To-day's dream, for a wonder, was not the usual duologue between the friend and the unfriend. Albeit innocently, it was tinged by sex, it assumed the shape of the triangle; and worked out, though, to the satisfaction of the dreamer, the eternal Rule of Three. Louis and his dear enemy, men grown, madly loved one woman; a bewitching creature, with a sparkling rose-flushed face, eyes like blue jewels under a pile of black hair, crowned with a little cap of velvet and gray fur, with a blue wing set at the side. She adored the Prince who had won her love in the disguise of a simple officer. Fortified by this passion, she could hear Cavaignac plead unmoved. He, driven to frenzy by jealousy, would conceal himself here, for the Imperial lover would have settled Bagatelle with all its treasures upon his lady-love!—and at midnight when a step echoed in the gallery of arms, and the fair one, reclining upon this very fauteuil in the window commanding the grass-plot centered by the Cellini fountain,—sprang up with a cry of joy to welcome her lover,—the rejected aspirant would leap from behind yonder trophy of sixteenth-century pageant-shields, topped with the magnificent embossed and damascened one bearing the monogram and insignia of Diane de Poitiers; and, seizing yonder rapier from its stand, would challenge his successful rival there and then, to a duel à outrance.
Need it be said that the Prince's well-known mastery of the sword would enable him,—by a lightning coup, following a feint—to disarm his antagonist; upon whom he would finally bestow not only the lady, but the villa, with its treasures of paintings by ancient and modern masters, its marvelous miniatures and enamels, its rooms of porcelain, cabinets of priceless coins and gems, galleries of antique sculpture, its costly furniture, its matchless grounds and gardens, ending a great many nobly turned sentences with the dignified peroration:
"Take her, Cavaignac, with all these riches! I ask nothing in return, but your esteem!"
XX
Could Juliette have known how she had been disposed of in a boy's imagination, perhaps the Spanish Infanta would have replaced the rosy nymph. But while her Prince dreamed, her jingling vehicle had crossed the Port de St. Cloud, and so by Ville d'Avray up the long avenue between the breasting woods, stately and glorious still, though stripped by the blasts of January, to the clean white town that had sprung up, nearly three hundred years before (upon the site of a little village patronized by wagoners), where an ancient feudal castle stood on a plateau surrounded by lake, forest, and marsh.
A touch of a King's scepter changed this ancient castle to a Royal Hunting-Lodge, a whim of his successor transformed the humbler dwelling to a Palace. Courtiers, officials, functionaries, guards, valets, lackeys, pimps, cooks, barbers and innumerable hangers-on are necessary to the upkeep of State; and these must be housed in stately fashion. Behold whole streets of buildings, with noble avenues, radiating like the sticks of a fan from the sunlike center, uprising like fungi from the swampy soil. Behold, as the power and glory of the monarch redoubled,—no less than thirty thousand workmen engaged in enlarging and beautifying the residence of His Majesty, while a regiment of Swiss Guards dig out the lake. And when pneumonia, fever, and ague carry off so many thousands of these hapless toilers that the dead have to be carted away by night, and secretly dumped into pits dug for the purpose, and the bottoms of the Royal coffers are seen through a thinning layer of gold, and the Building Accounts of the Crown Demesne show totals of unpaid debts sufficiently colossal to stagger a lightning-calculator, and Ministers grow dizzy, seeing a Kingdom on the brink of financial ruin, the sublime forehead beneath the bediamonded hat and the towering wig is illuminated by an inspiration. "Ha! We have it! Quick! commence new works! Pile on the national taxes, press a million unpaid laborers into the Royal service. Let rivers of tears flow to swell the sources of our dwindling fountains. Upon the uncounted corpses of vulgar toilers erect fresh monuments to all the glories of France!"
No ghastly visions disturbed the royal dreams, no awful Finger wrote the dreadful sentence upon the marble friezes of his banqueting-halls. The shadow of the little cocked hat that was to overtop his tallest wig by the whole height of a Crown Imperial was never shown him in Witch Montespan's magic mirror. The bees that were to swarm over his lilies and drain their golden honey were not to be hatched for many years yet. He deemed himself immortal in spite of the twinges of the gout, until it took him in the stomach and carried him off, at seventy-seven, leaving France to shudder in the embraces of a far worse man than himself. Until, aphrodisiacs and apoplexy having made an end of the infamous Regent, and Louis the Well-Beloved having succumbed to vice and smallpox, and the Red Widow having hugged the heads off Louis the Locksmith and his fair young Queen, the Terror ushered in the Revolution, Era of Liberty, Equality, and Universal Phlebotomy; until men, wearied of serving many masters, looked about for one to lead them, and the Little Corporal with the pale hatchet-face and the inscrutable gray-blue eyes under the great marble forehead rose up and said, "Here am I!"
The Court of his nephew was just now at the Tuileries. You saw the town of Versailles in its winter slumber, undisturbed by the roll of innumerable carriages, luggage fourgons, pastrycooks' and tradesmen's vans, and other vehicles, over its historic and venerable cobblestones.... Fashionable people lived there all the year round; many of the crack regiments of the Imperial Guard were quartered in the innumerable barracks; there was no lack of society—not the cream of the cream, perhaps, but charming, lively and gay.
The 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard were garrisoned in that antique quarter of barracks and churches, convents and Royal harems, once known as the Parc aux Cerfs. South of the great central avenue leading from the Place d'Armes to Paris, you found its huge monumental entrance on the right of the Rue de l'Orangerie, once the Hotel of the Gardes du Corps du Roi. It boasted a frontage at once chaste and imposing. The high window of the mess-room, balconied and dominated by a lofty pediment, surmounted the great gates of wrought-iron rolling back upon a wide sanded courtyard. If I do not err, the quarters of M. le Colonel were upon the second-floor upon the left-hand side of the gate, immediately above a confectioner's, whence rose delicious odors of baking pastry and simmering chocolate to titillate the nostrils of Mademoiselle. The sleeping-chamber and boudoir, described in the Colonel's letter as hung with rosebud chintz, and elegantly furnished; the little kitchen on the same floor, full of pots and bright pans, scoured by the Colonel's soldier-servant into dazzling brilliancy, more than fulfilled the expectations provoked beforehand. I rather think that the dinner—an inexpensive and savory little meal, consisting of vegetable soup with fillets of sole Normande, an infinitesimal steak jardinière, an omelette soufflée, Brie cheese (nowhere upon earth does one get such Brie as at Versailles), and dessert—had come from the pastrycook's on the street-floor. After the cooking one got at the Convent and in default of the much better dinner Mademoiselle could have evolved out of similar materials, it was a meal for demi-gods. And you do not know Juliette if you imagine she did not dispose of her share.