From this consideration the Marquise passed to that of another imminent change which would, on the other hand, make a vast difference to her. Fate had preserved her son to her long unmarried. Lucienne d’Aucourt, who had left her convent at the age of fifteen nearly four years ago, had spent the ensuing years with her mother—transferred in 1778 to the newly-formed household of the Princess Elisabeth—in her apartments at Versailles, and, afterwards, at the Tuileries, whither Gilbert went twice a year to pay his respects. But the shock of the disastrous flight to Varennes had killed Madame d’Aucourt within three months. Her death would have seemed the signal for Gilbert to claim his bride, but the Comtesse’s last wish was that her daughter should not be married until she had reached the unusually late age of nineteen. Respect for this desire and the friendship which the Princess Elisabeth extended to the daughter of her lady-in-waiting induced Gilbert, unwillingly, to postpone the ceremony, and Lucienne remained at Court under the technical chaperonage of an old cousin of her mother’s, Madame de Fontenelle. But her nineteenth birthday was advancing; by the autumn the château would know a new mistress. It was the plain duty of the present châtelaine to school herself to the thought; repugnance, as she recognised, was insensate, for she was genuinely fond of Lucienne, who was, moreover, the bride of her own choosing. She took up again the little book of devotions as if to find there a corrective for her own rather jealous thoughts.

A moment later the volume was again in her lap. Gilbert was reading to the priest a portion of the letter which he held in his hand. He was too far away for Madame de Château-Foix to hear the words, yet a frown of impatience creased her brow, for she knew from whom the letter came. For perhaps the hundredth time she was submerged in the bewildering rush of affection and annoyance, familiar enough in the years that had passed since Louis de Saint-Ermay had come to amaze them with his naughtiness and hold them captive with his audacious joy. She was as sure as if she had read it that his letter was the harbinger of annoyance. And Gilbert would give him his time and his advice, just as in old days he had given up to him his toys. Life, it seemed, was consistently unfair—always ready to heap fresh gifts on the spoilt child. Louis had always had what he wanted, and there were always to be found persons holding that ridiculous opinion enunciated years ago by M. des Graves—that it was good for him to be happy. And what sort of happiness was his? The Marquise had never closely enquired into the manner of the Vicomte’s life in Paris, but she had every reason to believe that he amused himself somewhat over-well. His modest estate near Poitiers was hopelessly mortgaged; she suspected Gilbert of having more than once paid his debts for him. Now that the King’s constitutional guard, the successor of the bodyguard, had been disbanded also, she might have wondered what kept him still in Paris, had she not known his fervid loyalty—and that, too, of a type rather rare when almost every extreme Royalist conceived it to be his duty to emigrate. This devotion Madame de Château-Foix considered to be the best thing she knew about her nephew; she set it over against his unconquerable levity and extravagance. It was not, in her eyes, a count against him that his reckless temper sometimes got the better of the nonchalant frivolity beneath which it was buried, for she infinitely preferred the volcanic to the surface stratum. He had, for instance, as a garde-du-corps, been at Versailles on the great night of the 5th of October 1789, and, so far as his family had been able to elicit, had had on that occasion a narrow escape of sharing the fate of his massacred comrades, MM. de Varicourt and Deshuttes. The Marquis de Lafayette told Gilbert that his cousin was only saved from the effects of an entirely useless defiance of the mob, as the whole cortège started the next day for Paris, by a fishwife from the Halles, who threw her arms round him and declared that no one should touch un si bel enfant. The Vicomte always denied this tale, which was galling to his dignity—for what youth of twenty-three (as he then was) is pleased to be termed a child?—and doubly so because, in common with most of the extreme Royalists, he hated and distrusted the narrator. When Château-Foix first asked him about it, he replied that the incident was undoubtedly one of the dreams which came to Lafayette in that inopportune and much-derided slumber on which the opposite party laid so much of the blame for that night’s events.

But Louis’ scrapes were not always political.

It was no mitigation of the Marquise’s annoyance—rather it was an addition of fresh fuel—to know that if Louis had come himself instead of writing she would have denied him nothing; there was no resisting his personal charm. But her principles, her prejudices, and her maternal jealousy, all of which the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay could vanquish when he was present, were apt, in his absence, to clamour the louder for their temporary extinction. It was so this evening.

CHAPTER III
A LETTER AND A CONCLAVE

“C’est le caractère du Français, né malin, mais léger et bavard, de conspirer dans les endroits publics.”

—François Coppée, Toute une Jeunesse.

Had the Marquise de Château-Foix been able to overhear the conversation between her son and M. des Graves she might perhaps have held her surmises to be in a measure justified. To M. des Graves’ conjecture of “something worse than a mistake,” Gilbert de Chantemerle had indeed made no immediate reply, but glanced thoughtfully at the letter in his hand.

“You mean?” he asked at length.

“I mean that there is more information in the Vicomte’s letter than he is himself aware of.”