Her Majesty the Queen of Bohemia—for story-tellers there will always be a kingdom of Bohemia—is travelling in the strictest and most modest incognito, under the name of the Comtesse des Sept-Châteaux and accompanied only by the old Baroness de Georgenthal, her reader, and General Horschowitz, her gentleman in waiting.
In spite of their hot-water pans and furs, it has been cold all the time in their reserved compartment, and when the Queen, tired of her English novel, or fidgetted by the general’s knitting—for the general knits—wished to look out at the landscape white with snow, she was forced to rub a moment with her handkerchief on the carriage-window, which the frost covered with sparkling crystals and delicate ferns of ice. It is a singular caprice indeed that her Majesty has had, and well worthy of a twenty-year-old head, to set out for Paris in mid-winter, there to meet her mother, the Queen of Moravia, though she had arranged to see her at Prague next spring. In spite of that, she must needs start on her journey in ten degrees below zero, the baroness has had to shake up her old rheumatic bones, the general, in despair, has left a magnificent bedspread behind him that he was busy knitting for his daughter-in-law, taking nothing with him to beguile the tedium of the journey but material for a modest pair of worsted stockings. The journey has been bad; all Europe is covered with snow, and they have come half-way across, with many delays and difficulties, on railways where the service is disorganized by the severity of the season. At last the end is coming near; this evening, at nine o’clock, they have dined in the refreshment room at Mâcon, and now, though to-night the foot-warmers are once more barely lukewarm, and outside the great flakes whirl in the darkness, the baroness and the general, slumbering under their furred mantles and their rugs, dream in their corners of their arrival and their stay in Paris, where the good lady will be able to fulfil a special little piece of devotion, and where the old campaigner will betake himself without delay to a certain wool-shop in the Rue Saint-Honoré, the only one where he can match his green skeins to his satisfaction.
As for the Queen, she is not sleeping.
Feverish and shivering in her great blue-fox pelisse, her elbow in the padded rest, and her hand clenched amid the disorder of her magnificent straw-coloured hair which escapes from her smart travelling toque, she is reflecting, her great eyes open in the half-shadow, listening mechanically to the vague and distant music that the tired ears of travellers fancy they hear in the iron gallop of an express. She reviews in memory all her existence, poor young Queen, and she reflects that she is very unhappy.
First she sees herself again as the little princess with red hands and a flat waist, beside her twin sister, the one who is married far away in the North, her sister whom she loved so, and who resembled her so closely that when they were dressed alike they had to have different-coloured bows put in their hair to distinguish them. That was before the rising had overthrown her parents’ throne; and she loved the calm, sleepy atmosphere of the little court of Olmutz, where etiquette was tempered with homeliness; that was the time when her father, the good King Louis V., who has since died in exile of a broken heart, used to take her for a walk across the park, without laying aside his court-suit and his stars, to drink coffee with her sister at four o’clock in the afternoon, in a Chinese pavilion overrun with convolvulus and virgin’s bower, from which the course of the river was seen and the distant amphitheatre of the hills reddened by the autumn.
Then there was her marriage and the grand state-ball, on that lovely night in July, when they heard through the open windows the murmur ascending from the crowd that thronged the illuminated gardens. How she trembled when she had been left alone for an instant in the conservatory with the young King! Yet she loved him already, she had always loved him from her first glimpse of him, when he had advanced, the white aigrette in his busby, so elegant and supple in his blue uniform all over diamonds, at each step jingling the curved gold spurs on his little grey boots with a thousand folds. After the first waltz Ottokar had taken her arm, and, caressing his long black moustache all the time, had led her to the conservatory, had made her sit down under a great palm, then, placing himself beside her and taking her hand with the most noble ease, had said to her, looking her in the eyes, “Princess, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?” Then she had blushed, bowed her head, and replied, repressing with one hand the mad beating of her heart, “Yes, Sire!” while the furious violins of the Hungarians attacked all together the first notes of the Czech March, that sublime song of enthusiasm and triumph!
Alas, how quickly that happiness had taken wings! Six months of error and illusion, barely six months, and then, one day, when soon to become a mother, a brutal chance had informed her that she had been deceived, that the King did not love her, never had loved her, that the very day after his marriage he had supped with La Gazella, the première danseuse at the Prague Theatre, a common strumpet. And that was not all! She had then learned what every one knew but herself, Ottokar’s old liaison with the Comtesse de Pzibrann, by whom he had three children, whom he had never quitted amid a hundred passing fancies, and whom he had had the audacity to make first lady in waiting to his wife. At one blow the Queen’s love was killed, that frail and timid love which she had never dared to avow to her husband, and which she now compared to the pet bird that she had smothered when she was a little girl through closing her hand suddenly at the noise of a Chinese vase broken by a housemaid.
Her son! To be sure she had a son, and she loved him; but, dreadful thought, very often, when seated beside the gilded cradle adorned with the royal crown in which her little Ladislas was sleeping, the Queen had felt an icy pang shoot through her heart as she looked at the child, begotten by a man who had cruelly, cynically outraged her. Besides, she never had him to herself, at least to herself alone. Things were not as they had been at home with her good parents, whom—a fresh grief—a revolution had lately driven far away, and everything in this old-fashioned and pompous court of Bohemia was done according to the laws of the most rigid ceremonial. A whole swarm of duennas and dry nurses, ancient ladies with grand airs and imposing head-gear, bustled about the royal cradle, and, when the Queen went to look at her son and embrace him, they would say to her solemnly, “His Highness was coughing a little during the night.... His Highness’s teeth are troubling him....” And she felt as if the icy breaths of those women blew on her mother’s heart to freeze it and extinguish it.
Ah, she was indeed helpless, poor Queen, and life was too cruel! So sometimes, giving way to vexation and weariness, she obtained permission from the King to go and see the Queen of Moravia, a refugee in France; she escaped away, she stole out as if from a prison—alone, for tradition forbade the Heir Apparent to travel without his father—and she hastened to pour out all her tears, with her arms round the neck of her grey-haired mother.