It was Sunday evening a good year after Fontenoy. The Court was just out of mourning, to its great joy, and the Salon de la Paix at Versailles blazed with lights and with the jewels and silks of a brilliant throng, a few of whom were dispersed in groups making love or talking scandal over their chocolate, while the greater part were playing cards, the ladies at the fashionable brélan, the men at the dice which led to duels and mortgaged estates.
“It will be the deuce for the peace negotiations,” Philippe Comte de Mont Rouge remarked, scowling at the Abbé for no other reason than that he was condemned to sit at this table while Denise, the favourite of the Queen’s maids of honour, was talking in an alcove behind his back to the Chevalier de St. Amant.
“Go you, my dear Abbé,” said the Comtesse, “and bring Des Forges and St. Benôit here. Your news will excite them more than throwing three sixes running.”
“And,” added the Duchess in her pouting staccato, “put your head into the gallery yonder, dear friend, and see if my husband has finished his flirtation with that pretty wench of mine.”
“And if he hasn’t, Duchess?”
“Give them a plenary absolution and let them begin all over again,” interposed the Comtesse.
“To be sure,” the Duchess assented plaintively, “it will keep them both out of worse mischief. Really I cannot dismiss the girl. She washes my lace to perfection.” And she resettled the delicate trimming on her corsage for the benefit of the Comte de Mont Rouge.
“Well, what is it?” St. Benôit demanded.
The Abbé took a fresh pinch of snuff. “The messenger,” he said with no little excitement, “the messenger who was conveying secret instructions from the King to the army in Flanders was found last night in a ditch near Vincennes drugged, his arms and feet bound, and——”
“The despatches gone?”