CHAPTER LXIX.

QUEENLY STRUGGLES.

Months passed, and each day widened the gulf that yawned between the people of France and their king. Marie Antoinette began to lose courage. More than once Monsieur Jacques had been summoned to the royal work-shop, but he always passed from that to the queen’s cabinet.

One day, after the Court had removed from its forced residence at the Tuileries to St. Cloud, a horseman came riding along the highway which led from Paris. A lady stationed at one of the palace windows leaned out and looked keenly after the man, as if trying to recognize him with certainty. He rode slowly, his head was turned toward the chateau, and she saw his face.

There was no mistaking those features after seeing them once. The great leonine head, with its shock of heavy hair; the seamed cheeks, and massive chin, could only belong to one man, Count Mirabeau.

The lady drew away from the window, and directly entered the presence of Marie Antoinette, whose friend and confidential attendant she had been for some dangerous years.

The queen was walking up and down the room in a state of unusual agitation. You could see by the light in her fine eyes, and the compression of her mouth, that she was about to undertake some task utterly distasteful to her. She turned sharply as her confidant came in.

“Well!”

“He is here, your highness. He has just passed.”

“Alone?”

“On horseback, and quite alone!”

“Look again, and tell me which way he goes.”

The duchess left the room, and Marie Antoinette resumed her impatient walk up and down the floor. There had been a terrible struggle before that proud woman and brave queen could prevail upon herself to give that reprobate count the special and private meeting that he had come to St. Cloud that day to claim. Now, in the sore strait to which royalty, in France, was driven, she had come to this sad humiliation, and was about to meet Count Mirabeau, the renegade from his class, the coarse noble, the eloquent leader of a riotous people, in private, and utterly alone.

But time wore on, and her confidant did not return. Had she been mistaken? Had the man passed them, in the coarse mockery so natural to his character, thus flinging back years of contempt upon her, and scoffing at the concessions she had been compelled to make.

The proud blood of Maria Theresa burned in her veins as the thought flashed across her brain. She clenched her hand in an agony of shame, and stood in the centre of the room, listening with the breathless eagerness of a girl waiting for her lover. Yet she hated this man with a thorough revolt of her whole nature. He was utterly disgustful to her taste as a woman, and she thoroughly despised the means by which he had obtained the power she dreaded, and was ready to conciliate.

The lady came at last. She had gone to one of the topmost windows of the palace, and from thence had seen the count ride along the highway toward a distant grove, where he had evidently left his horse; for directly he came forth again, and passed into the Park, where he was now loitering, apparently, but making quiet progress toward the place of rendezvous.

Marie Antoinette drew a deep breath; at least she had escaped a possible insult from the man she loathed. He had been faithful to his appointment. She must meet him.

The beautiful woman and the proud queen went hand-in-hand with Marie Antoinette. It was not enough that she could command homage by her state; in order to make it perfect, she must win it by those womanly charms, which few men had ever resisted. In order to bind this man to her chariot-wheels, she must win him to her side, body and soul. There must be no appearance of dislike in her manner to him. All the force of her beauty and genius must be brought against him. He was not to be convinced by argument, but won in spite of himself.

No woman that ever lived—save, perhaps, Mary of Scotland, who was not more lovely in her person than this unhappy Queen of France—could better have performed the task before her. She was still beautiful. What she had lost of youth came back to her in the dignity and assured grace of ripe womanhood. The necessities of her life had brought tact and keen perception with them. But she knew that all these qualities would be strained to their utmost. The man she had to deal with was brilliant, keen, unprincipled; but she knew that with such men there is sometimes a feeling of chivalric devotion where women are concerned, which, once enlisted, amounts to honor.

These were the thoughts that made Marie Antoinette so earnest and so restless. She hated the task allotted her, but for that reason was the more resolved to accomplish it. Her dignity as a queen, and her supremacy with the sex, demanded it.

“Yes, I must go now,” she said, drawing a shawl of black lace, which her lady brought, over her head and shoulders. “It will not be prudent to keep this man waiting. Ah! it is hard when the Queen of France is brought to this. Wait for me, and watch that no one follows.”

“How beautiful you are!” said the confidant, as she arranged the shawl. “I never saw a finer flush of roses on your cheeks!”

“It is the shame breaking out from my heart,—shame that my mother’s child should be so humbled.”

Perhaps it was; but the woman was triumphing in her talent and her beauty all the time, else why had she put on that exquisite robe, with its silken shimmer of greenish gold, or arranged the black lace so exquisitely over the red roses on her bosom? She had made many conquests in her life; but never that of a human animal, so brilliant in his coarseness as this Count Mirabeau. Away in the park was a little temple, or a summer-house, in which members of the royal family, sometimes, rested themselves after a fatiguing walk. It had been arranged that the count should await the royal lady in this pretty building. Marie Antoinette walked away from the palace so quietly that no one of the household heeded her departure, for it had always been her habit to walk alone, or with attendants, in the Park of Versailles and St. Cloud, as the caprice might come upon her. So she sauntered on quietly enough while the palace was in sight; but the moment it was shut out by the trees, her step became rapid, her breath came quickly, and she moved forward in vivid excitement, as if preparing herself for an encounter with some splendid wild animal.