“You are right, countess,” said the King while Marie Antoinette mumbled something unintelligible. “We will do something better to-morrow.”
The King watched the stately countess go out, while he held the plate to his mouth.
“That lady is a delightful creature,” he said, “and Charny ought to be happy to find such a phoenix at court.”
The Queen leant back in her chair to hide her sensation, not from the speaker, but from his sister Elizabeth, who was frightened lest she had fallen ill.
The Queen did not breathe at ease till alone in her room.
She had heard her daughter say her prayers, speaking a little longer than usual as she was pleading for her brother who had gone to rest forgetting to say his.
Sitting alone at a table, somehow she had the panorama of her life pass before her.
She recalled that she was born on the second of November, 1755, the day of the Lisbon earthquake, which swallowed up fifty thousand souls and extended five thousand miles.
She recalled that the room she slept in, in France, at Strasburg, represented the Massacre of the Innocents and so frightened her in the flickering lamplight that she had always retained a terrible memory of her first night on French soil.
She recalled how, stopping at Taverney House, she had been shown in the gardens by Baron Balsamo the image of an unknown instrument for decapitation: this was the man who, under the name of Cagliostro, had exercised a fatal influence on her destiny, as witness his hand in the Queen’s Necklace trial; though she was advised that he had perished in the papal dungeons as a magician and atheist, had she not seen him this day in the mob during the halt at Sevres?