Louis XVIII may have been tender to her every other moment of his life, but he was hard then, and looked beyond her toward the door, making a sign with his hand.
That strange sympathy which works in me for my opponent, put his outraged dignity before me rather than my own wrong. Deeper, more sickening than death, the first faintness of self-distrust came over me. What if my half-memories were unfounded hallucinations? What if my friend Louis Philippe had made a tool of me, to annoy this older Bourbon branch that detested him? What if Bellenger's recognition, and the Marquis du Plessy's, and Marie-Therese's, went for nothing? What if some other, and not this angry man, had sent the money to America—
The door opened again. We turned our heads, and I grew hot at the cruelty which put that idiot before my sister's eyes. He ran on all fours, his gaunt wrists exposed, until Bellenger, advancing behind, took him by the arm and made him stand erect. It was this poor creature I had heard scratching on the other side of the inn wall.
How long Bellenger had been beforehand with me in Mittau I could not guess. But when I saw the scoundrel who had laid me in Ste. Pélagie, and doubtless dropped me in the Seine, ready to do me more mischief, smug and smooth shaven, and fine in the red-collared blue coat which seemed to be the prescribed uniform of that court, all my confidence returned. I was Louis of France. I could laugh at anything he had to say.
Behind him entered a priest, who advanced up the room, and made obeisance to the king, as Bellenger did.
Madame d'Angoulême looked once at the idiot, and hid her eyes: the king protecting her. I said to myself,
"It will soon be against my breast, not yours, that she hides her face, my excellent uncle of Provence!"
Yet he was as sincere a man as ever said to witnesses,
"We shall now hear the truth."
The few courtiers, enduring with hardiness a sight which they perhaps had seen before though Madame d'Angoulême had not, made a rustle among themselves as if echoing,