"They niggled—at virtue or at vice. You don't niggle! Neither did Montespan nor Pompadour."
"And so I am to be—Marquise de—?"
"Higher, higher!" he laughed. "Madame la Maréchale—!"
"It is war, then—soon—you think?" She turned to him with a sudden tension.
He pointed a Frenchman's eloquent forefinger to the dark mass of the château, whose chimneys rose now like gloomy interrogation-marks to an unresponsive, darkened sky. "He is there now—the Emperor! Perhaps he walks in his garden by the round pond—thinking, dreaming, balancing."
"Throwing balls in the air, as conjurers do?"
"Yes, my star."
"And if he misses the first?"
"He'll seek applause by the second. And the second, I think, would be war."
"And you would—go?"