Like some fantastic company of
strolling players amid the hushed excitement of a little town, the
royal family, with all its own small rivalries, would be housed for
the night under the same roof with some of its greater enemies--Henri
de Guise, Conde, "The Admiral," all alike taken by surprise--but
courteously, and therefore ineffectively. And Gaston, come thus by
chance so close to them, had the sense not so much of nearness to the
springs of great events, as of the likeness of the whole matter to a
stage-play with its ingeniously contrived encounters, or the
assortments of a game of chance.
And in a while the dominant course of the river itself, the animation
of its steady, downward flow, even amid the sand-shoals and
whispering islets of the dry season, bore his thoughts beyond it, in
a sudden irresistible appetite for the sea; and he determined,
varying slightly from the prescribed route, to reach his destination
by way [80] of the coast. From Nantes he descended imperceptibly
along tall hedge-rows of acacia, till on a sudden, with a novel
freshness in the air, through a low archway of laden fruit-trees it
was visible--sand, sea, and sky, in three quiet spaces, line upon
line.
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