The examination satisfied her. Joy had effaced the wrinkles, and brought a passing bloom back to her face. She overlooked her grey locks, those she could powder. Her lips parted into a smile. While she was still looking at herself, and turning her head in various positions in order to catch the light, a page entered, and announced, "Monsieur de Baraille" (he was a friend of Lauzun). Baraille's sudden entrance startled her. She turned round abruptly, stumbled against a chair, and the mirror, an oval of rock crystal set in a gold frame, dropped from her hand.
"Ah! Monsieur de Baraille," she cried, looking at the fragments which strewed the floor, "why did you come in so suddenly? This is a dreadful omen."
Mademoiselle de Montpensier is at Choisy. The agitation of her mind is indescribable. She has the gravest reasons for displeasure. Lauzun is in France, but shows no desire to see her.
At last he makes his appearance. He is dressed in an old uniform, which he had worn before his imprisonment; it was now too short, and too small for him, and shabby and torn. His hair, of a reddish shade, has fallen off during his long imprisonment, and he wears a black wig with flowing curls, which covers his shoulders. He enters her cabinet, by the gallery, hung with the portraits of her ancestors. At sight of him Mademoiselle springs to her feet, and opens her arms to embrace him. Lauzun throws himself on the ground before her. She raises him, covers him with kisses, murmuring words of fond endearment into his ear.
For a few moments each, overcome by widely different feelings, remains speechless. Lauzun examines her curiously. This inspection does not seem satisfactory. He knits his brow, and slightly shrugs his shoulders. Altogether his manner is far from reassuring. He does not care to conceal his surprise at the change he sees in the royal lady beside him. She is now sixty, her face is pinched and lined by age; her form bent and attenuated. She has put powder on her grey hair, which is decked with ribbons, and rouge upon her shrivelled cheeks, in a vain effort to appear young. But even her blind infatuation can no longer deceive her. She is old and she knows it.
"I must ask your pardon," says Lauzun at last, breaking an awkward pause, "for having been so long on the road to Paris to join you. My health is very delicate, it is weakened by long confinement. I was ill at Amboise." (The truth being that he had been engaged in a violent flirtation with the wife of the governor, the Marquise d'Alluye. Mademoiselle had been informed of this.)
As Lauzun speaks, Mademoiselle raises her eyes, and looks him in the face. It was the same deep harmonious voice, full of subtle melody, that had once charmed her ear, like a cadence of sweet music. There were the same clear eyes, whose glance ruled her destiny. Those eyes that had haunted her day and night for so many years, through the mists of time and absence. There were the features whose every turn she had studied with unutterable tenderness; those lips which had parted to utter words on which hung her very life. There before her was her Lauzun,—the object of such longing desire, such torturing suspense; of such eager strivings, of such willing self-sacrifice. But oh, how changed!
Now the scales had fallen from her eyes. For the first time she saw him as he was. He was her Lauzun no longer. She felt that she was repugnant to him. An agony of grief welled up within her; she could have screamed for very bitterness of soul in the wild impulse of her despair. But at this supreme moment her pride came to her support. Should she let him mock the strivings of her tortured spirit? gauge the abyss of her misery with his cold steely eye? No; mortal as were the wounds his cruelty had inflicted, they should still be sacred. She would say nothing. As she looks at him (and, looking at him, gazes also through the long vista of years that his presence recalls) she composes her countenance to an unnatural calmness, and she replies to him, in a voice almost as careless as his own—