THE queen, after glancing round, exchanged friendly greetings with the king, who gave her his hand.
“To what good chance,” asked Marie Antoinette, “do I owe this visit?”
“Really to chance; you have spoken correctly, Madame. I have just met De Charny, who said he was commissioned by you to go and tell all our warriors to keep themselves quiet. It affords me much pleasure that you have taken so wise a resolution, and I was unwilling to pass your apartment without thanking you.”
“Yes,” said the queen, “I have in fact reconsidered the matter, and have come to the conclusion that it is decidedly the best course to leave the troops at rest, and thus to afford no pretext for intestine war.”
“Good! that is right!” said the king. “I am delighted to find you of that opinion. I knew very well that I should bring you over to it at last.”
“Your Majesty sees that you have gained your object without much trouble; since, uninfluenced by you, I have formed my decision.”
“Well done! that is a proof that you are almost reasonable, and when I have communicated to you some of my reflections, you will be so altogether.”
“But if we are of the same opinion, Sire, to impart to me these reflections would be useless.”
“Oh, calm yourself, Madame! I have no wish to enter upon discussion; you know well that I like it no more than you do. This will be a conversation. Come, now; are you not glad to talk with me occasionally about the affairs of France, as a good wife does with her spouse about domestic matters?”
These last words were uttered with that perfect good-nature which Louis XVI. invariably manifested towards his familiar friends.
“Oh, Sire,” answered the queen, “I am always happy to do so; but is the time well chosen?”
“I believe that it is. You desire that there should be no hostile demonstration. Did you not this moment say so?”
“But you have not explained to me your reason.”
“Ah! that is the reason, is it? If you thought yourself the stronger, you would make war.”
“If I thought that I was the stronger, I should burn Paris.”
“Oh, I was certain that your motives for not wishing war were not the same as mine.”
“ Mine?” asked the king. “Yes,” answered Marie Antoinette, “yours.”
“Oh, that is soon done! I do not wish to enter into war with the people, because I find that the people are right.”
Marie Antoinette made a gesture of surprise.
“Right!” she exclaimed, “the people right in rebelling!”
“Right in storming the Bastille, in killing the governor, in murdering the provost of the merchants, in exterminating your soldiers?”
“Oh,” exclaimed the queen, “these are your reflections, and it was such reflections as these that you wished me to hear!”
“I have told you them as they occurred to me.”
“Good!” said the king, “we are about to fall back on the subject of nourishment. You cannot pardon me for eating. You would have me poetic and ethereal. What do you wish! In my family we eat. Not only did Henry IV. eat, but he was also a hard drinker; the great and poetic Louis XIV. eat enough to make one blush; King Louis XV., to make sure of good eating and drinking, baked his biscuits with his own royal hands, and had his coffee made by Madame Dubarry. As for me, what would you have? When I am hungry, I cannot resist my appetite; I am compelled to follow the example of my ancestors, Louis XV., Louis XIV., and Henry IV. If this is a constitutional necessity, pray be lenient with me; if it is a fault, forgive me.”
“But, Sire, you must confess—”
“That I ought not to eat when I am hungry; no,” said the king, tranquilly shaking his head.
“I am not talking of that: I speak of the people.”
“You must confess that the people have been in the wrong.”
“In rebelling? Not at all. Come, let us review all our ministers. Since we began to reign, how many have really concerned themselves about the welfare of the people? Two,—Turgot and Monsieur de Necker. You and your coterie have banished them. For one of these gentlemen the people have raised a tumult; for the other they will perhaps raise a revolution. Let us speak a little of the others! Ah! they are charming fellows, are they not? Monsieur de Maurepas, that creature of my aunts, a song-writer! It is not the ministers who should sing, it is the people. Monsieur de Calonne? That epigrammatic answer he made you was admirable, I know well,—a sentence that will live. Once when you asked him for something,—I forget what,—he gallantly replied: 'If it is possible, it is done: if it is impossible, it shall be done.' That epigram cost the people to the tune of a hundred millions. You should not be astonished, therefore, if they find it a little less witty than you do. In truth,—pray understand me, Madame,—if I retain all those who fleece the people, and dismiss all those who love them, it will not be the best means of tranquillizing them and of making them more attached to our government.”
“Good! Then insurrection is a right. Proclaim this principle from the house-tops. In truth I am glad that it is to me alone that you have communicated such ideas. If others heard you!”
“Oh, yes, yes!” replied the king; “you tell me nothing new. Yes, I know well that if Polignac, Dreux-Brézé, Clermont-Tonnerre, and Coigny heard me, they would shrug their shoulders behind me,—I know it well; but in reality they pity me after a very different fashion. That Polignac, to whom one fine morning you made over the county of Fénestrange, which cost you twelve hundred thousand livres; Sartine, to whom I have already given a pension of eighty-nine thousand livres, and who has just received from you two hundred thousand livres ostensibly as a stipendiary fund; the prince of Deux-Ponts, to whom you compelled me to grant nine hundred and fortyfive thousand livres to clear off his debts; Marie de Laval and Madame de Magneville, who each finger a pension of eighty thousand livres; Coigny, who is loaded with all sorts of pensions, and who once, when I thought of making some reduction in his appointments, hedged me in between two doors, and would have beaten me, I believe, if I had not consented to give him all that he wished,—all these people are your friends, are they not? Well, speak about them. But this much I will say, and I know you will not believe it, because it is the truth; if instead of being at court, these friends of yours had been in the Bastille, the people would have fortified the place instead of demolishing it.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the queen, with a gesture of anger she was unable to suppress.
“You may say what you please, but that is the case,” said Louis, tranquilly.
“Oh, your beloved people! Ah, well! they will not have occasion much longer to hate my friends, for they are going into exile.”
“They are going away!” exclaimed the king.
“So much the better,” exclaimed the king, “so much the better! God be praised!”
“How so much the better? How God be praised? Are you not sorry?”
“No, indeed; far from it. Do they need money to take them away? I will give it them. That money at least will not be ill employed, I will warrant. I wish you a pleasant journey, gentlemen; and you also, ladies,” said the king, all radiant.
“Yes,” said the queen, “I can understand that you like cowardice.”
“Well, let us understand each other; you are doing them justice at last.”
“They are not dismissed; they are deserting.”
“No matter, so that they take themselves off!”
“And to think that it is your family who have advised such despicable conduct!”
“My family advised your favorites to go away! I never gave my family credit for so much sense. And tell me which members of my family have done me this service, that I may thank them.”
“Your aunt Adelaide; your brother D'Artois.”
“My brother D'Artois! Do you believe he will follow the advice he gives? Do you think that he also will go away?”
“Why not?” exclaimed Marie Antoinette, trying to vex the king.
“Heaven grant it!” exclaimed Louis; “let Monsieur d'Artois take his departure; I should say to him what I have said to the others: A good journey to you, brother d'Artois! I wish you a very pleasant journey!”
“Ah! your brother!” exclaimed Marie Antoinette. “True; but what quality has he to make his presence desirable? A good little fellow enough, who lacks neither wit nor courage, I grant you; but who has no brains; who acts the French prince like a fop of the time of Louis XII.,—a blundering blockhead, who has compromised even you, the wife of Cæsar.”
“Cæsar!” muttered the queen, with cutting irony.
“Or Claudius, if you like it better,” answered the king; “for you know, Madame, that Claudius, as well as Nero, was a Cæsar.”
The queen looked down. This historical coolness confused her not a little.
“Claudius,” continued the king,—“since you prefer the name of Claudius to that of Cæsar,—Claudius was obliged one evening, as you are aware, to shut the gate of Versailles, in order to give you a lesson when you stayed out too late. It was Monsieur d'Artois who got you that lesson. I shall not miss, therefore, the Count d'Artois. As for my aunt, ah, well! we know what we know about her. She is another who deserves to be enrolled in the family of the Cæsars. But I say no more; she is my aunt. Let her go in peace; I shall not miss her a whit more than I shall the others. Then, there is Monsieur de Provence; do you think I should feel sorry at his leaving? A good journey to him!”
“Oh, he does not speak of going!”
“So much the worse! You see, my dear, Monsieur de Provence knows Latin too well for me. I am obliged to speak English to be even with him. It was Monsieur de Provence who put Beaumarchais on our shoulders, thrusting him in at Bicêtre, For-Lévêque and I know not where, on his own private authority, and a fine return has been made us for all this by this same Monsieur de Beaumarchais. Ah, Monsieur de Provence will remain, will he? So much the worse, so much the worse! There is one thing of which I should like you to be aware, Madame, and it is this,—in your whole household, I know but one honest man, Monsieur de Charny.”
The queen blushed and turned away.
“We were talking about the Bastille,” continued the king, after a short silence, “and you were lamenting that it was taken.”
“Be seated at least, Sire,” replied the queen, “since it would appear that you have still many things to tell me.”
“No, thank you, I like better to walk while speaking; by thus walking, I attend to my health, about which nobody else seems to take the slightest concern; for though my appetite is good, my digestion is bad. Do you know what they are saying at this moment? They are saying: 'The king has supped; the king sleeps.' Now you see how I sleep,—bolt upright, trying to aid my digestion while I talk on politics with my wife. Ah, Madame, I am expiating,—expiating!”
“Expiating what, if you please?”
“The sins of a century whose scapegoat I am; I am expiating the sins of Madame de Pompadour, Madame Dubarry, the Parc-aux-Cerfs; the sins of poor Latude, who for thirty years rotted in dungeons, and was immortalized by suffering,—one more victim who caused the Bastille to be detested. Poor fellow! Ah, Madame! what blunders I have made in giving effect to the stupid measures of others! Philosophers, political economists, scientists, men of letters, I have taken part in persecuting them all. Good Heavens! these men asked for nothing better than to love me. If they had loved me they would have at once constituted the glory and the happiness of my reign. Monsieur Rousseau, for example, that bugbear of Sartines and others—ah well! I saw him one day myself, that day you made him come to Trianon, you recollect. His clothes, it is true, were ill brushed, and it is also true that his beard was long; but he was nevertheless a good man. If I had donned my rough gray coat and thick stockings, and had said to Monsieur Rousseau, 'Let us go and gather mosses in the woods of Ville d'Avray—'“
“Ah, well! what then?” interrupted the queen, with supreme contempt.
“Well, then Monsieur Rousseau would not have written the 'Vicar of Savoy' nor the 'Social Contract.'“
“Yes, yes, I am well aware of that; that is the way you reason,” said Marie Antoinette. “You are a prudent man; you fear your people as the dog does his master.”
“Not so, but as the master fears his dog; it is something to be sure that one's dog will not bite him. Madame, when I walk with Médor, that Pyrenean hound of which the king of Spain made me a present, I feel quite proud of his friendship. Laugh if you will, but it is nevertheless true that Médor, if he was not my friend, would chew me up with his great white teeth. You see I say to him: 'Pretty Médor, good Médor,' and he licks me. I prefer his tongue to his tusks.”
“Be it so, then; flatter the revolutionists, caress them, throw titbits to them.”
“Oh, the very thing I am going to do I have no other project, believe me. Yes, my decision is taken. I will lay up a little money, and then I will deal with these gentlemen as if they were so many Cerberi. Ah, but stay! There is Monsieur de Mirabeau—”
“Oh, yes! tell me about that ferocious brute.”
“With fifty thousand livres a month he will be a Médor, whereas if we wait, he will not perhaps be satisfied with less than half a million.”
“Oh, the idea of flattering people like him!”
“Monsieur Bailly,” continued the king, “having become minister of arts—an office which I am going to institute for my amusement—will be another Médor. Pardon me, Madame, if I do not entertain the same views that you do, but I am of the same opinion as my ancestor Henry IV. He was a profound politician if there ever was one, and I remember well what he said.”
“'Flies are not caught with vinegar.'“
“Sancho said that also, or something very like it.”
“Well, Sancho would have made the people of Barataria very happy, had there been such a place as Barataria.”
“Sire, your ancestor Henry IV., whom you bring forward, caught wolves as well as flies. Witness Marshal de Biron, whose throat he cut. He could say then what he pleased. By reasoning like Henry and acting as you do, you take all prestige from royalty, which can only exist by prestige. You degrade the principle, 'What will majesty become?' Majesty, I am aware, is but a word, but in this word centre all the royal virtues: 'He who respects, loves; he who loves, obeys—'“
“Ah! let us speak of majesty,” interrupted the king, with a smile; “yes, let us speak of it. You, for example, are as majestic as one can be; and I know of none in Europe, not even your mother, Marie Thérèse, who has promoted as you have the science of majesty.”
“I understand you; you mean that my majesty does not prevent my being abhorred by the French people.”
“I do not say 'abhorred,' my dear Antoinette,” said the king, gently; “but perhaps you are not so much loved as you deserve to be.”
“Sir,” said the queen, deeply wounded, “you only echo all that is said. I have, nevertheless, injured nobody; on the contrary, I have often benefited my sub- jets. Why should they hate me as you say? Why should they not love me, were it not that there are people who make it their business to repeat daily, 'The queen is not loved!' Are you aware, sir, that one voice alone is needed to say that, in order that a hundred voices should repeat it; a hundred voices evoke ten thousand. Then, in unison with these ten thousand voices everybody repeats: 'The queen is not loved!' And the queen is not loved simply because one person said: 'The queen is not loved!'“
“Good heavens!” muttered the king.
“Thank goodness,” interrupted the queen, “I have but little faith in popularity; but I also believe that my unpopularity is exaggerated. Praises are not showered down upon me, it is true; but I was once the popular idol, and because they loved me too much, they now run to the opposite extreme and hate me.”
“Stay, Madame,” said the king; “you know not the whole truth, and are still laboring under a delusion; were we not talking of the Bastille?”
“Well, there was a large room in the Bastille full of all sorts of books written against you. They will surely have burned all that.”
“With what did these books accuse me?”
“Ah, you very well know, Madame, that I take not upon me to be your accuser, and have no wish to be your judge. When these pamphlets appeared, I had the whole edition seized and buried in the Bastille. But sometimes these books fall into my own hands. For instance, I have one here now,” said the king, striking his coat pocket, “and it is simply abominable.”
“Show it me,” cried the queen.
“I cannot,” said the king; “it contains engravings.”
“And have you come to that? Have you reached that point of blindness and imbecility that you do not even attempt to trace all these base slanders to their source?”
“That is just what I have done. I have traced them to their source; there is not one of my lieutenants of police who has not grown gray in that service.”
“Then you know the author of these indignities?”
“I know one of the authors, at least,—Monsieur Furth, the author of that one; there is his receipt for 22,500 livres. You see when the thing is worth the trouble, I do not regard the expense.”
“Ah, they are often poor hungry wretches who vegetate in England or Holland. We are bitten, stung, irritated; we ferret them out, expecting to find a serpent, a crocodile, to crush, to kill. Nothing of the sort; but we find an insect, so mean, so base, so despicable, that we dare not dirty our hands by touching it, even to punish it.”
“That is all very fine! But if you care not to touch insects, why not accuse boldly the sun which calls them into existence. In truth, we may safely affirm that their sun is Philip of Orléans.”
“Ha!” exclaimed the king, clapping his hands, “are you there? Monsieur d'Orléans! nay, nay, seek not to embroil me with him.”
“Embroil you with your enemy, Sire! Oh, the idea is original!”
The king shrugged his shoulders.
“There now,” said he, “there is your system of interpreting matters. Monsieur d'Orléans! You attack Monsieur d'Orléans, who has just placed himself under my orders to fight the rebels,—who leaves Paris and hastens to Versailles! Monsieur d'Orléans my enemy! Truly, Madame, the hatred you bear to the house of Orléans surpasses all conception.”
“Oh, he has come, has he? and do you know the reason? He fears that his absence might be remarked in the general demonstration of loyalty. He has come because he is a coward.”
“Indeed! We are going to begin again. Whoever first imputed such motives to Orléans is a coward. You had it inserted in your gazette that he showed the white feather at Ushant, because you wished to dishonor him. Ah, well! it was a calumny, Madame. Philip was not afraid; Philip did not flee. Had he fled, he would not belong to the family. The Orléans are brave. The fact is indisputable. The chief of the family, who seemed rather to have descended from Henry III. than from Henry IV., was brave, in spite of D'Effiat and Chevalier de Lorraine. He braved death at the battle of Cassel. The regent had indeed some trifling things to say against him on the score of manners; but he exposed his life at Steinkerque, at Nerwinde, and at Almanza like the meanest soldier in his army. Tell only half the truth, Madame, if you will; but tell not the evil that has no existence.”
“Your Majesty is in the vein of whitewashing all the revolutionists. You will see, you will see what that fellow is worth. Oh, if I regret the destruction of the Bastille, it is on his account; yes, I repent that criminals were thrown into it, while he was at large.”
“Ah, well!” said the king, “if Monsieur d'Orléans had been in the Bastille, we should be in a fine predicament to-day.”
“In that case what would have happened, I should like to know?”
“You are aware, Madame, that his bust was prome- naded round, crowned with flowers, together with that of Monsieur de Necker.”
“Ah, well! once out of the Bastille, Monsieur d'Orléans would have been king of France.”
“And perhaps you would have thought that just,” said Marie Antoinette, in a tone of bitter irony.
“I' faith, yes; shrug your shoulders as much as you please. To judge others, I look at matters from their point of view. From the height of the throne we cannot well see the people; I descend to their level, and I ask myself if as a burgess or a clod-hopper I could suffer a noble to count me among his cows and poultry as a chattel! if, as a farmer, I could endure that my lord's ten thousand pigeons should daily eat ten grains each of wheat, oats, or buckwheat, that is to say, about two bushels, whilst his hares and rabbits browsed on my clover, whilst his wild boars rooted up my potatoes, whilst his tax-gatherers tithed my produce, whilst my lord himself kissed my wife and daughters, whilst the king pressed my sons into his army, and whilst the priest, in his moments of passion, condemned my soul to endless misery.”
“Why, sir,” interrupted the queen, whose eyes flashed thunderbolts, “you should take a pickaxe and go and aid in the demolition of the Bastille.”
“You laugh,” replied the king; “but, by my troth, I should go, were it not ridiculous for a king to handle a pickaxe, when he could have the same work done by a single dash of the pen. Yes, I should take the pickaxe, and they would applaud me, as I applauded those who accomplished the business. Nay, Madame, they did me a famous service in demolishing the Bastille, and to you they did a still greater; yes, to you, who can no longer throw, according to the whims of your friends, honest people into dungeons.”
“Honest people in the Bastille! I—I sent honest people there! Oh, perhaps Monsieur de Rohan is an honest man!”
“Oh, speak no more of him; I speak not of him myself. Our sending him there was not a success, seeing that the parliament set him at liberty. Besides, it was no place for a prince of the Church, since in our time forgers were sent to the Bastille; and, indeed, I ask what forgers and robbers were doing there. Have I not prisons in Paris which cost me dear enough for the entertainment of these gentry? But let the forgers and robbers pass; the evil is that honest men were sent there.”
“Undoubtedly; I have seen this very day an honest man who was incarcerated there, and who only got out a very short time since.”
“You have this evening seen a man who got out of the
“I have just parted with him.”
“Faith, one of your acquaintance.”
“Gilbert! Gilbert!” exclaimed the queen. “What! he whom Andrée named on returning to her senses?”
“Precisely so; it must have been he; I could swear to it.”
“Was that man in the Bastille?”
“Faith, Madame, one would suppose that you were ignorant of the fact.”
“I am entirely ignorant of it.”
And, perceiving that the king looked astonished:—
“Unless,” continued the queen, “for some reason I may have forgotten it.”
“Ah! there,” exclaimed the king, “for these acts of injustice there is always a reason which one forgets. But though you may have forgotten both the reason and the doctor, Madame de Charny has forgotten neither, I will answer for it.”
“Sire! Sire!” exclaimed Marie Antoinette.
“There must have been something between them,” the king continued.
“Sire, please to refrain!” said the queen, looking anxiously towards the boudoir, where Andrée was concealed, and could hear all that was said.
“Oh, yes!” said the king, laughing; “you fear that De Charny may chance to learn. Poor De Charny!”
“Sire, I entreat you; Madame de Charny is one of the purest of women, and I should rather believe, I assure you, that this Doctor Gilbert—”
“Pshaw!” interrupted the king, “do you accuse that honest fellow? I know what I know; and the worst of it is that, knowing so much, I do not yet know all.”
“Really, I am horrified that you should persist in entertaining such suspicions,” said the queen, without removing her eyes from the cabinet.
“Oh,” continued Louis, “I am in no hurry; I shall lose nothing by waiting a little. The beginning promises me an interesting conclusion, and I can learn the conclusion from Gilbert himself, he being now my doctor.”
“Your doctor! that fellow your doctor! You can trust the life of the king to a stranger!”
“Oh,” replied the king, coolly, “I have confidence in my first impressions, and I needed only a glance to read that man's inmost soul.”
The queen uttered a groan, from mingled anger and disdain.
“You can sneer at me as you will,” said the king, “but you can never shake my confidence in the learning and science of Doctor Gilbert.”
“I should like to see you in my place. I should like to know if Monsieur Mesmer was not able to make some impression on you and Madame de Lamballe.”
“Monsieur Mesmer?” asked the queen, blushing.
“Yes; four years ago you went disguised to one of his meetings. Oh, my police are drilled thoroughly. You see I know all.”
And the king, while uttering these words, smiled kindly on Marie Antoinette.
“You know all, Sire,” answered the queen; “and you are a good dissembler, for you have never once spoken to me on the subject.”
“Why should I have done so? I am sure the novelists and newspaper reporters abused you sufficiently on that score. But to return to Gilbert and at the same time to Mesmer. Monsieur Mesmer placed you round a vat, touched you with a steel rod, surrounded himself with a thousand phantasmagories, like the quack that he was. Gilbert uses no such illusions; he extends his hand over a woman; she sleeps, and sleeping, talks.”
“Talks!” muttered the queen, terrified.
“Yes,” replied the king, not unwilling to prolong somewhat his wife's little nervousness; “yes, put to sleep by Gilbert, she talks, and, believe me, says very strange things.”
“Madame de Charny may have said very strange things!” she muttered.
“Most strange,” said the king. “It was very fortunate for her—”
“Hush! hush!” interrupted Marie Antoinette.
“Why hush? I say that it was very fortunate for her that I alone heard what she said in her sleep.”
“Oh, for pity's sake, Sire, say not a word more!”
“Indeed, I had much rather talk no more. I feel ready to drop with weariness; and as I eat when I am hungry, so do I go to bed when I am sleepy. So good-night, Madame, and may our conversation leave upon you a salutary impression.”
“The people were right in undoing what we and our friends had done, witness my poor Doctor Gilbert. Adieu, Madame; trust me that after signalling the danger, I shall have the courage to prevent it. Pleasant dreams, Antoinette.”
And the king moved towards the door.
“À propos,” said he, turning round, “warn Madame de Charny that she has to make her peace with the doctor if it is not now too late. Adieu.”
He slowly retired, shutting the doors himself with all the satisfaction of the mechanic when his locks work well under the pressure of his fingers.
The king had not taken half a dozen steps in the corridor, when the countess issued from the boudoir, ran to the doors and bolted them, and to the windows and drew the curtains. She seemed to be excited with all the energy of rage and madness. Then, having assured her- self that she could neither be seen nor heard, she returned to the queen with a heart-rending cry, fell on her knees, and exclaimed,—“Save me, Madame; for Heaven's sake, save me!” Then, after a pause followed by a long sigh, she added:
END OF VOL. I.
