Ange Pitou by Alexandre Dumas part two

He understood her.

“Pardon me, Madame,” said he. “It is true I committed the unpardonable error to forget that, as a physician, I was called to see a patient. Forgive me, Madame; hereafter I shall remember it.”

He reflected for a moment.

“Your Majesty,” continued he, “is rapidly approaching a nervous crisis. I will venture to ask you not to give way to it; for in a short time it would be beyond your power to control it. At this moment your pulse must be imperceptible, the blood is rushing to the heart; your Majesty is suffering, your Majesty is almost suffocating, and perhaps it would be prudent for you to summon one of your ladies-in-waiting.”

The queen took a turn round the room, and seating herself:—

“Is your name Gilbert?” asked she.

“Yes, Gilbert, Madame.”

“Strange! I remember an incident of my youth, the strange nature of which would doubtless wound you much, were I to relate it to you. But it matters not; for if hurt, you will soon cure yourself,—you, who are no less a philosopher than a learned physician.”

And the queen smiled ironically.

“Precisely so, Madame,” said Gilbert; “you may smile, and little by little subdue your nervousness by irony. It is one of the most beautiful prerogatives of the intelligent will to be able thus to control itself. Subdue it, Madame, subdue it; but, however, without making a too violent effort.”

This prescription of the physician was given with so much suavity and such natural good-humor, that the queen, while feeling the bitter irony contained in his words, could not take offence at what Gilbert bad said to her.

She merely returned to the charge, recommencing her attack where she had discontinued it.

“This incident of which I spoke,” continued she, “is the following.”

Gilbert bowed, as a sign that he was listening.

The queen made an effort, and fixed her gaze upon him.

“I was the dauphiness at that time, and I inhabited Trianon. There was in the gardens a little dark-looking, dirty boy, covered with mud, a crabbed boy, a sort of sour Jean Jacques, who weeded, dug, and picked off the caterpillars with his little crooked fingers. His name was Gilbert.”

“It was myself, Madame,” said Gilbert, phlegmatically.

“You!” said Marie Antoinette, with an expression of hatred. “I was, then, right! but you are not, then, a learned man?”

“I think that, as your Majesty’s memory is so good, you must also remember dates,” rejoined Gilbert. “It was in 1772, if I am not mistaken, that the little gardener’s boy, of whom your Majesty speaks, weeded the flower-beds, of Trianon to earn his bread. We are now in 1789. It is therefore seventeen years, Madame, since the events to which you allude took place. It is more time than is necessary to metamorphose a savage into a learned man; the soul and the mind operate quickly in certain positions, like plants and flowers, which grow rapidly in hothouses. Revolutions, Madame, are the hotbeds of the mind. Your Majesty looks at me, and, notwithstanding the perspicacity of your scrutiny, you do not perceive that the boy of sixteen has become a man of thirty-three; you are therefore wrong to wonder that the ignorant, the ingenuous little Gilbert, should, after having witnessed these revolutions, have become a learned man and a philosopher.”

“Ignorant! be it so; but ingenuous,—ingenuous, did you say” furiously cried the queen. “I think you called that little Gilbert ingenuous.”

“If I am mistaken, Madame, or if I praised this little boy for a quality which he did not possess, I do not know how your Majesty can have ascertained more correctly than myself that he had the opposite defect.”

“Oh, that is quite another matter!” said the queen, gloomily; “perhaps we shall speak of that some other time; but, in the mean time, let me speak of the learned man, of the man brought to perfection, of the perfect man I see before me.”

Gilbert did not take up the word “perfect.” He understood but too well that it was a new insult.

“Let us return to our subject, Madame,” replied Gilbert. “Tell me for what purpose did your Majesty order me to come to your apartment?”

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