“If I were a plain woman I might be afraid,” she murmured; “but they will not touch me.”
Rising impatiently, she moved about the room; she began to be indignant that they had put her in such a place. She knocked on the door and called out, demanding a better apartment–food–clean sheets.
It was absurd that she should be treated thus; they had forgotten who she was, she told herself.
There was no answer to her cries. She began to tremble, and presently returned to the window.
She must think.
She was condemned to death; she had heard the man wearing the tricolor sash and cocked hat say so; but at the time the words had meant little or nothing: they had only been one detail more in the tumult of horror and terror by which she had been surrounded since her arrest. She knew that people were sentenced and left months in prison or set free the next morning; besides, she was not an aristocrat, but a woman of the people. Despite her rapid rise and the brilliance of her shining, she was by birth no better than the draggled women who had shouted at her as she was dragged before the tribunal.
Yes, she was one with these people; the great aristocrats had always scorned her. M. de Choiseul had lost his place for a disdainful word of her; they had all recognised that she was, however gilded by the homage of Louis, only a common creature.
She tried to recall the years of her glory when she had ruled France, and to search in her mind for any cause of offence given to the People who were now the masters. She thought that her conscience was clear: she had never meddled with politics; she had been kind to those dependent on her; she had done her best to amuse a King who was “unamusable.” True, she had used the public treasury as her own, but she had robbed no one, for the money would only have gone to some other woman. No, she could not see that she had done more than fill her part. Certainly, when she had ruled France it had not floated in blood as it was floating now; she had not pulled down God and profaned His Churches; she had not imprisoned the innocent and massacred the helpless.
With the thought that the People had no crime to charge her with she consoled herself, and she was not afraid of the actual charge on which she was condemned, for it was vague and feeble.
The truth they did not know. Having fled to London on the first outbreak of the revolution, she had returned to France–not, as her accusers believed, to fetch her jewels with which to succour the emigrants in England, but to put her wealth and her services at the disposal of those who were engaged in a plot to rescue the Queen.