“Monseigneur, do not exaggerate.”
“Oh, my joy! my gratitude! impossible.”
“But lending a million and a half to the queen is not all you wish for? Buckingham would have asked for more.”
“Buckingham believed what I dare not even dream of.”
“The queen sends you word that she will see you with pleasure at Versailles.”
The cardinal looked as pale as a youth who gives his first kiss of love.
“Ah,” thought she, “it is still more serious than I imagined. I can get what I please from him, for he acts really not from ambition but from love.”
He quickly recovered himself, however: “My friend,” said he, “how does the queen mean to act about this loan she talks of?”
“Ah, you think she has no money. But she will pay you as she would have paid Bœhmer. Only if she had paid him all Paris must have known it, which she would not have liked, after the credit she has had for her refusal of it. You are a cashier for her, and a solvent one if she becomes embarrassed. She is happy and she pays. Ask no more.”
“She pays?”