These simple men would have betrayed themselves to eyes so much exercised as those of this woman, habituated to detect evil from having so severely suffered from it.
The queen, then, entirely abandoned the idea that these double overtures were contrived as a trap; but as the fear of being betrayed into this snare disappeared, the still greater apprehension increased of bloodshed for her sake, before her very eyes.
"Strange destiny! sublime sight!" murmured she; "two conspiracies united to save a poor queen, or rather a poor female prisoner who has had no means of inducing or encouraging these conspiracies which are about to take place at the same moment! Who knows? Perhaps there may be one only. Perhaps it may be a double mine, leading to one and the same point.
"If I wished, I might then be saved.
"But a poor woman sacrificed in my stead!—two men killed before this woman could reach me! God and the future might perhaps forgive me. Impossible! impossible!"
Then passed and repassed in her mind visions of the great devotion of servants for their masters, and the ancient traditions of the right exercised by masters over the lives of their retainers,—phantasies almost effaced from the mind of expiring royalty.
"Anne of Austria would have accepted this," said she. "Anne of Austria would have set aside every consideration to the safety of the royal person.
"Anne of Austria was of the same blood, and was almost in the same situation as myself.
"What madness to have come to France to pursue Anne of Austria's principles of royalty! Was I not brought hither? Two kings said, It is important that two royal children who have never seen or loved each other, who perhaps never may love each other, should be married at the same altar, to die upon the same scaffold.