Yes, at the great Cardinal's levée I was the only client. I stared round the room, a long narrow gallery, through which it was his custom to walk every morning, after receiving his more important visitors. I stared, I say, round this room, in a state of stupefaction. The seats against either wall were empty, the recesses of the windows empty too. The hat, sculptured and painted here and there, the staring R, the blazoned arms, looked down on a vacant floor. Only, on a little stool by the main door, sat a quiet-faced man in black, who read, or pretended to read, in a little book, and never looked up. One of those men, blind, deaf, secretive, who fatten in the shadow of the great.
At length, while I stood confounded and full of shamed thought,--for I had seen the ante-chamber of Richelieu's old hotel so crowded that he could not walk through it,--this man closed his book, rose, and came noiselessly towards me. "M. de Berault?" he said.
"Yes," I answered.
"His Eminence awaits you. Be good enough to follow me."
I did so, in a deeper stupor than before. For how could the Cardinal know that I was here? How could he have known when he gave the order? But I had short time to think of these things. We passed through two rooms, in one of which some secretaries were writing; we stopped at a third door. Over all brooded a silence which could be felt. The usher knocked, opened, and with his finger on his lip, pushed aside a curtain, and signed to me to enter. I did so, and found myself standing behind a screen.
"Is that M. de Berault?" asked a thin, high-pitched voice.
"Yes, Monseigneur," I answered, trembling.
"Then come, my friend, and talk to me."
I went round the screen; and I know not how it was, the watching crowd outside, the vacant antechamber in which I had stood, the stillness,--all seemed concentrated here, and gave to the man I saw before me, a dignity which he had never possessed for me when the world passed through his doors, and the proudest fawned on him for a smile. He sat in a great chair on the farther side of the hearth, a little red skull-cap on his head, his fine hands lying motionless in his lap. The collar of lawn which fell over his red cape was quite plain, but the skirts of his red robe were covered with rich lace, and the order of the Holy Ghost shone on his breast. Among the multitudinous papers on the great table near him I saw a sword and pistols lying; and some tapestry that covered a little table behind him failed to hide a pair of spurred riding-boots. But he--in spite of these signs of trouble--looked towards me as I advanced, with a face mild and almost benign; a face in which I strove in vain to find traces of last night's passion. So that it flashed across me that if this man really stood--and afterwards I knew he did--on the thin razor-edge between life and death, between the supreme of earthly power, lord of France, and arbiter of Europe, and the nothingness of the clod, he justified his fame. He gave weaker natures no room for triumph.
The thought was no sooner entertained than it was gone. "And so you are back at last, M. de Berault?" he said, gently. "I have been expecting to see you since nine this morning."