By the time he reached the end of Rue Saint-Martin, Ascanio looked upon himself as a messenger of peace, chosen by the Lord to maintain harmonious relations between two powers.
And yet, notwithstanding that conviction, Ascanio was not sorry—surely lovers are strange creatures—to lengthen his journey by ten minutes, and instead of crossing the Seine by boat, he walked the whole length of the quays, and crossed by the Pont aux Moulins. It may be that he chose that road because it was the same he had taken the evening before when following Colombe.
Whatever his motive for making the detour, he finally found himself in front of the Hôtel de Nesle in about twenty minutes.
But when he saw the little ogive door that he must pass through, when he saw the turrets of the lovely little Gothic palace boldly raising their heads above the wall, when he thought that behind those jalousies, half closed because of the heat, was his beautiful Colombe, the whole card-house of happy dreams which he had built on the road vanished like the structures one sees in the clouds, and which the wind overturns with one blow of its wing; he found himself face to face with reality, and reality did not seem to him the most reassuring thing in the world.
However, after a few moments of hesitation—hesitation which is the harder to understand, in that he was absolutely alone upon the quay in the intense heat—he realized that he must make up his mind to do something. As there was nothing for him to do but find his way into the hotel, he walked to the door and raised the knocker. But God only knows when he would have let it fall, had not the door chanced to open at that moment, bringing him face to face with a sort of Master Jacques, a man about thirty years of age, half servant, half peasant. It was Messire Robert d'Estourville's gardener.
Ascanio and the gardener mutually recoiled a step.
"What do you want?" said the gardener; "whom do you seek?"
Ascanio, thus compelled to go forward with his mission, summoned all his courage, and replied bravely:—
"I desire to inspect the hotel."
"To inspect the hotel!" cried the gardener in amazement; "in whose name?"