Too Short a Spoon

Biron had jockeyed him cleverly. Well, the worse for Armand de Gontaut
de Biron if after this adventure the luck went against him! But in the
mean time? In the mean time his fate was sealed if harm befell Biron.
And what the King's real mind in Biron's case was, and what the Queen-
Mother's, he could not say; just as it was impossible to predict how far,
when they had the Grand Master at their mercy, they would resist the
temptation to add him to the victims. If Biron placed himself at once in
Marshal Tavannes' hands, all might be well. But if he ventured within
the long arm of the Guises, or went directly to the Louvre, the fact that
with the Grand Master's fate Count Hannibal's was bound up, would not
weigh a straw. In such crises the great sacrificed the less great, the
less great the small, without a scruple. And the Guises did not love
Count Hannibal; he was not loved by many. Even the strength of his
brother the Marshal stood rather in the favour of the King's heir, for
whom he had won the battle of Jarnac, than intrinsically; and, durable in
ordinary times, might snap in the clash of forces and interests which the
desperate madness of this day had let loose on Paris.

It was not the peril in which he stood, however--though, with the cold
clear eye of the man who had often faced peril, he appreciated it to a
nicety--that Count Hannibal found least bearable, but his enforced
inactivity. He had thought to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm,
and out of the danger of others to compact his own success. Instead he
lay here, not only powerless to guide his destiny, which hung on the
discretion of another, but unable to stretch forth a finger to further
his plans.