Chapter 20: Without Husband—Without Lover.

THE Queen was wrong for Charny did not go to his wife’s house. He went to the Royal Post to have horses put to his own carriage. But while waiting, he wrote a farewell to Andrea which the servant who took his horses home, carried to her.

She was still dwelling over it, having kissed it with profound feeling, when Weber arrived. Her answer to him was simply that she would conform to her Majesty’s orders. And she proceeded to the palace without dread as without impatience.

But it was not so with the Queen. Feverish, she had welcomed Count Provence coming to see how Favras had been received, and she committed the King more deeply than he had pledged himself.

Provence went away delighted, thinking that the King would be removed, thanks to the money he had borrowed from the Genoese banker Zannone, and to Favras and his Hectors. Then he stood a chance of becoming Regent of the realm, perhaps foreseeing that he would yet be King as Louis XVIII.

If the forced departure of the King failed, he would take to flight with what was left of the loan, and join his brothers in Italy.

On his leaving, the Queen went to Princess Lamballe, on whom she made it a habit to pour her woes or her joys in the absence of her other favorites, Andrea or the Polignacs.

Poor martyr! who dares grope in the darkness of alcoves to learn if this friendship were pure or criminal, when inexorable History was coming with feet red-shod in blood, to tell the price you paid for it?

Then she went to dinner for an hour, where both chief guests were absent in thought, the King thinking of Charny’s quest, the Queen of the Favras enterprise.

While the former preferred anything to being helped by the foreigners, the Queen set them first: for of course they were her people. The King was connected with the Germans, but then the Austrians are not German to the Germans.

In the flight she was arranging she saw no such crimes as she was afterwards taxed with: she felt justified in calling in the mailed hand to avenge her for the slights and insults with which she was deluged.

The King, as we have shown him, distrusted kings and princes. He relied on the priests. He approved of all the decrees against nobles and classes but not of the decree against the priests, which he vetoed. For them he risked his greatest dangers. Hence the Pope, unable to make a saint of him, made him a martyr.

Contrary to her habit, the Queen gave little time to her children this day; untrue to her husband in heart, she had no claim on their endearments. Such odd contradictions are known only to woman’s heart.

The Queen retired early to her own rooms, where she shut herself up with Weber as door-ward. She alleged that she had letters to write.

The King little noticed her going, as some minor events engrossed him; the Chief of Police was coming to confer with him.

The Assembly had changed the old form in public documents of “King of France and Navarre” to “King of the French”: and it was debating on the Rights of Man, when it had better be seeing to the Bread Question, more pressing than ever. The arrival of the “Baker” and his family from Versailles had not fed the famished people and the bakeries had strings of customers at their doors.

But the Assemblymen did not have to dance attendance for a loaf, and they had a special baker, one François in Marchepalu Street, who set aside rolls for them out of every baking.

The head of the police was discussing the bread riots with the ruler when Weber ushered Andrea into his mistress’s presence.

Though she expected her, Marie Antoinette started when her visitor was announced.

When they were girls together, at Taverney, they had made a kind of agreement of love and duties exchanged in which the higher personage had always had the advantage.

Nothing annoys rulers so much as senses of obligation, particularly in matters of affection.

While thinking she had reproaches to cast on her friend, the Queen felt under a debt to her.

Andrea was always the same: pure and cool as the diamond but cutting and invulnerable like it, too.