The Man in Black. Weyman Stanley John

glance, "how you seek to deceive me! You can fall back now. I have done with you for the present."

      I say "the boy never doubted him." This was not wonderful in an age of spells and diablerie, when the wisest allowed the reality of magic, and the learned and curious could cite a hundred instances of its power. That La Brosse warned Henry the Great he would die in his coach, and that Thomassin read in the stars the very day, hour, and minute of the catastrophe, no man of that time questioned. That Michel Nôtredame promised a crown to each of Catherine de Medici's three sons, and that Sully's preceptor foretold in detail that Minister's career, were held to be facts as certain as that La Rivière cast the horoscope of the thirteenth Louis while the future monarch lay in his cradle. The men of the day believed that the Concini swayed her mistress by magic; that Wallenstein, the greatest soldier of his time, did nothing without his familiar; that Richelieu, the greatest statesman, had Joseph always at his elbow. In such an age it was not wonderful that a child should accept without question the claims of this man: who was accustomed to inspire fear in the many, and in the few that vague and subtle repulsion which we are wont to associate with the presence of evil.