Marie Antoinette took the little boy in her arms, and with her cold, pale lips pressed a kiss upon his forehead. For one instant it seemed as if she felt herself overcome by the fearful scene through which she had just passed—as if the tears which were confined in her heart would force themselves into her eyes. But Marie Antoinette overcame this weakness of the woman, for she felt that at this hour she could only be a queen.
With the dauphin in her arms, and pressing him closely to her heart, she advanced to the king, who, in order not to let his wife see the tears which flooded his face, had withdrawn to the adjoining apartment and was leaning against the door.
"Sire," said Marie Antoinette, entering the room, and presenting the dauphin to him, "sire, I conjure you that, in this fearful hour, you will make one promise to me."
"What is it, Marie?" asked the king, "what do you desire?"
"Sire, by all that is dear to you and me," continued the queen, "by the welfare and safety of France, by your own and by the safety of this dear child, your successor, I conjure you to promise me that, if we ever must witness such a scene of horror again, and if you have the means to escape it, you will not let the opportunity pass," [Footnote: The very words of the queen.—See Beauchesne, "Louis XVI., sa Vie," etc., p 145.]
The king, deeply moved by the noble and glowing face of the queen, by the tones of her voice, and by her whole expression, turned away. He wanted to speak, but could not; tears choked his utterance; and, as if he were ashamed of his weakness, he pushed the queen and the dauphin back from him, hastened through the room, and disappeared through the door on the opposite side.
Marie Antoinette looked with a long, sad face after him, and then returned to the balcony-room. A shudder passed through her soul, and a dark, dreadful presentiment made her heart for an instant stop beating. She remembered that this chamber in which she had that day suffered such immeasurable pain—that this chamber, which now echoed the cries of a mob that had this day for the first time prescribed laws to a queen, had been the dying-chamber of Louis XIV. [Footnote: Historical.—See Goncourt, "Marie Antoinette," p. 195.] A dreadful presentiment told her that this day the room had become the dying- chamber of royalty.
Like a pale, bloody corpse, the Future passed before her eyes, and, with that lightning speed which accompanies moments of the greatest excitement, all the old dark warnings came back to her which she had previously encountered. She thought of the picture of the slaughter of the babes at Bethlehem, which decorated the walls of the room in which the dauphin passed his first night on French soil; then of that dreadful prophecy which Count do Cagliostro had made to her on her journey to Paris, and of the scaffold which he showed her. She thought of the hurricane which had made the earth shake and turn up trees by their roots, on the first night which the dauphin had passed in Versailles. She thought too of the dreadful misfortune which on the next day happened to hundreds of men at the fireworks in Paris, and cost them their lives. She recalled the moment at the coronation when the king caught up the crown which the papal nuncio was just on the point of placing on his head, and said at the same time,
"It pricks me." [Footnote: Historical.]And now it seemed to her to be a new, dreadful reason for alarm, that the scene of horror, which she had just passed through, should take place in the dying-chamber of that king to whom France owed her glory and her greatness.
"We are lost, lost!" she whispered to herself. "Nothing can save us.
There is the scaffold!"