The Cardinal's Musketeer by Mary Imlay Taylor

PÉRON and his twelve men, all armed and prepared for possible resistance, left the Palais Cardinal in less than a quarter of an hour after Richelieu had given his final instructions. Péron was in command of the party and walked a little in advance, anxious to be left to his own meditations, for the last three hours had been full of emotion; in that short space his life had been entirely changed. He was no longer a nameless waif, the adopted son of a clockmaker; he bore a name long honored in France, and his family had sprung from the noblest origin. On his mother's side he was related to the great Huguenot house of Rosny, and on his father's to the Catholic Duke of Montbazon. From being a man of humble origin, whose only chance of preferment lay in the favor of his patron, he was now a claimant to title and estates lawfully his own. The incidents of his childhood, so perplexing to him, were at last all understood. He remembered the room at the Château de Nancay, where Jacques des Horloges had made him pray; he remembered Père Antoine's puzzling answers to his childish questions; it was all plain now, the mystery of the attic on the Rue de la Ferronnerie, the tenderness and respect with which he had been treated by the clockmaker and his wife, and a hundred other trifling indications of his rank which had been concealed from him. He was not slow to divine the motive of this concealment; nothing could have been gained by the revelation of such a secret, and it was a dangerous one too, while his father's enemy was in such a powerful position that he could easily have removed the child.

Péron's feelings toward M. de Nancay were colored with passionate resentment and a thirst for revenge. Had he been less generous, he would have slain him in the struggle before the cardinal's clock, but it was not in his nature to strike a blow when an enemy was at his mercy. A man less scrupulous of honor would not have hesitated to avenge his father's death. Nor would Péron have hesitated to kill the marquis in an open fight, where both were equally armed. Had M. de Nancay been free at that moment and the edict against duelling not in force, Péron would have challenged him to single combat on the Place Royale and fought him to the death. But Richelieu was cardinal, and the duel was a capital offence. Yet, as Péron walked through the streets, he felt that when the hour came and they met on equal terms, he would surely kill M. de Nancay; and with this passionate feeling in his heart, he approached the house of his enemy.