Alas! it was now that the serpent of jealousy began to sting still deeper.
Happy! Could she be happy with the humiliation of despised love?
Happy! Could she be happy by the side of the king,—that vulgar husband in whom everything was deficient to form the hero?
Happy! Could she be happy with Monsieur de Charny, who might be so with some woman whom he loved,—by the side of his own wife, perhaps?
And this thought kindled in the poor queen’s breast all those flaming torches which consumed Dido even more than her funeral pile.
But in the midst of this feverish torture, she saw a ray of hope; in the midst of this shuddering anguish, she felt a sensation of joy. God, in his infinite mercy, has he not created evil to make us appreciate good?
Andrée had intrusted the queen with all her secrets; she had unveiled the one shame of her life to her rival. Andrée, her eyes full of tears, her head bowed down to the ground, had confessed to the queen that she was no longer worthy of the love and the respect of an honorable man: therefore Charny could never love Andrée.
But Charny is ignorant of this. Charny will ever be ignorant of that catastrophe at Trianon, and its consequences. Therefore, to Charny it is as if the catastrophe had never taken place.
And while making these reflections the queen examined her fading beauty in the mirror of her mind, and deplored the loss of her gayety, the freshness of her youth.
Then she thought of Andrée, of the strange and almost incredible adventures which she had just related to her.
She wondered at the magical working of blind fortune, which had brought to Trianon, from the shade of a hut and the muddy furrows of a farm, a little gardener’s boy, to associate his destinies with those of a highly born young lady, who was herself associated with the destinies of a queen.
“Thus,” said she to herself, “the atom which was thus lost in the lowest regions, has come, by a freak of superior attraction, to unite itself, like a fragment of a diamond, with the heavenly light of the stars.”
This gardener’s boy, this Gilbert, was he not a living symbol of that which was occurring at that moment,—a man of the people, rising from the lowness of his birth to busy himself with the politics of a great kingdom; a strange comedian, in whom were personified, by a privilege granted to him by the evil spirit who was then hovering over France, not only the insult offered to the nobility, but also the attack made upon the monarchy by a plebeian mob?
This Gilbert, now become a learned man,—this Gilbert, dressed in the black coat of the Tiers État, the counsellor of Monsieur de Necker, the confidant of the king of France, would now find himself, thanks to the Revolution, on an equal footing with the woman whose honor, like a thief, he had stolen in the night.
The queen had again become a woman, and shuddering in spite of herself at the sad story related by Andrée, she was endeavoring to study the character of this Gilbert, and to learn by herself to read in human features what God had placed there to indicate so strange a character; and notwithstanding the pleasure she had experienced on seeing the humiliation of her rival, she still felt a lingering desire to attack the man who had caused a woman such intensity of suffering.
Moreover, notwithstanding the terror generally inspired by the sight of monsters, she felt a desire to look at, and perhaps even to admire, this extraordinary man, who by a crime had infused his vile blood into the most aristocratic veins in France,—this man who appeared to have organized the Revolution, in order that it should open the gates of the Bastille for him, in which, but for that Revolution, he would have remained immured forever, to teach him that a plebeian must remember nothing.
In consequence of this connecting link in her ideas, the queen reverted to her political vexations, and saw the responsibility of all she had suffered accumulate upon one single head.