Then he took Denise to her carriage and returned.
“And when your sword arm is healed,” he added, “two other gentlemen have a prior claim, and I understand they will both insist on it, the Comte des Forges,” he bowed to the Comtesse, “and my friend the Vicomte de St. Benôit, whose name you pledged to an English traitor without his knowledge, and whom you tricked into being the accomplice of a card-sharper’s rascality. I am afraid I shall not have the pleasure of showing you that for such as you the Vicomte de Nérac does not use a sword, but his hunting whip.”
And André left him to his fate.
Neither he nor Denise altered their decision. To Beau Séjour they went, and at Beau Séjour they remained. Had you visited, as so many travellers then and since have done, the famous château, two questions you would certainly have been tempted to ask: To whom had that noble coat of arms in the great hall once belonged, a coat not of the Beau Séjour nor of the De Néracs? And the other would rise to your lips in the crypt of the village church, where amidst the nameless tombs of many who bear the same coat of arms with the same motto lay a single slab. “François de St. Amant” is all the name it bears. It has no date, no heraldic symbol to show why it is there, but at the foot are cut the familiar words, “Dieu Le Vengeur.” Nor could any one now or since explain why these things were so, nor why beside that simple slab lay for many years another with no inscription on it at all, a tomb waiting, as it were for some one whom death had not yet claimed. To the villagers, happier than any serfs on any demesne in France, these mysteries were simply the will of Madame la Marquise, nor did the curious ever succeed in getting a more satisfying answer.
The villagers were right. It was Denise’s act, and André, whatever he may have guessed, never asked why, for of certain events in the past both he and she were content with the better part of silence. Friends came to them from Paris and Versailles; they heard of all that was being done at the Court, of the unshaken supremacy of Madame de Pompadour; they lived through the years of hollow truce that followed the war of Fontenoy, through the terrible humiliation of the Seven Years’ War that followed the hollow truce, through the sombre and bleak tragedies of misery, disgrace, and starvation, defeat on sea and land for their France. Once only did they go together to Paris, in 1768, to attend the funeral of Queen Marie Leczinska. And once only before then André had been summoned alone to Versailles, to say good-bye to the dying Madame de Pompadour, to find her a wasted skeleton, her face a pitiful wreck of the beauty which twenty years before had stormed the privileged citadel of royalty and the noblesse, but a woman in whom the spirit and the wit that had dominated France were unquenched and unquenchable.
Nor did André ever again forget that April day with its chilling rain. He stood at the windows of the Palace, where, if you will, you can stand to-day, and watched the cortège that carried the last remains of the Marquise de Pompadour from the Cour d’Honneur into the Place d’Armes and down the Avenue de Paris to the magnificent sepulchre that had been prepared in the Church of the Capuchins in the Place Vendôme for the Mistress of France.
To one who had heard the crystal-gazer’s prediction, and had lived through these twenty years, there was more than a sermon in the King’s heartless comment as he, too, eyed the long procession wind away in the drenching squalls.
“Madame,” he said, “has a cold day for her journey.” That was all.
And Queen Marie did not exaggerate when she wrote, “She is forgotten as if she had never existed. Such is the way of the world.” What a world is this, and how does Fortune banter us! as a greater person than Queen Marie remarked.