If Adrienne would adjure her allegiance to the stage and banish all earthly thoughts, he would absolve her and would grant her the rite of Extreme Unction.
"Do you place your hope in the God of the Universe?" he intoned.
Slowly the great dark eyes—already wide with the Eternal Mystery—turned from the priest to the sobbing giant who knelt at the opposite side of her bed. Adrienne Lecouvreur stretched out her arms toward Saxe, for the last of many thousand times. Pointing at her weeping lover, she whispered to the priest:
"There is my Universe, my Hope, my God!"
The good priest scuttled away in pious horror. Adrienne Lecouvreur sank back upon the pillows, dead—and unabsolved.
That night—acting on a strong hint from the Bouillon family, who had heard that Voltaire intended to demand an autopsy—the police carried Adrienne's body away in a cab, and buried it in a bed of quick-lime.
For nearly two long months, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, scarcely looked at another woman.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CLEOPATRA