chance he yet retains some knightly faith!" said Owen, straining his eyes, for the confusion and uproar were too great to hear anything distinctly from below. The Lord of L'Isle Adam and the new provost seemed to be reasoning with the Cabochiens, and persuading them to peace. But the voice of Simon was only too audible in reply. "Curse on your justice, your pity, your reasonableness! Cursed of God be he who shall have pity on these false Armagnac traitors, these Englishmen They are but dogs! they have destroyed, they have ruined, the fair realm of France! They have sold us to the English-they have killed my son!"

!

The Veau de Bar again spoke, in a low voice, obviously much shaken and disordered by the roar of popular fury that followed Simon's oration. At this instant the mendicant of the parvis glided up; he shook a blank parchment, signed with a name and a broad seal, in the faces of the Burgundian leaders. He spoke to them and his words seemed to remove all scruples. "My friends," said the Veau de Bar, "do as it pleases ye! But how is that?"

"I am the executioner of Paris!" returned a voice. "I command and entreat all men to aid

me in executing the king's justice on criminals taken in the fact! Death to all the Armag

nacs!"

"Give us the keys of your fortress, provost, and turn your back for ten minutes!" said Simon Caboche.

"I may not; the Châtelet is the lock of Paris!" replied the Veau. Speak reasonably, Simon!"

"Yield us the prisoners then!" returned Caboche. "It is not safe to keep them here in the heart of Paris, close on the Boucherie!"

"Will ye swear, then, to convey them safely to the Bastille?" said the Veau de Bar.

"Their bodies?-yea!" replied Simon, and a peal of furious laughter applauded.

"Look to it, then!" said the Burgundian chief. "I hold myself quit of all harm that may happen to my prisoners when once they have passed my gates!" Who says that jesuistry was invented by the disciples of Loyola?

Deafening shouts responded, and the butchers

VOL. III.

followed in the steps of the new provost of Paris, while the rest of the mob, yelling the names of the various prisons of Paris, and exhorting one another to rush to them and destroy their miserable inmates, foamed off in various directions.

a

CHAPTER II.

THE MASSACRE OF THE ARMAGNACS.

THE Cabochiens halted at the gates of the Châtelet, while the Veau de Bar entered it with the understanding that he was to order the surrender of the prisoners. But at least those in the great keep were aware of the projects entertained, and were by no means inclined to confide themselves to the promised conveyance. Owen Tudor had communicated his suspicions, his certainties, to his fellow-prisoners, which were confirmed by the movements of the multitude, and the dreadful outcries that reached them. And into all but La Trimouille he infused some portion of his own determination of resistance, the desperate courage and resolve of his heroic blood. When the Veau de Bar arrived with some archers to bring his prisoners from the keep, he found the draw-bridge torn off its hinges and cast into the

ditch below, and by that means all passage between the donjon and its exterior works, destroyed. At the only door admitting into the prison, Owen Tudor stood armed with an axe, and surrounded by a throng of his fellow-prisoners armed with such weapons as chance presented, or that some of them had concealed; with stones and beams torn from the walls of the dungeon!

The provost's order to the prisoners to yield themselves, under the cajolery of being conveyed to the Bastille, wrung from Owen Tudor so overwhelming a storm of reproach and invective at his breach of knightly faith, that the Veau de Bar was struck with shame and relenting. "It is not I; it is the accursed mob; it is de Giac!" he replied.

"Go then and bid them win us ere they wear us; they shall find we are men and not sheep!" shouted the Welsh knight.

"It is not intended-no harm is intendedunless ye provoke the rabble by resistance," said the provost, stammeringly. "I, for one, abhor the thought-but I am only one."

"Give us arms to defend ourselves—we are many!" returned Owen.