‘No one can describe,’ said my sister, ‘how good and sweet Madame was, though she looked so like a Puritan dame. Her face was so wonderfully calm and noble, like some grand old saint in a picture; and it lighted up so whenever her son came near her, I wanted to ask her blessing! And I think she gave it inwardly. She curtsied, and would have kissed my hand, as being only bourgeois, while I was noble; but I told her I would have no such folly, and I made her give me a good motherly embrace!’
‘I hope she gave you something to eat,’ I said, laughing.
‘Oh, yes; we had an excellent meal. She made us eat before sending us home, soup, and ragout, and chocolate—excellent chocolate. She had it brought as soon as possible, because Eustace looked so pale and tired. Oh, Meg! She is the very best creature I have seen in France. Your Rambouillets are nothing to her! I hope I may see her often again!’
And while Eustace marveled if this were a passing tumult or the beginning of a civil war, my most immediate wonder was what my mother would say to this adventure.
CHAPTER XVI. — THE BARRICADES
My mother did not come home till the evening, when the streets had become tolerably quiet. She had a strange account to give, for she had been at the palace all the time in attendance on Queen Henrietta, who tried in vain to impress her sister-in-law with a sense that the matter was serious. Queen Anne of Austria was too proud to believe that a parliament and a mob could do any damage to the throne of France, whatever they might effect in England.
There she sat in her grand cabinet, and with her were the Cardinal, the Duke of Longueville, and many other gentlemen, especially Messieurs de Nogent and de Beautru, who were the wits, if not the buffoons of the Court, and who turned all the reports they heard into ridicule. The Queen-Regent smiled in her haughty way, but the Queen of England laid her hand sadly on my mother’s arm and said, ‘Alas, my dear friend, was it not thus that once we laughed?’
Presently in came Marshal de la Meilleraye and the Coadjutor, and their faces and gestures showed plainly that they were seriously alarmed; but M. de Beautru, nothing daunted, turned to the Regent, saying, ‘How ill Her Majesty must be, since M. le Coadjutor is come to bring her extreme unction,’ whereupon there was another great burst of applause and laughter.
The Coadjutor pretended not to hear, and addressing the Queen told her that he had come to offer his services to her at a moment of pressing danger. Anne of Austria only vouchsafed a little nod with her head, by way at once of thanks, and showing how officious and superfluous she thought him, while Nogent and Beautru continued to mimic the dismay of poor Broussel, seized in his dressing-gown and slippers, and the shrieks of his old housekeeper from the window. ‘Did no one silence them for being so unmanly?’ cried Annora, as she heard this.