“It’s perfectly useless,” the Queen broke out, bitterly, “to expect a man—even a comparatively intelligent and highly-developed man, like Florimond—to understand the subtleties of a woman’s nature, or to sympathise with the difficulties of her life. When she isn’t as crude, and as blunt, and as phlegmatic, and as insensitive, and as transparent and commonplace and all-of-one-piece as themselves, men always think a woman’s unreasonable and capricious and infantile. It’s a little too discouraging. Here I wear myself to a shadow, and bore and worry myself to extermination, with all the petty contemptible cares and bothers and pomps and ceremonies of this tiresome little Court; and that’s all the thanks I get—to be laughed at by my husband, and lectured and ridiculed in stupid allegories by Florimond! It’s a little too hard. Oh, if you’d only let me go away, and leave it all behind me! I’d go to Paris and change my name, and become a concert-singer. It’s the only thing I really care for—to sing and sing and sing. Oh, if I could only go and make a career as a concert-singer in Paris! Will you let me? Will you? Will you?” she demanded, vehemently, of her husband.
“That’s rather a radical measure to bring up for discussion at this hour of the night, isn’t it?” the King suggested, laughing.
“But it’s quite serious enough for you to afford to consider it. And I don’t see why one hour isn’t as good as another. Will you let me go to Paris and become a concert-singer?”
“What! And leave poor me alone and forlorn here in Vescova? Oh, my dear, you wouldn’t desert your own lawful spouse in that regardless manner!”
“I don’t see what ’lawful’ has to do with it. You don’t half appreciate me. You think I’m childish, and capricious, and bad-tempered, and everything that’s absurd and idiotic. I don’t see why I should waste my life and my youth, stagnating in this out-of-the-way corner of Nowhere, with a man who doesn’t appreciate me, and who thinks I’m childish and idiotic, when I could go to Paris and have a life of my own, and a career, and do the only thing in the world I really care for. Will you let me go? Answer. Will you?”
But the King only laughed.
“And besides,” the Queen went on, in a minute, “if you really missed me, you could come too. You could abdicate. Why shouldn’t you? Instead of staying here, and boring and worrying ourselves to death as King and Queen of this ungrateful, insufferable, little unimportant ninth-rate make-believe of a country, why shouldn’t we abdicate and go to Paris, and be a Man and a Woman, and have a little Life, instead of this dreary, artificial, cardboard sort of puppet-show existence? You could devote yourself to literature, and I’d go on the concert-stage, and we’d have a delightful little house in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and be perfectly happy. Of course, Flori-mond would come with us. Why shouldn’t we? Oh, if you only would Î Will you? Will you, Theo?” she pleaded earnestly.
The King looked at his watch. “It’s nearly midnight, my dear,” he said. “High time, I should think, to adjourn the debate. But if, when you wake up to-morrow morning, you wish to resume it, Flori-mond and I will be at your disposal. Meanwhile, we’re losing our beauty-sleep; and I, for one, am going to bed.”
“Oh, it’s always like that!” the Queen complained. “You never do me the honour of taking seriously anything I say. It’s intolerable. I don’t think any woman was ever so badly treated.”
She didn’t recur to the subject next day, however, but passed the entire morning with Florimond, planning the details of a garden-party, and editing the list of guests; and she threw her whole soul into it too. So that, when the King looked in upon them a little before luncheon, Florimond smiled at him significantly (indeed, I’m not sure he didn’t wink at him) and called out, “Oh, we are enjoying ourselves. Please don’t interrupt. Go back to your counting-house and count out your money, and leave us in the parlour to eat our bread and honey.”