Appearing satisfied, the Queen drew Barnave into the pile. She seemed a fugitive, following some phantom and looking neither before her nor behind. She only stopped, breathless, in the great preacher's sleeping chamber, where chance placed her confronting the portrait of a lady. Mechanically looking, she read the label: "Madam Henriette." She started without Barnave understanding why. From the name he guessed.
"Yes," he observed, "not Henrietta Maria of England, not the widow of the unfortunate Charles the First but the wife of the reckless Philip of Orleans; not she who died of cold in the Louvre Palace, but she who died of poison at St. Cloud and sent her ring to Bossuet. Rather would I have it her portrait," he said after a pause "for such a mouth as hers might give advice, but, alas! such are the very ones death seals up."
"What could Charles the First's widow furnish me in the way of advice?" she inquired.
"By your leave, I will try to say. 'Oh, my sister (Seems to say this mouth) do you not see the resemblance between our fates? I come from England as you from Austria, and was a foreigner to the English as you are to the French. I might have given my husband good counsel, but was silent or gave him bad; instead of uniting him to his people, I excited him to war against them; I gave him the counsel to march on London with the Irish. Not only did I maintain correspondence with the enemies of England but twice I went over into France to bring back foreign troops'. But why continue the bloody story which you know?"
"Continue," said the Queen, with dark brow and pleated lip.
"The portrait would continue to say: 'Sister, finally the Scotch delivered up their monarch, so that he was arrested just when he dreamt of escaping into France. A tailor seized him, a butcher led him into prison, a carter packed the jury, a beer-vendor presided over the assembly, and that nothing should be omitted odious in the trial and the sentence, it was carried out by a masked deaths-man striking off the victim's head.' This is what the picture of Henrietta Maria would say. God knows that nothing is lacking for the likeness. We have our brewer in Santerre for Cromwell, our butcher in Lengedre, not Harrison, and all the other plebeians who will conduct the trial; even as the conductor of this array is a lowborn peasant. What do you say to the picture?"
"I would say: 'Poor dear princess, you are reading me a page of history not giving me advice.'"
"If you do not refuse to follow it, the advice would be given you by the living," rejoined Barnave.
"Dead or living, those who can advise ought to do so: if good, it should be followed."
"Dead or living, one kind alone is given. Gain the people's love."