'Before that happens, I fear me, that the little Dauphin will have been hailed as Louis XIV.'
'Indeed, Countess!' said the King, with a sardonic grimace.
'Yes, sire, and you will be on your way to St. Denis, borne by the twenty-four Scots of the Garde du Corps.'
'Perhaps so,' said the easy King; 'but mort de tout les diables! let us have no more of politics, for I love to avoid them, and to come here when I am weary of display. The parade and routine of royalty are veritable slavery. Do you remember that fool the Prince of Condé entering Paris in 1616 with no less than fifteen hundred nobles and chevaliers and a thousand partizans in his train, and how he alarmed our royal mother, Mary de Medicis, who thought he had come to sack the city? By-the-by, in that year she had just finished the Hotel de Gondi to the tune of forty thousand crowns.'
'Sire, you forget that in 1616 I was but a girl,' said the Countess, pouting again.
'Four o'clock,' said the King, rising, as the hall-clock of the château struck in the turret of the quadrangle; 'and I promised to meet the grand huntsman and grand falconer at Versailles this evening about some little improvements I am making in the kennels and falconry. Fortunately, M. Richelieu does not interfere with them. I must go.'
'So soon, sire!'
'But you will accompany me, Countess, I hope.'
'If your Majesty would excuse me—'
She paused, for the pettish Louis knit his brow.