"I shall be very glad if you can lay my heart bare," said Marie without showing the least alarm.
"I know why necromancers do not frighten you; you cast spells yourself."
"Will you not have some of these peaches?" said she, offering him some fine fruit on a silver-gilt plate. "Look at these grapes and pears; I went myself to gather them all at Vincennes."
"Then I will eat some, for there can be no poison in them but the philters distilled from your fingers."
"You ought to eat much fruit, Charles; it would cool your blood, which you scorch by such violent living."
"And ought I not to love you less too?"
"Perhaps——" said she. "If what you love is bad for you,—and I have thought so—I should find power in my love to refuse to let you have it. I adore Charles far more than I love the King, and I want the man to live without the troubles that make him sad and anxious."
"Royalty is destroying me."
"It is so," replied she. "If you were only a poor prince like your brother-in-law the King of Navarre, that wretched debauchee who has not a sou or a stitch of his own, who has merely a poor little kingdom in Spain where he will never set foot, and Béarn in France, which yields him scarcely enough to live on, I should be happy, much happier than if I were really Queen of France."
"But are you not much more than the Queen? King Charles is hers only for the benefit of the kingdom, for the Queen, after all, is part of our politics."