A great roar of applause followed. The four poor devils grew pale and glanced apprehensively at one another. The multitude surged towards them, and they already saw the frail wooden balustrade that formed the only barrier between them and the crowd bulge and give way under the pressure from without.

The moment was critical.

“At them! At them!” came from all sides.

At that instant the curtain of the dressing-room we have described was raised to give passage to a personage, the mere sight of whom suddenly arrested the crowd, and, as if by magic, transformed its anger into curiosity.

“Silence! Silence!”

But slightly reassured and trembling in every limb, the person in question advanced to the edge of the marble table with a profusion of bows which, the nearer he approached, assumed more and more the character of genuflections.

By this time quiet had been gradually restored, and there only remained that faint hum which always rises out of the silence of a great crowd.

“Messieurs the bourgeois,” he began, “and Mesdemoiselles the bourgeoises, we shall have the honour of declaiming and performing before his Eminence Monsieur the Cardinal a very fine Morality entitled ’The Good Judgment of Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’ I play Jupiter. His Eminence accompanies at this moment the most honourable Embassy of the Duke of Austria, just now engaged in listening to the harangue of Monsieur the Rector of the University at the Porte Baudets. As soon as the Most Reverend the Cardinal arrives we will commence.”

Certainly nothing less than the direct intervention of Jupiter could have saved the four unhappy sergeants of the provost of the Palais from destruction. Were we so fortunate as to have invented this most veracious history and were therefore liable to be called to task for it by Our Lady of Criticism, not against us could the classical rule be cited, Nec deus intersit.

For the rest, the costume of Seigneur Jupiter was very fine, and had contributed not a little towards soothing the crowd by occupying its whole attention. Jupiter was arrayed in a “brigandine” or shirt of mail of black velvet thickly studded with gilt nails, on his head was a helmet embellished with silver-gilt buttons, and but for the rouge and the great beard which covered respectively the upper and lower half of his face, but for the roll of gilded pasteboard in his hand studded with iron spikes and bristling with jagged strips of tinsel, which experienced eyes at once recognised as the dread thunder-bolt, and were it not for his flesh-coloured feet, sandalled and beribboned á la Grecque, you would have been very apt to mistake him for one of M. de Berry’s company of Breton archers.