"You see every thing in too dark and sad a light," cried the king. "Every thing will come out right if we are only wise and carefully conform to circumstances, and by well-timed concessions and admissions propitiate this hate and bring this enmity to silence."
The queen did not reply; she stooped down to the dauphin, and, pressing a kiss upon his locks, whispered: "Now yon may tell every thing, Louis. It is not longer necessary to keep silent about any thing, for silence were useless! So tell of your heroism, my son!"
"Is it of heroism that you talk?" said the king, whose nice ear had caught the words of the queen.
"Yes, of heroism, sire," answered Marie Antoinette. "But it is with us as with Don Quixote; we believed that we were fighting for our honor and our throne; now we must confess that we only fought against windmills. I beg you now, sire, to inform General Lafayette that it is not necessary to call out his National Guards on my account, I shall not walk again!"
And the queen kept her word. Never again during the winter did she go down into the gardens and park of the Tuileries. She never gave Lafayette occasion to protect her, but she at least gained thereby what Lafayette wanted to reach by his National Guard—she held the populace away from the Tuileries. At first they stood in dense masses day after day along the fence of the park and the royal garden, but when they saw that Marie Antoinette would no more expose herself to their curious and evil glances, they grew tired of waiting for her, and withdrew from the neighborhood of the Tuileries,—but only to repair to their clubs and listen to the raving speeches which Marat, Santerre, and other officers, hurled like poisoned arrows at the queen-only to go into the National Assembly and hear Mirabeau and Robespierre, Danton, Chenier, Petion, and all the rest, the assembled representatives of the nation, launch their thundering philippics against a royalty appointed by the grace of God, and causing the people to believe that it was a royalty appointed by the wrath of God.
CHAPTER XVI.
IN ST. CLOUD.
The winter was passed—a sad dismal winter for the royal family, and for Marie Antoinette in particular! None of those festivities, those diversions, those simple and innocent joys, which are wont to adorn the life of a woman and of a queen!
Marie Antoinette is no more a queen who commands, who sees around her a throng of respectful courtiers, zealously listening to every word that falls from her lips; Marie Antoinette is a grave solitary woman, who works much, thinks much, makes many plans for saving the kingdom and the throne, and sees all these plans shipwrecks on the indecision and weakness of her husband.
Far away from the queen lay those happy times when every day brought new joys and new diversions; when the dawn of a summer morning made the queen happy, because it promised her a delightful evening, and one of those charming idyls at Trianon. The brothers of the king, the schoolmaster and mayor of Trianon, had left France and had located themselves at Coblentz on the Rhine; the Polignacs had fled to England; the Princess Lamballe, too, had, at the wish of the queen, gone to negotiate with Pitt, in order to implore the all- powerful minister of George III. to give to the oppressed French crown more material and effectual support than was afforded by the angry and bitter words which he hurled in Parliament against the riotous and rebellious French nation. The Counts de Besenval and Coigny, the Marquis de Lauzun, and Baron d'Adhemar, all the privileged friends of the summer days at Trianon and the winter days of Versailles, all, all, were gone.