On the south steps of the palace they moved to seize him, but again the mot de passe charmed the watchers. One among them stepped forward and began: “Let him strike—” but a flurry among the guards told of a surprise. A man of keen look and soldierly stride suddenly pressed through them and seized the letter which David held in his hand. “Come with me,” he said, and led him inside the great hall. Then he tore open the letter and read it. He beckoned to a man uniformed as an officer of musketeers, who was passing. “Captain Tetreau, you will have the guards at the south entrance and the south gate arrested and confined. Place men known to be loyal in their places.” To David he said: “Come with me.”

He conducted him through a corridor and an ante-room into a spacious chamber, where a melancholy man, sombrely dressed, sat brooding in a great, leather-covered chair. To that man he said:

“Sire, I have told you that the palace is as full of traitors and spies as a sewer is of rats. You have thought, sire, that it was my fancy. This man penetrated to your very door by their connivance. He bore a letter which I have intercepted. I have brought him here that your majesty may no longer think my zeal excessive.”

“I will question him,” said the king, stirring in his chair. He looked at David with heavy eyes dulled by an opaque film. The poet bent his knee.

“From where do you come?” asked the king.

“From the village of Vernoy, in the province of Eure-et-Loir, sire.”

“What do you follow in Paris?”

“I—I would be a poet, sire.”

“What did you in Vernoy?”

“I minded my father’s flock of sheep.”

The king stirred again, and the film lifted from his eyes.

“Ah! in the fields!”

“Yes, sire.”

“You lived in the fields; you went out in the cool of the morning and lay among the hedges in the grass. The flock distributed itself upon the hill-side; you drank of the living stream; you ate your sweet, brown bread in the shade, and you listened, doubtless, to blackbirds piping in the grove. Is not that so, the shepherd?”

“It is, sire,” answered David, with a sigh; “and to the bees at the flowers, and, maybe, to the grape gatherers singing on the hill.”

“Yes, yes,” said the king, impatiently; “maybe to them; but surely to the blackbirds. They whistled often in the grove, did they not?”

“Nowhere, sire, so sweetly as in Eure-et-Loir. I have endeavoured to express their song in some verses that I have written.”

“Can you repeat those verses?” asked the king, eagerly. “A long time ago I listened to the blackbirds. It would be something better than a kingdom if one could rightly construe their song. And at night you drove the sheep to the fold and then sat, in peace and tranquillity, to your pleasant bread. Can you repeat those verses, shepherd?”