She watched with pleasure the departure of her uncle, and impatiently called the tailor who was responsible for the dolls. She had some fault to find with each of them: one model had the skirt too long, in another the colour was hideous, the gold lacing of a third did not please her. These objections were taken at random, for she was far too overwrought to consider or even notice the details of the beautiful little dresses.
When the man had bowed himself out with his small gallows full of puppets, Anne sank into one of the deep chairs of blue-and-yellow velvet; her back ached from standing, her head throbbed, her heavy gown dragged at her shoulders, she had not slept for several nights and her whole feeble body was fatigued, but she would spare neither herself nor those who had to please her humour.
Gowns, petticoats, mantles, caps, hoods, gloves, shoes, jewels, every ornament or trinket luxury could devise was brought before her for her inspection. She had been most extravagant in her purchases, and it was already said that when her debts and the feasts had been paid, there would not be anything left of the hundred thousand thalers that formed her dowry. Her thin, feverish fingers handled the brocades and velvets, the silks and lawns, the girdles and chains with a kind of eager energy, as if these things were so many weapons she was piling up against fate.
And so unconsciously she regarded them, she meant to be the grandest lady at the Court of the Regent; her whole small soul was centred on this childish ambition and had no room for any other emotion save a fierce, jealous, but inchoate desire that her brilliant husband should love her. She thought all this bravery would help her accomplish both ends, and therefore devoted all her passionate interest to these splendours of silvered silk, Venetian velvet, cloaks of miniver and red fox, skirts of many coloured brocade, doeskin fringed gloves and shoes sewn with gold thread.
At last her weakness could endure no more; with an hysteric petulance that bordered on tears she dismissed every one, and, taking the arm of her favourite waiting-woman, she limped through the bowing ranks of tailors, jewellers, and sewing-maids into her inner and private chamber.
There she dropped into the cushion-piled chair near the window that stood open on the sunshine, and so sat, looking huddled and dwarfish, her right hand, sparkling with the hard brilliance of an emerald ring, supporting her aching head, her feet resting on a great footstool, her knees drawn up.
The waiting-woman stood at the end of the huge crimson-curtained bed, waiting the pleasure of her mistress.
She was a tall girl, subdued, quiet, patient—qualities to which she owned the dangerous favour of capricious Anne's preference. Her father had served under the Elector Maurice, but returning to his native city, Ghent in the Netherlands, he had been executed as a heretic under the rule of the late Regent, and his entire property confiscated. His wife had fled with her child to the Saxon Court, where she had soon after died of her miseries, leaving her daughter under the protection of the Electress.
Such was the short, sad experience of Rénèe le Meung, which had left her reliant, reserved, self-effacing, humble, but passionately attached to the faith for which her parents and her happiness had been sacrificed, and of an earnest gravity beyond her years.
She endured the whims and caprices, the tempers and tyrannies of Anne with more than the usual submission of the dependant, and her lack of vanity and her indifference made her a foil that was precious to the arrogance of her mistress.