest
apartment, with great silver flambeaux, that he might wash off the
blood with which not his hands only were covered; for he hunted also
with the eagerness of a madman--steeped in blood. He lay there for a
few hours, after supping very familiarly on his own birds, Gaston
rising from [15] his bed to look on at a distance, and, afterwards,
on his knee, serving the rose-water dish and spiced wine, as the
night passed in reassuring silence; Charles himself, as usual, keenly
enjoying this "gipsy" incident, with the supper after that unexpected
fashion, among strange people, he hardly knew where. He was very
pale, like some cunning Italian work in wax or ivory, of partly
satiric character, endued by magic or crafty mechanism with vivacious
movement. But as he sat thus, ever for the most part the unhappy
plaything of other people's humours, escaped for a moment out of a
world of demoniac politicians, the pensive atmosphere around seemed
gradually to change him, touching his wild temper, pleasantly,
profitably, so that he took down from the wall and struck out the
notes of a lute, and fell to talking of verses, leaving a stanza of
his own scratched with a diamond on the window-pane--lines simpler-
hearted, and more full of nature than were common at that day.

The life of Gaston de Latour was almost to coincide with the duration
of the Religious Wars. The earliest public event of his memory was
that famous siege of Orleans from which the young Henri de Guise rode
away the head of his restless family, tormented now still further by
the reality or the pretence of filial duty, seeking vengeance on the
treacherous murder of his father. Following a long period of quiet
progress--the tranquil and tolerant years of the [16] Renaissance--
the religious war took possession of, and pushed to strangely
confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by an artificial