Next day and for six more her journey proceeded amid perpetual deputations, Latin, flowers, bad verses, stage peasantry, fireworks, feasts and addresses, until, a week after she had crossed the Rhine, she slept at Soissons and knew that on the morrow she would see the King.
The pavement of the long road out from Soissons, the great royal road, had sounded under the wheels of her carriage for now the best part of the day. She had already found Choiseul awaiting her in state, and had exchanged with this old friend of her mother’s those ceremonial compliments of which the child was now well weary, when, through the left-hand window of her coach, which was open to the warm spring day, she saw before her a thing of greater interest—the league-long line of trees that ends abruptly against the bare plain and marks the forest of Compiègne.
Into this wood the road plunged, straight and grand, until after a declivity, where a little stream is crossed (near the place where the railway lines join to-day), there appeared awaiting her, as Choiseul had awaited her some miles before, a great and orderly group of people, of carriages, and horses; but this company was far larger and was ranked with more solemnity than others that had met her upon her progress. She knew that it was the King.
The splendour which a history full of trumpets had lent to the French name, the lineage of the Kings, the imagined glories of Versailles—all these had penetrated the nursery and the schoolroom of the Princess. As she came down from her carriage, with either hand reposing in the hands of her escort, an awe of the Capetian monarchy came upon her, and she knelt upon the roadway in the midst of the Court, of the Princesses who now first saw the little heiress of their lives, of the gilded carriages and the men-at-arms.
The King raised her up and kissed her forehead; he motioned forward a heavy, shambling, frowning boy, his grandson, for whom all this pomp existed. The lad shuffled forward, bent a little perhaps, and kissed her in his turn with due ceremony—for he was to be her husband. When this little ritual and its sharp emotions were over she had a moment, before her introductions to the Blood, to the King’s mature daughters, to the Orleans and the rest, in which to seize with that bright glance, which was always so ready for exterior things, the manner of the King.
Louis XV. was at that moment a man just past his sixtieth year. Long habit had given him, as it gives to all but the greatest of those educated to power, an attitude constrained though erect. His age had told on him, he had grown somewhat fat, he moved without alertness and—a weakness which had appeared but lately—his rare and uncompleted gestures expressed the weight of his body; but his muscles were firm, his command of them perfect, and he still had, especially in repose, so far as age can have it, grace.
The united pallor of his complexion, which had been remarkable in youth, seemed now more consonant to his years. The steady indifference to which he had reduced his features was now more dignified than when its rigidity had seemed unnatural and new. His expression had even acquired a certain strength from the immobility and firmness of his mouth, whose lines displayed a talent for exact language and a capacity for continued dignity; but his eyes betrayed him.
They were warm in spite of a habit of command, but the sadness in them (which was profound and permanent) was of a sort which sprang from physical appetites always excessive and now surviving abnormally beyond their time. There was also in those eyes the memory of considerable but uprooted affections, and, deeper, of a fixed despair, and deeper far—a veil as it were behind their brightness—the mortal tedium, to escape from which this human soul had sacrificed the national traditions and the ancient honour of the crown.
This great Monarch, whom no one since his boyhood had approached without a certain fear, received his grandson’s betrothed with an air almost paternal. It was a relaxation upon his part to which he owed, during the remainder of his life, the strongly affectionate respect which Marie Antoinette, vivacious and ungoverned, paid to him alone in the palace.
He presented the rest in turn. She heard names which were to mix so intimately with her own destiny, and when they set out again upon the road she could discreetly watch during the long ten miles to Compiègne, Chartres who would soon be Orleans, the faded faces of the King’s spinster-daughters, the old Duke of Ponthièvre; and she watched with a greater care that daughter of his whose foolish, dainty, and sentimental face, insecure upon its long thin neck, was that of a young, unhappy widow: the Princesse de Lamballe.