_THE CHILDREN_
_Easter Sunday, April 19, 1778, to Monday, October 22, 1781_
THE expectation of an heir, the Queen’s ascendency over her husband, the
promise of adventurous war, proceeded with the year. Meanwhile the
little business of Bavaria somewhat marred the hopes of the now renewed
and invigorated Monarchy. It is a business history should make little
of; hardly a combat—rather a diplomatic rupture soon arranged. It
covered the year exactly—it was settled with the close of it; but it had
its significance in the Queen’s life, _for her political action in it
confirmed and extended the popular idea that Marie Antoinette was
treasonable to French interests in the department of foreign affairs_.
The most apparent thing of that moment was the new certitude and
strength of the Queen now that she was to be a mother. Her love of
change became less frivolous, more mixed with character; her old
passionate friendships, her appetite for colour of every kind—in jewels,
in fantasies, in voices—took on some depth and permanence. Even her
interference with public affairs was no longer the mere whim that had
been the bane of Turgot: it had objects; those objects were pursued,
though they were personal and unwise. Unfortunately her mother and Mercy
persuaded her, just as her strength appeared, not to the aggrandisement
of her husband’s throne, but to the mere fending off of Prussia from
Maria Theresa’s land in the Bavarian quarrel. There arose concerning her
action a swarm of whispers, voices not yet of moment, though numerous in
the taverns and clear at Court.
[Illustration:
MARIE ANTOINETTE
FROM THE PRINCIPAL BUST AT VERSAILLES
]
The Elector of Bavaria had died while Versailles and all the Court were
in the height of their absorption in the American Rebellion; just in
that last December which had been full of the first active approach of
Vergennes towards the American envoys. The passing of the Electorate to
another branch of the family, and that branch childless, or rather
lacking direct legitimate issue, threw the musty anarchy of German
archives open to the lawyers; they were rummaged, and a dust arose. The
various fragments out of which the old Duchy and the newer Electorate
were pieced together found claimants everywhere, and the two heads of
antagonism were necessarily Vienna and Berlin: Berlin, which would
support the heir to the old Duchy—at a price; Vienna, which would
protect the reigning Elector for the reversion—on doubtful pleas of
inheritance—to some half of the mosaic over which he ruled.
There was here no plain conscience of civilised right against a northern
and blundering atheism such as had earlier supported the defence of
Maria Theresa against the too successful cynicism of Frederick the
Great. The ambitions of Joseph were the ambitions of a philosopher; they
were at least as empty and by no means as thorough as the soldierly
ambitions of his opponent the King of Prussia: the injury was mutual,
the contempt of justice equal, for Joseph was a pupil of Frederick’s in
wrong-doing. To each, however, the complex little territorial quarrel
seemed of secular magnitude. Maria Theresa was maddened with anxiety,
and wrote, so maddened, despairing appeals to her daughter at
Versailles. Mercy moved all his persuasion to persuade the intervention
of France. Vergennes as resolutely refused to be involved. England was
approaching Austria, to the detriment, it was hoped, of the Bourbons,
the whole weight of diplomatic thought was at work, and Europe was
warned and threatened with incredible futures as one or the other of the
two enemies armed for the acquisition of a titular sovereignty over the
tortuous and overlapping boundaries of a feudal ruin. Such were the
petty concerns of statesmen and even of demagogues in a year when the
young men who were to fight at Valmy were already boys. The politicians
wrangled over the Bavarian succession as we to-day wrangle over colonial
things, imagining them to contain the future fate of Europe.
The Queen at first did little. Mercy complained of her detachment. She
was occupied in the greater matter of her maternity, passing all the
time of the first leaves and the early summer rains in quietude at
Marly; she would have no Court about her, and when she wrote to Maria
Theresa it was perpetually of the child. That seclusion and that hope so
much attached to her the new affections and the new pride of Louis that
when at last she spoke to him, and spoke with increasing violence, for
her family and for Vienna, she largely accomplished her aim. She did not
intend to involve the Foreign Office—Vergennes was apparently
immovable—but so great was now her influence with Louis that by autumn
she did obtain a tardy intervention, and until she obtained it she
showed in every way her determination to be heard. The first acts of war
in July moved her to countermand a feast at Trianon; during August she
frequently disturbed the Council by her presence. In September she put
forward an uncertain proposal for mediation. It was refused, and her
anger added to the difficulties of the French Crown. But she did
obtain—the forgotten act was to re-arise, enormous, at her scaffold—she
did obtain a subsidy. Treaty demanded it: it had been refused: the whole
duty of the Bourbon Crown was to watch finance—yet fifteen million went
to Austria. The taverns made it a whole convoy of gold; there were songs
against the Queen, accusing her of “paying out French gold.” Older and
worse stories about her were revived. The printed obscenities from
London and Amsterdam began to flow. The set at Court which had called
her openly “the Austrian” before her accession, and since her accession
had in secret still so called her, passed on the term to the street, and
the nickname was common in Paris before the end of the year.
All these things she had forgotten before the winter closed upon her and
her hour approached. They were indeed little things, seedlings. Much
greater was the coming of an heir—and Fersen’s return.
* * * * *
He had come back late in August. The moment she had seen him, with his
tall, upstanding gait and serious eyes, she came forward and reminded
him (and those about her) of his old acquaintance—he was a friend. The
lad was still quite young; here was she now a woman, and the effect of
four years, changing her so greatly in body had less changed him in
body; it had less changed her in heart. For as the days fell shorter and
autumn lapsed into winter, his rare and brief notes betray the growing
charm of the woman who perpetually remembered him. All through the
months of the cold, through the time of her approaching childbirth, and
through the gaieties of the new year that succeeded, he remained. Many
noted her visage and her tone, once especially when she sang and looked
at him during her singing. At last he also—when in April he left the
Court, bitten with the gallant adventure of America, like so many of his
rank—he also had understood. She followed him perpetually with her eyes;
she followed him as he left her rooms again for the last time, and it
was noted that there were tears in her eyes.... A wealthy woman rallied
Fersen, as he left, upon his conquest; he was now old enough to deny
gravely that any woman of that Court had deigned to consider him: having
so denied it, he was gone.
As for the Queen, she wrote or spoke of him in public as a young
nobleman only, now known and worthy of advancement, and since she kept
the rest strictly in her heart no emphasis here of that which lay at the
root of her life would give it dignity or value in these pages. Yet
throughout these pages the name of Fersen should be the chief name.
He was gone for five more years after so brief a sight of new things.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the Court awaited the birth of an heir.
There was a murmur all around. Monsieur had written frankly enough to
the King of Sweden that his hope of the succession was gone. The Court
was transformed, and Marie Antoinette especially was a new power: the
light calumnies were grown heavy now; the revenge for personal touches
was becoming a State affair; a weight of office was upon her, for she
was now to be half the Crown and the true wife of a King who governed,
and the mother of a King after him.
It was on the 19th of December, in the very early hours long before
dawn, that her husband was warned: in the forenoon her travail began.
I have said that the French Monarchy was a sacramental and therefore a
public thing. The last act of its public ritual was about to be
accomplished; for the last time it rose to the mystical duties of its
office and dared to mix with the nation, not as a person, but as an
Institution for whom, being immortal, peril was nothing, and, being
impersonal, decency and comfort nothing. Could it have so dared again it
would have been saved, but it did not dare.
The populace demanded admittance to the birth, and were admitted in the
ancient way. The square room in which the Queen lay, upon a low little
camp-bed before the fire, was crowded in a moment; upon the carved
marble of the chimney-piece two street arabs were seen climbing. The
market-women were there, mixed with the ladies of the Court, and a great
press of the poor from the streets had found an entry and were packed
also upon the great stairs outside. Everything was a-buzz and a-tiptoe,
questioning, craning for the news; the market-women commiserated and
complained; the ladies-in-waiting stood silent, each estimating the
event—the change there would be at Court, the strong place the King
would now hold, and, above all, the new power of the mother—the little
heir, the boy who should dispossess Monsieur, exile Artois perhaps, and
recapture the heart of the crowds to the Bourbon name.
For some critical moments there was a silence.
Vermond (the tutor’s brother), who was her doctor, or her midwife, had
ordered every crevice to be closed. Even the chinks of the window had
paper gummed to them. In such an air and under such an ordeal the Queen
fainted. Louis in a passion of sense thrust his arm through a pane of
glass and let in the winter cold; Vermond lanced a vein, and with the
bleeding and the fresh draught of air the Queen returned to life. They
told her that the child was a girl.
* * * * *
There were great crowds at her churching and some eagerness. The Latin
Quarter was impassable with folk as her coach crawled up the hill
towards the shrine of Ste. Genevieve. The square in front of the
Cathedral was very full—but they lacked a Dauphin. The King was glad
enough. When, upon Christmas Eve, the child had grasped his finger, he
had told his pleasure to all. Her name and godparents, her household and
her future were discussed as solemn things. But in Versailles the air
was dull with anti-climax; they had depended upon, or braced themselves
for, or begun their intrigue against, a son of France—and none was
there.
The little girl who thus was born alone survived. Her brothers
perished—the heir in prison; her father and her mother both were
publicly destroyed. She lived. The country house of her old age I well
remember, a solemn and lonely place, small and grey and deep in the
woods—long empty. It fell into ruins, was sold for stone, and a road
driven over it; but after nightfall horses refused to pass the place,
and legends of darkness clung to the last blood of the Bourbons.
It was but the close of January when the Queen returned from La Muette
and her churching to Versailles and the disappointment of Versailles. It
was just a year from the ball-room scene that had meant war with the
English. That year had done nothing but maintain the struggle, to the
surprise and encouragement of the French Ministry; it had done no more,
but even that was much. The naval actions had been at the worst
indecisive, the English communications along the rebel coast were now in
perpetual jeopardy, and would so remain until a French fleet was
destroyed: none was destroyed. Even an attempt to blockade the French in
Boston harbour had failed, and in November D’Estaing had slipped away
from Byron under the advantage of a storm. Of all the operations of that
year perhaps the most momentous to history was the chance and
inconclusive fight of July in the Atlantic, for it gave the Queen
occasion to doubt the courage of Chartres and to ridicule it: and
Chartres, soon to be Orleans, found his growing hatred of her fixed for
ever.
As for her, she kept her carnival, the carnival of 1779. Her less light
purpose now earned her reproaches far more deep than those which had
pursued her first childless years; but in her new hopes she could forget
them, and her much rarer omissions did not remain in her mind. She did
not see how solidly the foundations of her fate were being laid in the
dark, and how every trivial folly was her foe; no act of hers proved
great enough to destroy the last effect of these trivial follies.
She went to the Opera-ball on Shrove Tuesday with the King—it was a
folly (they said) to leave Versailles so soon. She went without him a
week later—it was a folly to go alone. That night, her coach breaking
down, she must take a public fly—a piece of common sense. She spoke of
the adventure, and it pleased her hugely, but the populace twisted it
into I know not what adventures, repeated and enlarged in a thousand
ways.
When in April the measles incommoded her, she must retire to Trianon for
a month—it was common sense; but it was “breaking roof” with the King,
and therefore a lesion in the constant etiquette of the Crown. She took
with her her young sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, whom she had once
petulantly avoided, and now, saner, loved; and Madame de Lamballe was
there too. It was common sense; but her absence from the Court was
hateful, was an insult to the courtiers, and the presence at Trianon
during the day of four gentlemen, her friends, was more hateful still.
The lies poured out in a printed stream from London; and the Paris
coffee-shops, and the drawing-rooms too, had now woven round her an
enduring legend of debauchery more real than things witnessed or heard.
The calumny was fixed.
If a moment must be chosen of which one can say that it was the decisive
moment in her public ill-repute, the moment before which that repute was
yet fluid, the moment after which it was set, then that moment must be
found in this summer of her twenty-fourth year, 1779. It was an effect
coming well after its cause: the high tide of a wave that the first
reckless three years had raised.
It may be asked whether, had some shock or some necessity wholly changed
her, had she given up every lightness as she had already given up most
excesses, she might not yet have warded off the approaches of a distant
judgment. No, she could not. The character of the attack upon her she
could have modified; but she could only have diminished its volume by
increasing its intensity, or its rapidity by extending its already
almost universal vogue: she could not have escaped it. The most sober
actions of that enthusiastic nature would now for ever be criticised.
Had no money gone on slight pleasures, the money spent in every error of
foreign policy would have been put down to her; every unpopular
dismissal she was to be guilty of, innocent or no, and her name was to
be, in every story of intrigue, however incredible, pre-judged. She was
destined henceforward to be forgotten in victory and remembered in
defeat, nor could anything have saved her save a sudden comprehension of
France. No God revealed it to her, and to the general protest that was
rising beneath her came accident after accident, some hardly of her
doing, some not at all, but every one pointing towards the single issue
of her fate, not one in aid of her.
The nights of August were hot and the early autumn also. The customary
tours of the Court had been countermanded to save money. The princesses
walked at evening and mingled with the crowd on the terrace of the
palace, where was the band. It gave scandal. It gave scandal that the
Queen should walk later with Artois. It gave most scandal that Madame de
Polignac, with her refined and silent face, her gentle deep-blue eyes
under that dark hair—a type not national—should so entirely possess the
Queen.
The Polignac clique demanded and obtained on every side. It was a double
evil: a proof to the Court that the aristocracy as a whole were excluded
from favour and that a faction ruled; a proof to the nation that, at a
time when finance was the known burden, and when, in the midst of
prosperity, a permanent crisis weighed on the impatient poor and the
public forces alike, the executive, the King, could blindly spend money
and endow every Polignac claim. The sums involved in this patronage of
the Polignacs, as in every other public extravagance of the French, were
small. The debts of a Pitt or a Fox were far larger, the luxuries of our
modern money-dealers are mountainous compared to them; but they fell on
a nation wholly egalitarian, unused to and intolerant of government by
the wealthy, and a nation which regarded (and regards) its government as
the principal engine to use _against_ the rich, not in their aid.
Trianon, not enormous in its cost, grew to be yet another legend, and
that legend was not diminished when, in the summer of 1780, a little
theatre was opened there, a little stage for the Queen.
All the world did such things! None could blame her—yet all did. After
all, one great house after another had put up its show—most of them more
costly than hers: but there was in her gradual extension of the
amusement something that aggrandised it and made it a public talk; her
invitation to the great Paris companies of actors, her very seclusion at
first, with its opportunity for rumour, later her open doors, swelled
the comment and the offence of Paris. Paris detested this private
theatre from the first. There was in it a mixture of carelessness for
the State and of personal abasement which Paris could not tolerate in a
French Queen; yet how simple was the distraction to her, and how could
the subtleties of these Paris critics, themselves the best actors in the
world, deriding acting and despising it, be comprehensible to her? She
played on.
The King came often. He applauded. She permitted—in this year 1780 at
least—no one but the royal family to witness her from the audience ...
but the parts were many and needed many players. She made dull Campan,
her librarian, manage for her; she gave no place in the distraction to
those who thought their presence about her to be a most solemn right and
duty. In the autumn to the acting she must add singing, though her voice
was not always in tune and was often displeasing in its lack of volume.
Stage parts demanded stage lovers, and, learning this, Mercy in his turn
opposed. He came at her invitation (but he insisted on being hidden
behind the lattice of a box), he applauded her acting somewhat, was
courtier-like to her singing—but he disapproved.
Silent, a little bent, low-voiced, a man of but fifty-three—though
seeming older—Mercy was now at the height of that long career during
which for twenty-two years he was Austria itself permanently present
before Marie Antoinette, a spy over her for her mother’s sake and for
her own, a devoted servant of the Hapsburgs and Lorraine.
His nobility was of the Empire: a Belgian from Liège, a man without
nationality, and with no comprehension of the rising religion of
patriotism, he had from his childhood formed part of that cosmopolitan
soldiery which was the shield of Maria Theresa; he lived for that Great
Lady who maintained him in his embassy, and in his manner and tradition
he maintained the character it had had under his master, Kaunitz.
He had passed all his early manhood in that splendid river-side house in
Paris which the dandyism of the great diplomatist his teacher had
demanded. His youth—reserved, awkward and probably laborious—had left
him very observant. He had adopted for life all the externals of the
Parisians, but—with the narrowness of his profession—he had failed to
see that inmost part of them which was so soon to launch a tempest of
wars against all that bunch of private interests on which he depended,
and to destroy it. The French Crown was nothing to him, and whether in
Paris, at Versailles, or down river in his great country house at
Conflans, the French nation left him careless. He was lord of a French
manor in Lorraine, of another near his _château_ on the river. His wines
were French, and marvellous, and cellared in 15,000 bottles, which the
peasants of the Oise drank for him joyfully in ’92—nothing more saddened
the old man in his exile when the Revolution was on.
His horses were superb. Even of coachmen he boasted two—each beautiful
and large; each equal in domestic rank.
Unmarried, he maintained with dignity an opera-singer of some fame and
of the refinement customary in that trade; at the close of his life he
left upon record their “close and rooted friendship.”
Such was the man who for nine years had watched his Princess as she grew
to womanhood and at last to motherhood at the French Court, and for nine
years had sent those long, regular, and careful letters to Maria Theresa
which are now our source for quite half the history of the place and
time. His life also was at a crisis and a change in this year of 1780,
for in the autumn of it his great sovereign died.
Maria Theresa was sixty-three. She was still vigorous in body, powerful
in voice, alert in brain, but for many years a great melancholy had not
abandoned her. She had continually contemplated her husband’s tomb; her
letters to her children, and especially to the Queen of France, were
full at the last of an approaching silence. The Bavarian trouble had
broken her; in the long expectation of a grandson to the French throne
she had been disappointed; the future of her daughter had terrified
her—for she saw the gulf. It was upon the 24th of November that she felt
her fatal illness; until the 29th she wrote and dictated her affairs of
State, and on that very date wrote at length to the Queen. Then she saw
Death coming visibly; she staggered into a chair, and with words of
rational charity upon her lips she died.
It was a week—Wednesday, the 6th of December—before the news could reach
Versailles. It came at evening. Marie Antoinette saw suddenly receding,
as the sea had receded from Lisbon at her birth, the principal aspect of
her life. The memory of her mother, and the constant letters—scolding,
anxious, loving, or imperious—had been her only homely things where
everything around her had been alien and increasingly alien. Her mother
for nine years, her mother and Mercy’s voice, had been tangible: all the
rest was strange. That deep and inner part which she did not or could
not show, which she herself perhaps did not know, and which appeared but
three times upon the surface of her life, rose through its eager and not
profound levels of sense. Her whole frame was broken; she spat blood.
She put herself that hour in black of every kind disordered, and she met
the coming year charged with a sorrow that could now never wholly leave
her. But that year was to give her the two chief things of that phase in
her life—the news of a successful battle, and the birth of a son; and a
third—the woman _La Motte_, through whom the chief of her evils were to
come upon her.
Far off in Virginia, La Fayette lay at Richmond with a handful of men.
Cornwallis made a dash for him and failed, marched back, burning and
plundering, to the coast, received a confused tangle of orders, entered
Yorktown and awaited the English fleet. Washington had heard how Grasse
in the West Indies would sail with the French fleet; he marched
southward to join the French commanders. With him was young Fersen, who
for so long had not seen France and who was there volunteered for
America; with him also was Rochambeau and all his men, and they hurried
to victory together through the wet, heavy summer of 1781 along the
Atlantic plain.
Meanwhile in Versailles nothing was toward. The Court had lost its old
gaiety in the stress of the war and of the “economies.” The Queen
awaited and implored a son. The Emperor, coming in July 1781 for the
second time to a country he despised, “found much improvement,” was
entertained at Trianon, and went away. It was August, hot, drowsy, and
silent; it was September, and an intense anxiety for the birth—now at
last, if it might be—of an heir.
And as that September passed, two things came into this strange life
upon which so many varied things arose and joined darkly in their dates;
each accident was quite unknown to the Queen.
The first was this, that the British fleet coming up to save Cornwallis
found Grasse already within the bay, was beaten off, and with it the
chance of succour; so that La Fayette and Washington meeting could and
did, just as the month ended, lay siege.
The second was this: that up in the mountains of Alsace a lady, a
friend, introduced a younger lady and a poor one to the notice of the
Bishop of Strasburg. He was that coadjutor to the see, now succeeded to
it, whom Marie Antoinette had seen as a child—the first to meet her in
France after her crossing of the Rhine. He was now the Grand Almoner,
and was spending the end of the hot season in his palace of Saverne. It
was thus that the woman _La Motte_ first touched her victim, the
Cardinal de Rohan. And it so happened that the Cardinal de Rohan, who
had been the first to greet the Queen on her passage of the Rhine as a
child, now aspired to be her lover, or—as his fatuous misconception of
her would have put it—“one of her lovers.” She for her part had
resolutely avoided him. He was odious to her. Upon his ambition and
credulity this woman La Motte was to play.
* * * * *
It had been upon April 25 that Cornwallis in the Carolinas had broken
camp and started northward, to conquer and to hold the central seaports
of the rebels as he had conquered and held Charlestown. On the 20th of
May his two hundred miles were marched, and he had joined the troops in
Virginia.
That march was not followed in Versailles—and even had it been followed,
nothing would have been thought of its progress. The war had lingered so
long, the issue had so dragged, that no chance could be foreseen, and
the tangle of those wildernesses without roads, hardly with towns, was
beyond European imagining. They knew that young La Fayette was still
desolate somewhere there—they knew no more. Fersen—if more than his
bright image came to her, if rumours of his letters home could come to
her—must have given the woman who remembered him something of his own
lassitude: cooped up as was that Swede in New England, without supplies,
without money, cursing the Americans, telling the French Cabinet they
were masters of folly, saying the Southern States were conquered by the
British, and complaining with a Northern complaint of the indiscipline
of the French. But there was greater business to engage attention at
Versailles: the Queen was again with child; and Necker, failing at the
vast financial tangle, had fallen.
Just as Cornwallis and the army in Virginia met to complete the war,
Necker had been sent back from his command of the exchequer to those
private and less reputable dealings with which the Puritan was more
familiar and at which he was more successful than in the financing of a
military nation. The Queen, who had not driven him forth at all, who
would have had him remain, was blamed because she did not save him. The
rising democratic opinion of Paris had already vaguely begun to favour
Necker’s ineptitude: he was a foreigner; he had no faith (save the
Genevese mask); but he was novel, he was a change—he was therefore
demanded, and his dishonesty was not comprehended; yet that dishonesty
was even then about to cost some price to the French State, for by his
counsel and after his dismissal appeared that first sham Exchequer
Statement to deceive the nation, to cajole it into a loan, to embitter
it for the future; and the blame of the trick was to fall on the Crown
and not on him, its author.
* * * * *
It was October 1781: Cornwallis was surrounded in Yorktown: the British
fleet had failed to relieve him and the siege advanced; the parallels
were opened; they were firing at six hundred yards, and Cornwallis still
held on. The third week, and they were firing at three hundred: two
redoubts still forbade a nearer approach. On the 14th the two redoubts
were carried by the French, and next day came the storming.
The river lay near a mile broad behind Yorktown: Cornwallis might yet
cross to Gloucester; his guns were dismantled and his force shattered,
more by sickness than by fire, but he made the attempt, and the wind
defeated him. Upon that ominous Friday, the 19th, he laid down his arms,
and England had lost the war. By an accident native to lingering
campaigns a series of chances and one coincidence at the end—the entry
of the French fleet—had suddenly determined the issue: the young Boys of
the French Court, heretofore grumbling and themselves disliked, were
suddenly become heroes; the colonists, “half savages,” “mostly traitors
to the English,” were suddenly become “the athletes of Liberty”; many in
England and all the Rivals of England made up their minds that the
business of England in the history of the world was at an end.
* * * * *
It was Fersen, with his command of French and English, who had
negotiated that surrender. Soon he would return.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
THE COUNTESS OF PROVENCE
FROM THE BUST AT VERSAILLES
]
At Versailles that October Friday and the week-end following it were
still. For the few days the Court was silent. The issue of the expected
childbirth had been debated or feared; it was now not mentioned in an
intensity of expectation. The morning of the Monday that silence
continued. The King had ordered his hunt; four of the carriages had
already started, when he bethought him before he left to see the Queen
again. He thought her to be in pain, and though she denied the pain, he
ordered the Hunt to return, and an unusual rumour and press at once
filled the great galleries. It was a little after eleven o’clock when
the passages and halls were full of a gathering crowd, and the cold and
splendid staircase which made the royal life at Versailles a public
thing, a thing of the open air, were already crammed before noon by a
mob of the populace; but this time custom was disdained and the doors
were shut fast. Within, the Queen lay groaning on her pallet-bed before
the fireplace, but there was air around her: no such press as had all
but killed her three years before. Yet that exclusion of the populace
helped to kill the Monarchy.
At one o’clock a Swedish noble, chancing to be at the Queen’s door, was
told the news. He was caught and electrified by it as though he had been
of the French blood. He turned to the first woman he met and said: “We
have an heir!” Now that woman happened to be Provence’s wife, and the
scene—her red anger and her disdain, his bewilderment—were taken up at
once into the laughter of the moment. All the world laughed or cried: it
was like the excitement of a great victory turning the tide of a
disastrous war.
The Queen, when she could speak, noting the silence round her pallet and
hearing the noise without, said faintly and smiling: “I have been a good
patient.... Tell me the truth.” They were still silent, and she was sure
that another daughter had been born, till the King came in and said to
her:—
“The Dauphin begs leave to come in.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------