Trimousette had shown no sign of chagrin when Madame de Valençay arrived with a merry party, all laughing and chattering like so many birds in spring. It was a part of her reticent pride to make no complaint, to show no uneasiness. The duke was furiously angry with Madame de Valençay for hunting him down, but she was so beautiful, she tripped up and down the terrace with such airy grace, she was so wickedly merry at his expense, that, manlike, he forgave her.
This week, which Trimousette had pictured to herself as so charming, turned out to be one of the most trying of her life. She scarcely saw her duke except in the evening when the saloons were full of persons, and there was much fiddling and dancing. Nor did she see much more of Victor, who was keen about his play. The very last evening of all it was produced and was a huge success. By some sort of hocus-pocus, Madame de Valençay had forced herself into the cast, and made a divinely beautiful marquise, to whom the duke, as a soldier of fortune, made violent love and made it well, too, his duchess looking on with a face composed, almost dull. Victor himself was disguised most bewitchingly as a ragpicker, and in his character denounced the aristocracy furiously, to the uproarious delight of his audience.
It was the most amusing thing in the world, and all the fine ladies and gentlemen nearly died of laughing at it. The heart of the young duchess alone did not respond to this ridicule of the earthquakes and the storm clouds. She remembered the words of the washerwomen and the cooks, and the strange glare in their eyes and their pinched faces.
The gayety of the party lasted until midnight, when the ball after the play and the supper was nearly over. Then a messenger, pale and breathless with hard riding from Paris, arrived on a spent horse, and told how the people had gone to Versailles and had carried the king and queen and their children and Madame Elizabeth off to Paris. How the king, foolish and shamefaced, had appeared on the balcony of the Tuileries with the red cap of liberty on his head, and how the royal people were no better than prisoners in that palace, and that Paris had gone mad.
There were no cowards among this party at the Château of Belgarde except Madame de Valençay. Much as she loved the duke, she loved her own skin better, and privately resolved to seek shelter in England until the shower was over, not knowing it to be the deluge.
The duke, who had not a drop of coward’s blood in him, started for Paris at daylight. He took his duchess with him, not that he particularly cared for her society, but because it did not enter his rash head that anybody should be afraid of anything. So to Paris they went, and on the next night the duke was visited by a deputation of rapscallions calling themselves the National Guard, thrust into a wretched hackney coach with a ruffian on each side of him, and cast into the prison of the Temple as a conspirator against the liberties of the people.
PART THREE
