"You are Dr. Gilbert? Strange—I have a girlish memory of one of your name. A boy who looked unkempt, tattered and torn like a little Jean Jacques Rousseau when a vagabond, who was delving the ground with the spade held in his dirty, crooked hands."
"It was I," replied the other calmly. "It was in 1772, that the little gardener's boy to whom you kindly allude, was earning his bread by working in the royal gardens of Trianon. That is seventeen years ago, and much has happened in that time. It needed no longer to make the wild boy a learned man: revolutionary eras are the forcing-beds of mind. Clear as your glance is, your Majesty does not see that the youth is a man of thirty; it is wrong to be astonished that little Gilbert, simple and uncouth, should have become a learned philosopher in the breath of two revolutions."
"Simple? perhaps we will recur to that on another occasion," said the Queen vindictively: "but let us have to do with the learned philosopher, the improved and perfect man whom I have under my eyes."
Gilbert did not notice the sneer though he knew it was a fresh insult.
"You are appointed medical attendant to the King," she continued: "it is clear that I have the welfare of my husband too near my heart to entrust his health to a stranger."
"I offered myself, madam," responded Gilbert, "and his Majesty accepted me without any doubts on my capacity and zeal. I am mainly a political physician, vouched for by Minister Necker. But if the King has need of my knowledge of the scalpel and drugs, I can be as good a healer as human science allows one of our race to be. But the King most wants, besides the good adviser and physician, a good friend."
"You, a friend of the King?" exclaimed the lady, with a new outbreak of scorn. "By virtue of your quackery and charms? have we gone back to the Dark Ages and are you going to rule France with elixirs and jugglery like a Faust?"
"I have no pretentions that way."
"Oh, why have you given that branch? you might, in the same way as you sent Andrea to sleep, put the monsters under a spell who howl and spit fire on our threshold."
This time Gilbert could not help blushing at the allusion to mesmerizing Andrea, which was of inexpressible delight to her who baited him as she believed she had left a wound.