Page:A Nameless Nobleman.djvu/68

56 angry, or tearful or silent, as the mood seized her,—to know the liberty of Jeanne Poisson once more. And, after all, she was a Catholic, and must at least have been taught the superstitions of her faith: she must by times have thought of death and judgment and hell; she was not &quot; advanced &quot; enough to doubt the existence of both God and the Devil as real persons, and suppose the thought of them took possession of her imagination while the king waited to see her in the bayadère dress. Well, she reigned by the power of contrasts, and achieved her last coup of this sort when she was carried from her lodgings in the royal palace, from her pink and blue, her jewels, her costumes, her magnificence, to the sordid hearse, quite good enough to-day for her whose word a few months earlier could shake the world; and Louis XV., standing at his window to watch the wretched funeral and the dismal, rainy November day, took snuff, and laughed, and said,—

"The marquise has rather poor weather for her journey."

Is the digression a trifle long? Pardon it; for it is to make you in love with contrast, and to lead you from Versailles, with its Montespans and Pompadours, and the rose-garden of Provence, with Valerie, summoned by a king to grace his court, to a desolate winter sea-coast, its sparse vegetation cut down by unremitting frosts, its few and scattered dwellings cowering before the winds that contemptuously hurl handfuls of sand in their blinking eyes, or tear the thatch from their roofs like hair from a dishonored