"Why did you not change your doublet at the Louvre, since you returned there?" asked the queen.

"Ah!" said La Mole, "because some one was in my room."

"Some one in your room?" said Marguerite, whose eyes expressed the greatest astonishment; "who was in your room?"

"His highness."

"Hush!" interrupted Marguerite.

The young man obeyed.

"_Qui ad lecticam meam stant?_" she asked La Mole.

"_Duo pueri et unus eques_."

"_Optime, barbari!_" said she. "_Dic, Moles, quem inveneris in biculo tuo?_"

"_Francisc.u.m ducem_."

"_Agentem?_"

"_Nescio quid_."

"_Quoc.u.m?_"

"_c.u.m ignoto._"[8]

"That is strange," said Marguerite. "So you were unable to find Coconnas?" she continued, without evidently thinking of what she was saying.

"So, madame, as I have had the honor of telling you, I am really dying of anxiety."

"Well," said Marguerite, sighing, "I do not wish to detain you longer in your search for him; I do not know why I think so, but he will find himself! Never mind, however, go, in spite of this."

The queen laid a finger on her lips. But as beautiful Marguerite had confided no secret, had made no avowal to La Mole, the young man understood that this charming gesture, meaning only to impose silence on him, must have another significance.

The procession resumed its march, and La Mole, intent on following out his investigation, continued to ascend the quay as far as the Rue Long Pont which led him to the Rue Saint Antoine.

Opposite the Rue Jouy he stopped. It was there that the previous evening the two duennas had bandaged his eyes and those of Coconnas. He had turned to the left, then he had counted twenty steps. He repeated this and found himself opposite a house, or rather a wall, behind which rose a house; in this wall was a door with a shed over it ornamented with large nails and loop-holes.

The house was in the Rue Cloche Percee, a small narrow street beginning in the Rue Saint Antoine and ending in the Rue Roi de Sicile.

"By Heaven!" cried La Mole, "it was here--I would swear to it--in extending my hand, as I came out, I felt the nails in the door, then I descended two steps. The man who ran by crying 'Help!' who was killed in the Rue Roi de Sicile, pa.s.sed just as I reached the first. Let us see, now."

La Mole went to the door and knocked. The door opened and a mustached janitor appeared.

"_Was ist das?_" (Who is that?) asked the janitor.

"Ah! ah!" said La Mole, "we are Swiss, apparently." "My friend," he continued, a.s.suming the most charming manner, "I want my sword which I left in this house in which I spent the night."

"_Ich verstehe nicht_," (I do not understand,) replied the janitor.

"My sword," went on La Mole.

"_Ich verstehe nicht_," repeated the janitor.

"--which I left--my sword which I left"--

"_Ich verstehe nicht._"

"--in this house, in which I spent the night."

"_Gehe zum Teufel!_" (Go to the devil!) And he slammed the door in La Mole's face.

"By Heaven!" cried La Mole, "if I had this sword I have just asked for, I would gladly put it through that fellow's body. But I have not, and this must wait for another day."

Thereupon La Mole continued his way to the Rue Roi de Sicile, took about fifty steps to the right, then to the left again, and came to the Rue Tizon, a little street running parallel with the Rue Cloche Percee, and like it in every way. More than this, scarcely had he gone thirty steps before he came upon the door with the large nails, with its shed and loop-holes, the two steps and the wall. One would have said that the Rue Cloche Percee had returned to see him pa.s.s by.

La Mole then reflected that he might have mistaken his right for his left, and he knocked at this door, to make the same demand he had made at the other. But this time he knocked in vain. The door was not opened.

Two or three times La Mole made the same trip, which naturally led him to the idea that the house had two entrances, one on the Rue Cloche Percee, the other on the Rue Tizon.

But this conclusion, logical as it was, did not bring him back his sword, and did not tell him where his friend was. For an instant he conceived the idea of buying another sword and cutting to pieces the wretched janitor who so persistently refused to speak anything but German, but he thought this porter belonged to Marguerite, and that if Marguerite had chosen thus, it was because she had her reasons, and that it might be disagreeable for her to be deprived of him.

Now La Mole would not have done anything disagreeable to Marguerite for anything in the world.

Fearing to yield to this temptation he returned about two o'clock in the afternoon to the Louvre.

As his room was not occupied this time he could enter it. The matter was urgent enough as far as his doublet was concerned, which, as the queen had already remarked to him, was considerably torn.

He therefore at once approached his bed to subst.i.tute the beautiful pearl-gray doublet for the one he wore, when to his great surprise the first thing he perceived near the pearl-gray doublet was the famous sword which he had left in the Rue Cloche Percee.

La Mole took it and turned it over and over.

It was really his.

"Ah! ah!" said he, "is there some magic under all this?" Then with a sigh, "Ah! if poor Coconnas could be found like my sword!"

Two or three hours after La Mole had ceased his circular tramp around the small double house, the door on the Rue Tizon had opened. It was about five o'clock in the evening, consequently night had closed in.

A woman wrapped in a long cloak trimmed with fur, accompanied by an attendant, came out of the door which was held open by a duenna of forty, and hurrying rapidly along to the Rue Roi de Sicile, knocked at a small door of the Hotel Argenson, which opened for her; she then left by the main entrance of the same hotel which opened on to the Vieille Rue du Temple, went toward a small postern in the Hotel de Guise, unlocked it with a key which she carried in her pocket, and disappeared.

Half an hour later a young man with bandaged eyes left by the same door of the small house, guided by a woman who led him to the corner of the Rue Geoffroy Lasnier and La Mortellerie. There she asked him to count fifty steps and then remove his bandage.

The young man carefully obeyed the order, and when he had counted fifty, removed the handkerchief from his eyes.

"By Heaven!" cried he, looking around. "I'll be hanged if I know where I am! Six o'clock!" he cried, as the clock of Notre-Dame struck, "and poor La Mole, what can have become of him? Let us run to the Louvre, perhaps they may have news of him there."

Coconnas hurriedly descended the Rue La Mortellerie, and reached the gates of the Louvre in less time than it would have taken an ordinary horse. As he went he jostled and knocked down the moving hedge of brave bourgeois who were walking peacefully about the shops of the Place de Baudoyer, and entered the palace.