“She told me I was ugly, sour-faced, and malformed; that I was priest-ridden and a fool; unlike my brother, who, she assured me, is a mirror of chivalry and manly perfections. She promised me that Heaven should never receive my soul, though I told my beads from now till Doomsday, and she prophesied for me a welcome among the damned when my time comes. What more she might have foretold I cannot say. She wearied me at last, for all her novelty, and I dismissed her—that is to say,” he amended, “I ordered four musketeers to carry her out. God pity you, Marcel, when you become her daughter's husband!”
But I had no heart to enter into his jocularity. This woman with her ungovernable passion and her rash tongue had destroyed everything.
“I see no likelihood of being her daughter's husband,” I answered mournfully.
The King looked up, and laughed. “Down on your knees, then,” said he, “and render thanks to Heaven.”
But I shook my head very soberly. “To Your Majesty it is a pleasing comedy,” said I, “but to me, helas! it is nearer far to tragedy.”
“Come, Marcel,” said he, “may I not laugh a little? One grows so sad with being King of France! Tell me what vexes you.”
“Mademoiselle de Lavedan has promised that she will marry me only when I have saved her father from the scaffold. I came to do it, very full of hope, Sire. But his wife has forestalled me and, seemingly, doomed him irrevocably.”
His glance fell; his countenance resumed its habitual gloom. Then he looked up again, and in the melancholy depths of his eyes I saw a gleam of something that was very like affection.
“You know that I love you, Marcel,” he said gently. “Were you my own son I could not love you more. You are a profligate, dissolute knave, and your scandals have rung in my ears more than once; yet you are different from these other fools, and at least you have never wearied me. To have done that is to have done something. I would not lose you, Marcel; as lose you I shall if you marry this rose of Languedoc, for I take it that she is too sweet a flower to let wither in the stale atmosphere of Courts. This man, this Vicomte de Lavedan, has earned his death. Why should I not let him die, since if he dies you will not wed?”
“Do you ask me why, Sire?” said I. “Because they call you Louis the Just, and because no king was ever more deserving of the title.”