License was so universal that no one
was surprised to see a great lord kill his enemy in open day. When a
military expedition, having a private object, was led in the name of
the King or of the League, one or other of these parties applauded it.
It was thus that Blagny, a soldier, came near becoming a sovereign
prince at the gates of France. Sometime before Henri III.'s death, a
court lady murdered a nobleman who made offensive remarks about her.
One of the king's minions remarked to him:--
"Hey! vive Dieu! sire, she daggered him finely!"
The Comte d'Herouville, one of the most rabid royalists in Normandy,
kept the part of that province which adjoins Brittany under subjection
to Henri IV. by the rigor of his executions. The head of one of the
richest families in France, he had considerably increased the revenues
of his great estates by marrying seven months before the night on
which this history begins, Jeanne de Saint-Savin, a young lady who, by
a not uncommon chance in days when people were killed off like flies,
had suddenly become the representative of both branches of the
Saint-Savin family.
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