"God pity them!" the King said.
"Morbleu! Your Majesty is pitiful of a sudden!" The speaker was the Constable de Montmorency. He was a stout, gruff, choleric man, born, as the Montmorencys were, a generation too late.
"I pity them!" the King answered a trifle sharply. "But you" – he spoke to the table-"neither pity them nor put them down."
"You are speaking, sire," one asked, "of the Crocans?" It was so; from the name of a village in their midst, they called these revolted peasants of the Limousin of whom more will be said.
"Yes."
"They are not in my government," the speaker replied. "Nor in mine!"
"Nor mine!" And so all, except the Governor of the Limousin and the Governor of Poitou, who sat sulkily silent.
Another of the great ones, Marshal Matignon, nodded approval. "Let every man shoe his own ass," he said, pursing up his lips. He was a white-haired, red-faced, apoplectic man of sixty, who thought that in persuading the Estates of Bordeaux to acknowledge Henry he had earned the right to go his own way. "Otherwise we shall jostle one another," he continued, "and be at blows before we know it, sire! They are in the Limousin; let the Governor put them down. It is his business and no other's."
"Except mine," the King replied, with a frown of displeasure. "And if he cannot, what then?"
"Let him make way, sire, for one who can," the Constable answered readily. "Your Majesty will not have far to look for him," he continued in a playful tone. "My nephew, for instance, would like a government."
"A truce to jesting," Henry said. "The trouble began, it is true, in the Limousin, but it has spread into Poitou and into the Angoumois" – he looked at Epernon's agent, for the Duke of Epernon was so great a man he had not come himself. "Gentlemen," the King continued, sitting back in his great chair, "can you not come to some agreement? Can you not mass what force you have, and deal with them shortly but mercifully? The longer the fire burns, the more trouble will it be to extinguish it, and the greater the suffering."
"Why not let it burn out, sire?" Epernon's agent muttered with thinly veiled impudence. "It will then burn the more rubbish, with your Majesty's leave!"
But, the words said, he quailed. For, under his aquiline nose, the King's mustaches curled with rage. There were some with whom he must bear, lords who had brought him rich cities, wide provinces; and others whose deeds won them licence. But this man? "There spoke the hireling!" he cried. And the stroke went home, for the man was the only one at the table who had no government of his own. "I will spare your attendance, sir," the King continued, with a scornful gesture. "M. de Guise will answer such questions as arise on your master's late government-of Provence. And for his other government-"
"I represent him there also," the man muttered sulkily.
"Then you can represent his absence," Henry retorted with quick wit, "since he is never there! I need you not. Go, sir, and see that within three hours you are without the walls of Lyons!"
The man rose, divided between fear of the King and fear of the master to whom he must return. He paused an instant, then went down the room slowly, and went out.
"Now, gentlemen," Henry continued, with hard looks, "understand. You may shoe each his own ass, but you must shoe mine also. There must be an end put to this peasant rising. Who will undertake it?"
"The man who should undertake it," Matignon answered, "for the ass is of his providing, is the gentleman who has gone out."
"He is naught!"
"He is for much in this."
"How? Sometimes," the King continued irritably, "I think the men are shod, and the asses come to my Council Table!"
This was a stroke of wit on a level with the Constable's discernment; he laughed loudly. "Nevertheless," he said, "Matignon's right, sire. That man's master is for a good deal in this. If he had kept order his neighbour's house would not be on fire."
For the first time M. des Ageaux ventured a word from the lower end of the table. "Vlaye!" he muttered.
The Constable leaned forward to see who spoke. "Ay, you've hit on it, my lad, whoever you are. Vlaye it is!" And he looked at Matignon, who nodded his adhesion.
Henry frowned. "I am coming to the matter of Vlaye," he said.
"It is all one, sire," Matignon replied, his eyes half shut. He wheezed a little in his speech.
"How?"
The Constable explained. He leant forward and prodded the table with a short, stout finger-not overclean according to the ideas of a later time. "Angoumois is there," he said. "See, your Majesty. And Poitou is here" – with a second prod an inch from the first. "And the Limousin is here! And Périgord is there! And see, your Majesty, where their skirts all meet in this corner-or as good as meet-is Vlaye! Name of God, a strong place, that!" He turned for assent to old Matignon, who nodded silently.
"And you mean to say that Vlaye-"
"Has been over heavy handed, your Majesty. And the clowns, beginning to find the thing beyond a joke, began by hanging three poor devils of toll gatherers, and the thing started. And what is on everybody's frontier is nobody's business."
"Except mine," the King muttered drily. "And Vlaye is Epernon's man?"
"That is it, sire," the Constable answered. "Epernon put him in the castle six years back for standing by him when the Angoulême people rose on him. But the man is no Vlaye, you understand. M. de Vlaye was in that business and died of his wounds. He had no near heirs, and the man whom Epernon put in took the lordship as well as the castle, the name and all belonging to it. They call him the Captain of Vlaye in those parts."
The King looked his astonishment.
"Oh, I could give you twenty cases!" the Constable continued, shrugging his shoulders. "What do you expect, sire, in such times as these?"
"Ventre St. Gris!" Henry swore. "And not content with what he has got, he robs the poor?"
"And the rich, too," Joyeuse murmured with a grin, "when he gets them into his net!"
Henry looked sternly from one to another. "But what do you while this goes on?" he said. "For shame! You, Constable? You, Matignon?" He turned from one to the other.
Matignon laughed wheezily. "Make me Governor in Epernon's place, sire," he said, "and I will account for him. But double work and single pay? No, no!"
The Constable laughed as at a great joke. "I say the same, sire," he said. "While Epernon has the Angoumois it is his affair."
The King looked stormily at the Governor of Poitou. But Poitou shook his head. "It is not in my government," he said moodily. "I cannot afford, sire, to get a hornets' nest about my ears for nothing."
He of the Limousin fidgeted. "I say the same, sire," he muttered. "Vlaye has three hundred spears. It would need an army to reduce him. And I have neither men nor money for the task."
"There you have, sire," the delicate-faced Joyeuse cried gaily, "three hundred and one good reasons why the Limousin leaves the man alone. For the matter of that" – he tried to spin his pen like a top-"there is a government as deeply concerned in this as any that has been named."
"Which?" Henry asked. He was losing patience. That which was so much to him was nothing to these.
"Périgord," Joyeuse answered with a bow. And at that several laughed softly-but not the King. He was himself, as has been said, Governor of Périgord.
Here at last, however, was one on whom he could vent his displeasure; and he would vent it! "Stand up, des Ageaux!" he cried harshly. And he scowled as des Ageaux, who