“She says nothing,” replied the Marquis de Gemosac, sharply. “She is silent, because the world is listening for every word she may utter. What she thinks ... Ah! who knows? She is an old woman, my friend, for she is seventy-one. Her memories are a millstone about her neck. No wonder she is silent. Think what her life has been. As a child, three years of semi-captivity at the Tuileries, with the mob howling round the railings. Three and a half years a prisoner in the Temple. Both parents sent to the guillotine—her aunt to the same. All her world—massacred. As a girl, she was collected, majestic; or else she could not have survived those years in the Temple, alone—the last of her family. What must her thoughts have been, at night in her prison? As a woman, she is cold, sad, unemotional. No one ever lived through such troubles with so little display of feeling. The Restoration, the Hundred Days, the second Restoration, Louis XVIII, and his flight to England; Charles X and his abdication; her own husband, the Duc d’Angoulême—the Dauphin for many years, the King for half an hour—these are some of her experiences. She has lived for forty years in exile in Mittau, Memel, Warsaw, Königsberg, Prague, England; and now she is at Frohsdorf, awaiting the end. You ask me what she says? She says nothing, but she knows—she has always known—that her brother did not die in the Temple.”
“Then—” suggested Colville, who certainly had acquired the French art of putting much meaning into one word.
“Then why not seek him? you would ask. How do you know that she has not done so, my friend, with tears? But as years passed on, and brought no word of him, it became less and less desirable. While Louis XVIII continued to reign there was no reason to wish to find Louis XVII, you understand. For there was still a Bourbon, of the direct line, upon the throne. Louis XVIII would scarcely desire it. One would not expect him to seek very diligently for one who would deprive him of the crown. Charles X, knowing he must succeed his brother, was no more enthusiastic in the search. And the Duchess d’Angoulême herself, you ask? I can see the question in your face.”
“Yet,” conceded Colville. “For, after all, he was her brother.”
“Yes—and if she found him, what would be the result? Her uncle would be driven from the throne; her father-in-law would not inherit; her own husband, the Dauphin, would be Dauphin no longer. She herself could never be Queen of France. It is a hard thing to say of a woman—”
Monsieur de Gemosac paused for a moment in reflection.
“Yes,” he said at length, “a hard thing. But this is a hard world, Monsieur Colville, and will not allow either men or women to be angels. I have known and served the Duchess all my life, and I confess that she has never lost sight of the fact that, should Louis XVII be found, she herself would never be Queen of France. One is not a Bourbon for nothing.”
“One is not a stateswoman and a daughter of kings for nothing,” amended Colville, with his tolerant laugh; for he was always ready to make allowances. “Better, perhaps, that France should be left quiet, under the régime she had accepted, than disturbed by the offer of another régime, which might be less acceptable. You always remind me—you, who deal with France—of a lion-tamer at a circus. You have a very slight control over your performing beasts. If they refuse to do the trick you propose, you do not press it, but pass on to another trick; and the bars of the cage always appear to the onlooker to be very inadequate. Perhaps it was better, Marquis, to let the Dauphin go; to pass him over, and proceed to the tricks suitable to the momentary humour of your wild animals.”
The Marquis de Gemosac gave a curt laugh, which thrilled with a note of that fearful joy known to those who seek to control the uncontrollable.
“At that time,” he admitted, “it might be so. But not now. At that time there lived Louis XVIII and Charles X, and his sons, the Duc d’Angoulême and the Duc de Berri, who might reasonably be expected to have sons in their turn. There were plenty of Bourbons, it seemed. And now—where are they? What is left of them?”