No Frenchman could have turned her gaze. Between her temperament and that of her husband’s nation the gulf was far too deep. But one night, late, as she moved, masked in her domino, through the crowd of a Paris ball-room, she saw, among so many faces whose surface only was revealed to her, another face of another kind—a boy’s. It arrested her. The simple and sincere expression which Versailles had never shown her, the quiet manliness which, in Northerners, is so often allied to courage and which stands in such contrast to the active virility of Gaul—all that which, in the secret places of her German heart, unknown to herself, she thought proper to a man, all that whose lack (though she could not analyse it) had disturbed and wounded her in the French palace, was apparent in the face before her. She asked his name, and heard that it was Fersen. He was a Swede, the son of a considerable political noble, sent here on his travels with a tutor. She went up and spoke to him.
She could look into his eyes and see their chivalry. His low, handsome forehead, his dark brows, his refined, firm lips, his large and gentle eyes completed in detail the profound impression with which that first glance had struck her. Once she had begun to speak to him, so masked, she continued to speak continually. A boy of eighteen is far younger than a girl of his age—they were born within six weeks of each other, and he was a child compared with her; he desired her, she consenting, and he became hers in that moment. When they had separated and he reached his rooms at morning there was ready in his heart what later he wrote down, that the Dauphine was delightful, and that she was the most charming Princess he ever had known. She upon her side had followed him with her eyes to the door of the great assembly. She was not to see him again for four years, but during all those years she remembered him.
This was the way in which Marie Antoinette entered life, and almost simultaneously with that entry came her ascent of the throne: the old King was changing.
He suffered: his digestion failed; from time to time he would abandon his hunting. It was in the January of 1774 that the Dauphine had met Axel de Fersen. Before the spring of that year Louis XV.’s increasing infirmities were to reach their end.
Gusts of strong faith swept over him in these failing years, as strong winds, filled with a memory of autumn, will sweep the dead reeds of December. His fear of death, and that hunger for the Sacraments which accompanies the fear, came to him in dreadful moments. For thirty-eight years he had neither communicated nor confessed. All his life he had avoided the terrace of St. Germain’s, because a little lump far off against the Eastern sky was St. Denis, the mausoleum of the Kings, and he had not dared to look on it. But, with no such memorial before him, Death now appeared and reappeared.
Once in his little private room—it was late at night and November—he played at cards with the Du Barry. They were alone, save for an old crony of his pleasures, Chauvelin, which well-bred and aged fellow stood behind the woman’s chair, leaning upon it and watching the woman’s cards in silence, his rapacious features strongly marked in the mellow light of the candles. Something impelled the woman to glance up at him over her shoulder. “Oh, Lord! M. de Chauvelin, what a face!” It was the face of a dead man. She leapt and started from it, and the body fell to the floor.
The King, his age and apathy all shaken from him, shouted down the empty corridors: “A priest! a priest!” They came, and in the presence of the King absolved what lay immovable upon the shining floor, in a hope or wish that some life lingered there. But Chauvelin was quite dead.
Now, in his last Easter, the dread came back for ever and inhabited the King. Upon the Maundy Thursday of ’74 (it was the last day of March) the Court were all at Mass, and the sermon was ending. The priest, strong in that tradition of Bossuet which had not perished, turned to the royal chair and related for his peroration the legend of an ancient curse: “Forty days, and Nineveh shall be no more.” All the Court heard it and forgot it before the chanting of the creed was done—but the King was troubled. He reckoned in his mind; he counted dates and was troubled.
The liturgical times went by; he abandoned his mistress; he lived apart and gloomy: but his Easter duties were not accomplished, nor did he communicate or confess, nor was he absolved. Then the cloud lifted and he began to forget, and the tie which held him to the Du Barry, and which had in it now something of maturity and routine, was very strong upon him. He yielded and returned to her where she waited for him down the park at the little Trianon. His domesticity returned—but not for long.