“I will, of course, honor all my father’s promises,” Duc Blaise said, “but preparations for the funeral will take up a great deal of everyone’s time in the next few days. We cannot possibly hold the memorial mass until Thursday, given that we shall have to bring the Archbishop all the way back from Bordelais so that he may officiate. We shall, of course, require a suitable interval thereafter for mourning, so you must be a little more patient. Your new quarters should be ready in fifteen days—twenty at the most—and you need not fear that you will be neglected in the meantime. I shall visit you again, as often as my father did, to keep track of all our experiments. You do have an empty cask to spare, I hope, and some wine with which to fill it up.”
“My supplies have run very low,” Benedict
