The years came and the years went, as had been their way since the fall of Troy and earlier. To the philosophic eye, surveying existence with the supreme wisdom of the initiate into mysteries, things changed but little through eons on the surface of the world, where men loved and hated, bred and slew, triumphed and failed, lorded and cringed as had been the way since the beginning, when the cave man that handled the heavier knuckle-bone ruled the roost. But to the unphilosophic eye of the majority of mankind things seemed to change greatly in a very little while; and it seemed, therefore, to the superficial, that many things had happened in France and in Paris during the seventeen years that had elapsed since the fight in the moat of Caylus.

To begin with, the great cardinal, the Red Man, the master of France, had dipped from his dusk to his setting, and was inurned, with much pomp and solemnity, as a great prince of the church should be, and the planet wheeled on its indifferent way, though Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, was no more. His Gracious Majesty Louis the Thirteenth, self-named Louis the Just, found himself, for the first time in his futile career, his own master, and did not know quite what to make of the privilege. He mourned the deceased statesman with one eye, as it were, while he ogled his belated goddess of freedom with the other. It might well be that she had paid too tardy a visit, but at least he would essay to trifle with her charms.

Many things had happened to the kingdom over which, for the first time, his Majesty the King held undivided authority since the night of Caylus fight. For one thing, by the cardinal’s order, all the fortified castles in France had been dismantled, and many of them reduced to ruins, owl-haunted, lizard-haunted, ivy-curtained. This decree did not especially affect Caylus, which had long ceased to be a possible menace to the state, and, after the death of the grim old marquis, was rapidly falling into decay on its own account without aid from the ministers of Richelieu’s will. For another thing, two very well-esteemed gentlemen of his Majesty’s Musketeers, having been provoked by two other very well-esteemed gentlemen of his Eminence’s Musketeers, had responded to the challenge with the habitual alacrity of that distinguished body, and had vindicated its superiority in swordcraft by despatching their antagonists. After this victory the gentlemen of the Musketeers, remembering the rigor of the cardinal’s antipathy to duelling, made a vain effort to put some distance between them and the king’s justice. They were arrested in their flight, brought back to Paris, and perished miserably on the scaffold by the pointless sword of the executioner. Each of these events proved in its degree that Monsieur de Richelieu had very little respect for tradition, and that if he disliked an institution, no matter how time-hallowed and admired by gentlemen, he did away with it in the most uncompromising and arbitrary manner. There were many other doings during the days of the cardinal’s glory that are of no account in this chronicle, though they were vastly of importance to the people of France. But many things had happened that are of moment to this chronicle, and these, therefore, shall be set down as briefly as may be.

News did not travel, when the seventeenth century was still young, from one end of the kingdom to the other with any desperate rapidity. Even when the posts rode at a hand gallop, the long leagues took their long time to cover, and, after all, of most of the news that came to the capital from abroad and afar it was generally safe to disbelieve a full half, to discredit the third quarter, and to be justifiably sceptical as to the remaining portion. But, credible or incredible, all news is blown to Paris, as all roads lead to Rome, and in the fulness of time it got to be known in Paris that the Duke Louis de Nevers, the young, the beautiful, the brilliant, had come to his death in an extraordinary and horrible manner hard by the Spanish frontier, having been, as it seemed, deliberately butchered by a party of assassins employed, so it was said, by his father-in-law, the old Count of Caylus.

It was not difficult for the well-informed in Paris to credit the ignoble rumor. The old feud between the house of Caylus, on the one hand, and the house of Nevers on the other, was familiar to those who made it their business to be familiar with the movements of high persons in high places; and when on the top of this inherited feud you had the secret marriage between the son of the house of Nevers and the daughter of the house of Caylus, there was every reason, at least, to believe in a bloody end to the business. There was, however, no jot of definite proof against the marquis. Nevers’s dead body was found, indeed, in the neighborhood of the castle, with three sword wounds on it, one inflicted from the back and two from the front, but who inflicted or caused to be inflicted those wounds it was impossible to assert with knowledge, though it was easy enough to hazard a conjecture.

Anyway, Louis de Nevers was dead. It was amazing news enough for Paris, but there was more amazing news to follow. To begin with, Louis de Nevers’s young wife was now formally recognized even by the old marquis as Louis de Nevers’s young widow. It was true that there was no documentary evidence of the marriage, but Prince Louis de Gonzague, who happened to be a guest of the Marquis de Caylus at the time of the murder, and who seemed little less than inconsolable for the death of his friend, came forward in the handsomest, gallantest fashion to give his evidence. He told how he and his faithful henchman Peyrolles had been the witnesses of the secret wedding. He succeeded in placating the wrath of the Marquis of Caylus. He succeeded in obtaining the sanction of the king, and, which was more important, the sanction of the cardinal, to the recognition of the marriage of Mademoiselle de Caylus with the late Duke Louis de Nevers. All this was thrilling news enough, but news more thrilling was to follow. The newly recognized Duchess of Nevers soon, to the astonishment and, at first, the blank incredulity of all hearers, took to herself a third name, and became Madame la Princesse de Gonzague. There was soon no doubt about it. She had consented to marry, and had married, Prince Louis de Gonzague, who, as all the world knew, had been the closest friend of the dead Louis of Nevers with one exception, and that was Louis of Bourbon, that was King of France. People who talked of such things said, and in this they were generally inspired in some way, directly or indirectly, by friends of Prince Louis de Gonzague, that the Duke de Nevers had been murdered by an exiled captain of Light-Horse, who was little else than a professional bully, and who for some purpose or purposes of his own had, at the same time, succeeded in stealing the duke’s infant daughter. What the reasons might be for this mysterious act of kidnapping they either were not able or did not choose always to explain. It was an undoubted fact that the late duke’s daughter had disappeared, for the grief of the whilom Duchess de Nevers and present Princess de Gonzague was excessive for the loss of her child, and the efforts she made and the money she spent in the hope of finding some trace of her daughter were as useless as they were unavailing. It was also certain that on or about the time of the late duke’s death a certain captain of Light-Horse, whose name some believed to be Henri de Lagardere, had fled in hot haste from Paris to save his audacious head from the outraged justice of the king for fighting a duel with a certain truculent Baron de Brissac and incontinently killing his man.

What connection there might be between these two events those that busied themselves in the matter left to the imagination and intelligence of their hearers, but after awhile few continued to busy themselves in the matter at all. Nevers was dead and forgotten. The fact that Nevers’s daughter had been stolen was soon forgotten likewise by all save the man and the woman whom it most immediately concerned. Few troubled themselves to remember that the Princess de Gonzague had been for a brief season the Duchess de Nevers, and if Louis de Gonzague, whenever the tragic episode was spoken of, expressed the deepest regret for his lost heart’s brother and the fiercest desire for vengeance upon his murderer or murderers, the occasions on which the tragic episode was referred to grew less year by year. Louis de Gonzague flourished; Louis de Gonzague lived in Paris in great state; Louis de Gonzague was the intimate, almost the bosom friend, of the king; for Louis of Bourbon, having lost one of the two Louis whom he loved, seemed to have a double portion of affection to bestow upon the survivor. If Louis de Gonzague did not himself forget any of the events connected with a certain night in the moat of Caylus; if he kept emissaries employed in researches in Spain, emissaries whose numbers dwindled dismally and mysteriously enough in the course of those researches, he spoke of his recollections to no one, save perhaps occasionally to that distinguished individual, Monsieur Peyrolles, who shared his master’s confidences as he shared his master’s rise in fortunes. For Monsieur Peyrolles knew as well as his master all about that night at Caylus seventeen years before, and could, if he chose—but he never did choose—have told exactly how the Duke de Nevers came to his death, and how the child of Nevers disappeared, and how it was that the battered survivors of a little army of bravos had been overawed by the muskets of a company of Free Companions. He could have told how seven gentlemen that were named Staupitz, Faenza, Saldagno, Pepe, Pinto, Joel, and Æsop had been sent to dwell and travel in Spain at the free charges of Prince Louis de Gonzague, with the sole purpose of finding a man and a child who so far had not been found, though it was now seventeen years since the hounds had been sent a-hunting.

But though a year may seem long in running, it runs to its end, and seventeen years, as any school-boy will prove to you, take only seventeen times the length of one year to wheel into chaos. So these seventeen years had been and had ceased to be, and it was again summer-time, when many people travelled from many parts of the world for the pleasure of visiting Paris, and some of those travellers happened to come from Spain.