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Alas, we made haste to be happy, as if we knew that we were not to be happy long. For two months we had not even been to Paris. No one came to see us, except Prudence and Julie Duprat, of whom I have spoken to you, and to whom Marguerite was afterward to give the touching narrative that I have there. I passed whole days at the feet of my mistress.
When the news came of the king's captivity, the regency threatened for a moment to become difficult and stormy; all the ambition and the hatred that lay dormant in the court awoke; an attempt was made to excite in the Duke of Vendome, the head of the younger branch of the House of Bourbon, a desire to take the regent's place; the Parliament of Paris attacked the chancellor, Duprat, whom they hated not without a cause; but the Duke of Vendome was proof against the attempts which were made upon him, and frankly supported the regent, who made him the chief of her council; and the regent supported the chancellor.
"I am going to the court, and I will speak the truth; after which the king will have to be obeyed," was said in the middle of the seventeenth century by the premier president Mold to Cardinal de Retz. Chancellor Duprat, if we are not mistaken, was, in the sixteenth century, the first chief of the French magistracy to make use of language despotic not only in fact, but also in principle.
I then wrote her the letter which she answered in the way you know; I received it at Toulon. I started at once, and you know the rest. Now you have only to read a few sheets which Julie Duprat gave me; they are the best commentary on what I have just told you.
I have not slept for eleven nights. I am suffocated. I imagine every moment that I am going to die. The doctor has forbidden me to touch a pen. Julie Duprat, who is looking after me, lets me write these few lines to you. Will you not come back before I die? Is it all over between us forever? It seems to me as if I should get well if you came. What would be the good of getting well? January 28.
With anybody but the king the constable was a good deal more than short-tempered the chancellor, Duprat, who happened to be at Moulins, and who had a wish to become possessed of two estates belonging to the constable, tried to worm himself into his good graces; but Bourbon gave him sternly to understand with what contempt he regarded him, and Duprat, who had hitherto been merely the instrument of Louise of Savoy's passions, so far as the duke was concerned, became henceforth his personal enemy, and did not wait long for an opportunity of making the full weight of his enmity felt.
The design of these has for a long time been shown at the house of Cardinal Duprat, the king's Chancellor. The constable ransacked his brains, and at the bottom, from his finest stratagems, drew the best, and fitted it so well to the present case, that the gallant would be certain to be taken like a hare in the trap.
The estates of Languedoc complained in vain. The Parliament of Paris was in its turn attacked. In 1521, three councillors, recently nominated, were convicted of having paid, one three thousand eight hundred livres, and the two others six thousand livres. The Parliament refused to admit them. Duprat protested.
"And watch the girl! Something has happened to her mind. She's forgotten or remembered! Get the best specialist in Paris and get Duprat. Do whatever they advise no matter what it costs. Everything depends on her." "I'll do exactly as you say, old friend," whispered the other. Then, at a warning signal from the nurse: "Don't worry now. Just rest and get well." He rose to go.
He knew the truth about this girl." Now the prisoner's pulse was running wild, faster and faster, but with no more violent spurtings and leapings; the red column throbbed swiftly and faintly at the bottom of the tube as if the heart were weakening. "A hundred and sixty to the minute," whispered Duprat to the magistrate. "It is dangerous to go on." Hauteville shrugged his shoulders.
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