Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/37

Rh the King with a smile. "But, once for all, is not the mirror to your taste?"

"It is not the mirror I dislike, Sire?"

"Well, what is it then? Surely not the charming face reflected therein? Deuce and all, you are hard to please. Marquis!"

"On the contrary no one pays more sincere homage to the Countess's beauty."

"But," asked Madame du Barry, losing patience, " if it is not the mirror, nor yet the face it reflects, what is it, pray? "

"It is the place it occupies."

"But surely it could not be better than on that dressing-table, which is likewise a present from His Majesty?"

"Yes, it would be better elsewhere."

"But where, pray? You really annoy me with your difficulties. I have never known you like this before."

"It would be better in Madame la Dauphine's chamber."

"What do you mean, sir?"

"I mean that the crown with the fleurde-lis of France cannot be worn but by her who has been, or is, or will be Queen of France."

Madame du Barry's eyes flashed fire. The King's face loomed black and terrible as he rose from his seat and said:

"You are right, Marquis de Chauvelin; your brain is sick. Go and seek repose at Grosbois, since you find yourself so ill at ease in our society. Go, Marquis, go."

Monsieur de Chauvelin bowed to the ground for sole answer, stepped backwards out of the room, as he might have done on leaving the state apartments of the Palace, and strictly observing the rules of etiquette which forbid a courtier to salute any other person in the King's presence, disappeared without so much as casting a glance at the Countess, who bit her lips in fury.

The King strove to calm her anger, saying soothingly:

"Poor Chauvelin! the Marquis must have had a bad dream like me. Really all these clever, sceptical fellows knock under the instant the dark angel touches them with the tip of his wings. Chauvelin is ten years younger than I, but I think I am still more than a match for him."

"Oh! yes. Sire, you are a match for all the world. You are cleverer than your Ministers, and younger than your children."

The King beamed at this flattering compliment, and did his best to prove how well he deserved it,— in spite of Lamartinière's warnings. 



HE next day after the King had given Monsieur de Chauvelin leave to retire to his estates, the Marquise his wife was walking in the Park of Grosbois with her children and their tutor.

A good and noble woman, who dwelling beneath the shade of those great oaks, had known nothing of the corruption gnawing at the heart of France for the past fifty years, Madame de Chauvelin had still her God who smiled on her and to whom she prayed, her children who loved her and whom she adored, her dependents who revered her and whom she succoured.

Always interested in what interested her husband, she followed him in thought through the stormy scenes of court life, as the sailor's wife pursues with her love the poor mariner tossing far away amid misty seas and tempestuous waters.

The Marquis loved his wife tenderly. Courtier and first favourite, he had never risked, in that game which Kings always win against courtiers, his last stake, to wit the happiness of his domestic life, the bright flame of home to which he looked longingly from afar.

It was to him what the lighthouse is to the shipwrecked mariner. At its beams he hoped to warm and refresh himself when the storm and stress were well over. It was a virtue to Monsieur de Chauvelin's credit never to have forced the Marquise to come and reside at Versailles. The pious lady would have obeyed, if he had ordered her, but it would have been a sore sacrifice. But as a matter of fact the Marquis had never said a word on the subject except once. Then at the first look of dismay in his wife's eyes, he had given up the idea. The reason was not, as ill-natured people would have it, that Monsieur de Chauvelin dreaded his wife's curtain-lectures; there is not a debauchee at Court grovelling before the King and the King's