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He followed the servant up the wide spiral stair of the tower, and from its twenty-eighth step entered a room hung with purple cloth stamped with golden fleurs-de-lis. The bishop lay six feet above the floor on one of the splendid carved cabinet beds that are built against the walls in Brittany. Heavy curtains shaded his cold white face.
The buttresses have offset string courses, and square crocketed pinnacles just as at Batalha; there has even been an attempt to copy the parapet, though only the trefoil corbel table is really like the model, for the parapet itself is solid with a cresting of rather clumsy fleurs-de-lis.
The blue hangings of the room, with their white fleurs-de-lis, were faded, like the rugs on the old dim floor; for the splendor of the Croisacs had departed with the Bourbons.
The second, or central, modern era lasted twice as long, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It thus covered one century under the Fleurs-de-lis in Canada and another under the Union Jack. It also exactly corresponded with the long era of the famous British navigation laws, of which more will presently be heard.
When he desired audience, or rather when the Prince de Conti desired it for him, the President de Mesmes, a man of great capacity, but by fear and ambition most slavishly attached to the Court, made an eloquent and pathetic harangue, preferable to anything I ever met with of the kind in all the monuments of antiquity, and, turning about to the Prince de Conti, "Is it possible, monsieur," said he, "that a Prince of the blood of France should propose to let a person deputed from the most bitter enemy of the fleurs-de-lis have a seat upon those flowers?"
"'Tis a goodly match as match can be, To marry the Church and the fleurs-de-lis: Should either mate a-straying go, Then each too late will own 'twas so." King Philip must have considered that he had ground for seeing in him a faithful and useful ally.
As this commander was destined to cruise upon the French in the latitude of Martinico, his stem and quarters were adorned with white fleurs-de-lis, and the whole shell of the ship so much disguised for a decoy to the enemy, that it was no wonder my uncle did not know her, although he had sailed on board of her many years.
And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the East as "woven air," and "running water," and "evening dew"; strange figured cloths from Java; elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks and wrought with fleurs-de-lis, birds and images; veils of lacis worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish velvets; Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas, with their green-toned golds and their marvellously plumaged birds.
Then followed Madame Elisabeth de France and the ex-Queen Marguerite, wearing mantles covered with fleurs-de-lis embroidered in gold, carried by four nobles richly attired, with their capes and caps laced with jewels; and the gorgeous train was finally closed by the Princesses of the Blood and Duchesses, whose trains were in like manner borne by some of the principal noblemen of the Court.
Nothing stirred along its whole length, except the Union Jacks, waving defiance at the fleurs-de-lis, and those patient men who fell before a fire to which they could not yet reply. Bayonet after bayonet would suddenly flash out of line and fall forward, as the stricken redcoat, standing there with shouldered arms, quivered and sank to the ground.
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