Out went the candles! the dauphin staggered back, dazed and frightened to the very wall. The dauphiness fell, half swooned, on the step of her praying-desk and dwelt in deadly torpor.
Believing the earth was quaking under him, Louis XV. regained his rooms, followed by his faithful valet.
In the morning Versailles was not recognizable. The ground had drunk up the deluge, and the trees absorbed the sulphur.
Everywhere was mud and the broken boughs dragging their blackened lengths like scotched serpents.
Louis XV. went to the bridal chamber for the third time, and looked in. He shuddered to see at the praying-stand the bride, pale and prone, with the aurora tinging her spotless robe, like a Magdalen of Rubens.
On a chair, with his velvet slippers in a puddle of water, the dauphin of France sat as pale as his wife and with the same air of having faced a nightmare.
The nuptial bed was untouched.
Louis XV. frowned; a never-before-experienced pain ran through his brow, cooled by egotism even when debauchery tried to heat it.
He shook his head, sighed and returned to his apartments full of grim forebodings over the future which this tragic event had marked on its brow.