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Updated: June 16, 2025
I had taken the precaution to bring a meal with me, and while La Trape and his companion unpacked it, and I dried my riding boots, I asked the players who it was they had meant to frighten. They were not very willing to tell me, but at length confessed, to my astonishment, that it was M. Grabot. "Grabot Grabot!" I said, striving to recollect where I had heard the name. "The Mayor of Bottitort?"
"But," the King remonstrated in a tone of anger, "the man is dying!" "He is no more dying than you are, sire," the other answered. "Or, if he is, it is of fright. There, he can stand as well as you or I!" And to be sure, as he spoke, La Trape scrambled to his feet, and with a mien between shame and doubt stood staring at us, the very picture of a simpleton.
All being ready I gave the word to bring in the prisoners, and escorted by La Trape and six of my guards, they were marched into the arena. In their pale and terrified faces, and the shaking limbs which could scarce support them to their appointed stations, I read both the consciousness of guilt and the apprehension of immediate death; it was plain that they expected nothing less.
Maignan was furious, La Trape vicious, while my own equanimity scarcely supported me against the thought that we should probably be where we were until the arrival of my people, whom I had directed my wife to send to Le Mesnil at noon next day. Their coming would free us, indeed, but at the cost of ridicule and laughter. Never was man worse placed.
Is he not brother to the smith at Aubergenville who has just shod my horse?" La Trape professed to be ignorant on the point.
There, pretending that the motion of the coach fatigued me, I mounted the led horse, without which I never travelled, and bidding La Trape accompany me, I gave orders to the others to follow at their leisure to Pithiviers, where I proposed to stay the night.
He had left his bed and was standing near La Trape, endeavouring to hearten him; now telling him to tickle his throat with a feather, and now watching his sufferings in silence, with a face of gloom and despondency that sufficiently betrayed his reflections.
On this I rallied Maignan on his mare's nest, and was inclined to dismiss the matter as such; still, before doing so, I thought I would see La Trape, and dismissing Maignan I sent for him. When he was come, "Well," I said, "have you anything to say?" "One little thing only, your excellency," he answered slyly, "and of no importance." "But you did not tell it to Maignan?"
"La Trape," I said to my valet the same who was with me at Cahors "what is the name of the innkeeper at Poissy, at whose house we are accustomed to dine?" "Andrew, may it please your lordship." "Ha! Ha! I thought so!" I exclaimed, smiting my thigh. "Simon and Andrew his brother! Answer, knave; and if you have permitted me to be robbed these many times, tremble for your ears!
On the word his voice rose and broke; and in a moment the door, through which we had all passed unsuspecting, fell to with a crash behind us. Before we could move we heard the bars drop across it. A little before, La Trape had taken a candle from someone's hand to light me the better; and therefore we were not in darkness.
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