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Updated: June 7, 2025
"Little Æsop wants his reward." Gonzague thought he understood now. "True. What is your price?" The hunchback, more bowed than ever, with his hair more than ever huddled about his face, swayed his crippled body whimsically, and when he spoke he spoke, apologetically: "I am a man of strange fancies, highness."
"Tell Madame Berthe to come with the girl who was placed in her charge to-night." The servant bowed and disappeared. Gonzague went to the golden doors and threw them open. Standing in the aperture, he summoned his friends to join him. Instantly there was a great noise of rising revellers, of chairs set back, of glasses set down, of fans caught up, of fluttered skirts and lifted rapiers.
Lagardere dismissed them. "Then, farewell, old friends, till to-night." When Lagardere was left alone he placed himself at the table where Gonzague had been sitting so short a time before, and, taking pen and paper, wrote rapidly a short letter. When he had folded and sealed this, he rose, and, crossing the room, went to the door which opened on the antechamber to the princess's apartments.
After this for another half-hour the talk was all about the young Duke de Nevers and his secret thrust, and the woman he loved, and the Prince de Gonzague, his friend, who meant to kill him. Here, as before, Æsop dominated the party by his superior knowledge of all the individuals in the little tragedy in which they were invited to play subordinate parts.
The name of Lagardere meant little or nothing to them. Nocé spoke a short funeral oration: "The scamp has cheated the gallows." When the applause had died down, Gonzague spoke again: "Also I have good sport for you. To-night you shall witness a wedding." Again the applause broke forth. Oriol, his round eyes growing rounder, echoed the last words as a question: "A wedding?" Gonzague nodded.
Then Gonzague's partisans slowly filed out of the room, Chavernay, as usual, smiling, the others unusually grave. Gonzague turned to Peyrolles, who had returned from his task of convoying Flora to her apartments. "Who has done all this?" he asked. He thought he was alone with his henchman, but he was mistaken. Æsop had quietly entered the room, and was standing at his side.
And again Cocardasse persisted: "It might concern us very much if we chanced to believe that our quarry is Louis de Nevers, and if we got it somehow or other into our heads that our employer is Louis de Gonzague."
"Oh, Æsop, Æsop," Lagardere murmured to himself, "how vexed you would be if you knew how useful you prove to me!" One of the handsomest rooms in the Palace of Gonzague, as the Palace of Nevers was now called, was known as the Hall of the Three Louis. It was so called on account of the three life-sized portraits which it contained.
Gonzague advanced leisurely to the table, relieved to think the comedy had come to an end, and that he had satisfactorily rid himself of an incubus. He bent carelessly over the parchment, and then sprang back with face as pale and eyes as wild and lips as trembling as if on the pitiful piece of sheepskin he had seen some terror as dread as the face of Medusa.
He put up his hand, and whispered behind it cautiously: "The married life of the Prince de Gonzague and the widow of Nevers has not been ideally happy." Æsop grinned at him in derision. "You surprise me!" he commented, ironically. Peyrolles went on: "The marriage is only a marriage in name. What arguments succeeded in persuading so young a widow to marry again so soon I do not, of course, know."
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