Everything happened very quickly.
One of the assailants cried, ‘Watch out! Watch out!’
The new arrival rushed into the middle of the fight like a lion, the light shining on his drawn sword.
‘Thieves! Scoundrels! Knaves!’ he cried in a powerful voice as he distributed a shower of blows about him.
The thieves disappeared like flies before his attack. As one of the cut-throats passed within reach of his hand, he took him by the collar and hurled him against the wall. The whole gang decamped along the river bank without asking for more. They could be heard running towards the Petit-Pré-aux-Clercs, and then there was silence.
Gasping and stumbling, his hands clasped to his chest, Philippe went over to his brother.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Gautier breathlessly, rubbing his shoulder. ‘And you?’
‘Nor am I. But it’s a miracle to have got away with it.’
Together they turned towards the stranger who, for the last few seconds, had been chasing the thieves and was now returning, putting up his sword. He looked very tall, broad and strong; his breath came deep and fierce.
‘Well, Messire,’ said Gautier, ‘we’re very grateful to you. Without your help we should soon have been floating down the river. To whom have we the honour to be beholden?’
The man laughed, a great, fat, rather forced laugh. One could imagine his strong, pointed teeth in the darkness. For an instant the two brothers thought that they recognised the laugh, then the moon came out from behind the clouds and they knew their defender.
‘By heaven, Monseigneur, it’s you, is it!’ cried Philippe.
‘And by heaven, young sirs,’ replied the man, ‘I know you too!’
They had been saved by Robert of Artois.
‘The brothers Aunay!’ he cried. ‘The handsomest young fellows at Court. Devil take it, I didn’t expect that. I was just passing along the bank when I heard the row down here, and said to myself, “There’s some peaceable townsman getting done in!” I must say, Paris is infested with these rogues, and that fool of a Provost is too busy licking Marigny’s boots to attend to cleaning up the town.’
‘Monseigneur,’ said Philippe, ‘we don’t know how to thank you.’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Robert of Artois, patting Philippe on the shoulder with a hand that made him reel. ‘It’s a pleasure! It’s every gentleman’s natural instinct to go to the assistance of someone in danger. But it’s a double pleasure if that someone is of one’s acquaintance, and I am delighted to have preserved for my cousins of Valois and Poitiers their best equerries. It’s only a pity it was so dark. By heaven, if the moon had only come out sooner I should have taken great pleasure in ripping up some of those rascals. I didn’t really dare thrust properly for fear of wounding you. But, tell me young gentlemen, what the devil are you doing in this dirty hole?’
‘We … we were taking a walk,’ said Philippe d’Aunay, embarrassed.
The giant roared with laughter.
‘Oh, so you were taking a walk, were you? A fine place and a fine hour for a walk! You were taking a walk in mud up to your knees! That’s a likely story! Ah, youth! This is a little matter of some love affair, isn’t it? A question of women,’ he said jovially, crushing Philippe’s shoulder once more. ‘Always on heat, eh! What it is to be your age!’
He suddenly saw their purses shining in the moonlight.
‘Christ!’ he cried. ‘On heat and to good purpose! Fine ornaments, young gentlemen, fine ornaments!’
He tried the weight of Gautier’s purse.
‘Gold thread, and fine work. Italian or English maybe. Equerries’ salaries don’t run to this sort of splendour. The cut-throats would have had a good haul.’
He grew excited, gesticulated, banged the young men about with friendly blows of his fist, enormous, noisy, red-headed and obscene in the half-light. He was beginning to get seriously on the brothers’ nerves. But how do you tell a man who has just saved your life to mind his own business?
‘Love obviously pays, my fine young sirs,’ he said walking beside them. ‘Your mistresses must be very great ladies and very generous ones. Good God, you young Aunays, who would have thought it, eh!’
‘Monseigneur is in error,’ said Gautier rather coldly. ‘These purses came to us through the family.’
‘Of course they do, I knew it,’ said Artois, ‘from a family you’ve visited at midnight under the walls of the Tower of Nesle! Quite, quite, I shan’t say anything, honour comes first. I approve of you, young sirs. One must respect the reputation of the women one sleeps with! All right. Good-bye. And don’t venture out at night wearing all your jewellery again.’
He went off into another great gale of laughter. With a huge gesture of embracing them, he banged the two brothers one against the other, and then went off, leaving them there, anxious and disquieted, without even giving them time to repeat their thanks.
They were at the Porte de Bucy and went on their way to the right, while Artois went off through the fields in the direction of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
‘I hope to God he doesn’t go telling all the Court where he found us,’ said Gautier. ‘Do you think he’s capable of keeping his great mouth shut?’
‘Yes,’ said Philippe. ‘He’s not a bad sort of chap. And the proof is that without his great mouth, as you call it, and his great arms for that matter, we shouldn’t be here now. Don’t let’s be ungrateful, not yet anyway.’
‘That’s true. Besides, we might have asked him what the hell he was doing there anyway.’
‘I’d swear he was looking for a whore! And now he’s gone off to a brothel,’ said Philippe.
He was wrong. Robert of Artois had not gone off to a brothel. He had made a detour through the Pré-aux-Clercs and, returning to the river bank, had come back to the neighbourhood of the Tower of Nesle.
The moon was obscured once more. He whistled with the same low whistle that had preceded the fight.
The same six shadowy figures detached themselves from the wall, and a seventh stood up in a boat. The shadowy figures stood in respectful attitudes.
‘Good, you’ve done your work well,’ said Artois. ‘Everything went off as I wished. Here, Carl-Hans!’ he called to the chief blackguard, ‘share this between you.’
He threw him a purse.
‘You gave me a terrible blow on the shoulder, Monseigneur,’ said one of the cut-throats.
‘Bah! That’s all in the day’s work,’ Artois answered laughing. ‘Now, get off with you. If I should need you again, I’ll let you know.’
Then he got into the boat. It sank low in the water under his weight. The man who took the oars was the same ferryman who had brought the Aunays over.
‘So Monseigneur is satisfied with the night’s work?’ he asked.
He had lost his whining tone, seemed to have become younger by ten years, and gave way with a will.
‘Splendid, my dear Lormet! You played your little trick on them wonderfully well,’ said the giant. ‘Now I know what I wanted to know.’
He leant back in the stern of the boat, stretched out his monumental legs, and let his huge hand trail in the dark water.