“Then your ambitions are gone?” she asked, with that touch of sadness that can quicken sympathy into inspiration. “You are destined to be great, and,” her eyes pierced the vision of the future, “I desired to help to make you great.”
“Madame,” he answered simply, “I have achieved my greatest ambition, and I believe I can serve my France better at Beau Séjour than at Versailles.”
She was playing the great game that was her life, and she was not beaten yet.
“And ‘No. 101’?” she asked gravely.
“There will be treachery, no doubt, in the future,” André replied, “there may even be a ‘No. 101’; but the ‘No. 101’ that you and I, Madame, have fought with will not trouble you again.”
Madame de Pompadour studied the speaker’s face, reflecting on the mysterious confidence in this answer. The riddle was as puzzling to her to-day as it had been at Fontenoy. André, she saw, could have told her much; but she also felt he would never tell. And it was not the least of her rare gifts instinctively to recognise when to stop and when to yield. The future was her absorbing care always, and the Vicomte de Nérac would belong to that future.
“You keep your best news to the end,” she said with graceful gratitude. “Thanks to you, Vicomte, I hope I have heard the last of ‘No. 101.’ I shall not forget you at Beau Séjour; do not, in the years to come, think too harshly of me. Good-bye!”
“Adieu, Madame,” he raised her fingers to his lips. “Adieu!”
And as the door closed on him she knew, if “No. 101” had defeated her after all, that whatever the past had been, whatever the future might bring, she would never triumph over any man as she had triumphed that morning over André de Nérac. Nor would he ever forget the salon of Madame de Pompadour. The spell of a woman’s genius once cast on any man touched to the finer issues of human destinies can never be effaced.
But one thing remained, and it was settled in the parlour of “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,” in which the Comtesse des Forges, the Duc de Pontchartrain, and the Comte de Mont Rouge, still a prisoner, unknown to the Court and the King, were waiting for André.