Page:Ten Years Later.djvu/271

Rh he could find, and invited them to follow him. He found madame engaged in chasing butterflies, on a large lawn bordered with heliotrope and flowering broom. She was looking on as the most adventurous and youngest of her ladies ran to and fro, and with her back turned to a high hedge, very impatiently awaited the arrival of the king, to whom she had given the rendezvous. The sound of many feet upon the gravel-walk made her turn round. Louis XIV. was bareheaded; he had struck down with his cane a peacock-butterfly, which M. de St. Aignan had picked up from the ground, quite stunned.

"You see, madame," said the king, as he approached her, "that I, too, am hunting for you;" and then, turning toward those who had accompanied him, said, "Gentlemen, see if each of you cannot obtain as much for these ladies;" a remark which was a signal for all to retire.

And thereupon a curious spectacle might be observed; old and corpulent courtiers were seen running after butterflies, losing their hats as they ran, and with their raised canes cutting down the myrtles and the furze, as they would have done the Spaniards.

The king offered madame his arm, and they both selected, as the center of observation, a bench with a roofing of moss, a kind of hut roughly designed by the modest genius of one of the gardeners who had inaugurated the picturesque and fanciful amid the formal style of gardening of that period. This sheltered retreat, covered with nasturtiums and climbing roses, screened a bench, as it were, so that the spectators, insulated in the middle of the lawn, saw and were seen on every side, but could not be heard, without perceiving those who might approach for the purpose of listening. Seated thus, the king made a sign of encouragement to those who were running about; and then, as if he were engaged with madame in a dissertation upon the butterfly, which he had thrust through with a gold pin and fastened on his hat, said to her:

"How admirably we are placed here for conversation."

"Yes, sire, for I wished to be heard by you alone, and yet to be seen by every one."

"And I also," said Louis.

"My note surprised you?"

"Terrified me, rather. But what I have to tell you is more important."

"It cannot be, sire. Do you know that Monsieur refuses to see me?"