"The king or the queen?" he questioned.
"It is the queen, sir; but she thought there was no need for those gentlemen to know that."
And Weber—for this was the Austrian foster-brother of Marie Antoinette—conducted the general to the queen's apartments, where he introduced him as the person sent for.
Dumouriez entered, with his heart beating more violently than when he led a charge or mounted the deadly breach. He fully understood that he had never stood in worse danger. The road he traveled was strewn with corpses, and he might stumble over the dead reputations of premiers, from Calonne to Lafayette.
The queen was walking up and down, with a very red face. She advanced with a majestic and irritated air as he stopped on the sill where the door had been closed behind him.
"Sir, you are all-powerful at this juncture," she said, breaking the ice with her customary vivacity. "But it is by favor of the populace, who soon shatter their idols. You are said to have much talent. Have the wit, to begin with, to understand that the king and I will not suffer novelties. Your constitution is a pneumatic machine; royalty stifles in it for want of air. So I have sent for you to learn, before you go further, whether you side with us or with the Jacobins."
"Madame," responded Dumouriez, "I am pained by this confidence, although I expected it, from the impression that your majesty was behind the tapestry."
"Which means that you have your reply ready?"
"It is that I stand between king and country, but before all I belong to the country."
"The country?" sneered the queen. "Is the king no longer anything, that everybody belongs to the country and none to him?"