Away at the other end of the ballroom was a raised dais on which was gathered a bevy of the fairest of the bourgeoisie. One of them, escorted by three or four gentlemen, was descending the stairs into the throng—a woman in the guise of Diana, clad in the airiest, gauziest, purest white, with a silver bow in her hand and a quiver on her shoulder and a jewelled half-moon in her powdered hair. It was—yes, it was—the fair huntress of the woods of Versailles, to-night a matchless spectacle of majestic beauty which rippled over into the gayest, most provocative coquetry imaginable—Juno and Venus and Diana in one and defying you to say which was the more divine. And that cunningly arranged robe of glittering white, with its artful jewels to suggest every curve and line, was just what witchery would have chosen to be the foil to the laughter of her eyes and the subtle sheen of her skin. What other woman could have worn it? But for the one who dared, it was the homage of a woman’s art to the triumph of nature’s womanhood.
André watched her with absorbing interest. Fate had ordained that this woman’s ambitions should be bound up with his. But how? how?
“She has a mind,” his companion was saying, “as well as incomparable beauty. That Abbé at her elbow is Monsieur de Bernis, a poverty-stricken poet who writes her love-letters for her, whom she will make great some day, perhaps, and if Monsieur de Voltaire cared as much for balls as for the muses, he, too, would be snarling his honeyed venom in her ear. She can act and dance and sing. She will not always be Madame d’Étiolles.”
The plans of years were sweeping through André’s brain. What if the crystal—the thought was cut short by a stately flourish of trumpets and the loud hum of applause.
“See,” the sorceress whispered, “the King has arrived.”
Men and women pressed to the entrance and then fell back—on all sides the lowliest reverences. The King, the master of France, had entered and was facing the crowd. And a truly royal figure he made in his splendid dress, for Louis XV. knew how to present himself as a worthy grandson of the Sun God who had created Versailles and made monarchy in Europe sublime: the pose of his handsome head, the dignity of his carriage, the matchless air of command that conveyed an air of majesty such as could only belong to one whose wish since boyhood was law, whose words were orders, whose will was the inspiration of a nation. And when you marked that faint mysterious smile, those blue eyes delicately dull, was he not just like his grandfather, indefinable and impenetrable? What was the real man concealed behind that regal presence? What were the real thoughts masked by that gaze, slightly bored yet caressing and sweet?
“You do not like the King?” André asked quickly, for he had caught behind the pale blue mask a swift glance which sent a shiver down his spine.
“I love him,” she answered, “as all we women do. But I was thinking of the day when I am to be burnt for a witch.”
It was not the truth and André knew it. A woman’s jealousy, he thought—but that, too, he knew it was not.
“My friend,” she said, “go you and salute Madame d’Étiolles. Perhaps you will see something later on to amuse you,” and as if to assist him she glided from him and was lost in the crowd.