Wide horizons, infinitely clear—­a blazing intensity of light, beating on the palace, the gardens, the statues, and the distant water of the ’Canal de Versailles’—­each tint and outline, sharp and vehement, full-bodied and rich—­the greenest greens, the bluest blues, the most dazzling gold:—­this was Versailles, as Eugenie saw it, on this autumn day.  And through it all, the blowing of a harsh and nipping wind sounded the first approach of winter, still defied, as it were, by these bright woods decked for a last festival.

It was the 5th of October—­the very anniversary of the day when Marie Antoinette, sitting alone beside the lake at Trianon, was startled by a page from the chateau bringing the news of the arrival of the Paris mob, and the urgent summons to return at once;—­the day when she passed the Temple of Love, gleaming amid the quiet streams, for the last time, and fled back through the leafy avenues leading to Versailles, under a sky—­cloudy and threatening rain—­which was remembered by a later generation as blending fitly with the first act of that most eminent tragedy—­’The Fall of the House of France.’

Madame de Pastourelles had in her hand a recent book in which a French man of letters, both historian and poet, had told once again the most piteous of stories; a story, however, which seemed then, and still seems, to be not even yet ripe for history—­so profound and living are the sympathies and the passions which to this day surround it in France.

Eugenie had closed the book, and her eyes, as they looked out upon the astonishing light and shade of the terrace and its surroundings, had filled unconsciously with tears, not so much for Marie Antoinette, as for all griefs!—­for this duped, tortured, struggling life of ours—­for the ‘mortalia’ which grip all hearts, which none escape—­pain, and separation, and remorse, hopes deceived, and promise mocked, decadence in one’s self, change in others, and that iron gentleness of death which closes all.

For nearly a year she had been trying to recover her forces after an experience which had shaken her being to its depths.  Not because, when she went to nurse his last days, she had any love left, in the ordinary sense, for her ruined and debased husband; but because of that vast power of pity, that genius for compassion to which she was born.  Not a tremor of body or soul, not a pang of physical or spiritual fear, but she had passed through them, in common with the man she upheld; a man who, like Louis the Well-Beloved, former master of the building beneath whose shadow she was sitting, was ready to grovel for her pardon, when threatened with a priest and the last terrors, and would have recalled his mistress, rejoicing, with the first day of recovered health.

He and she had asked for respite in vain, however; and M. de Pastourelles slept with his fathers.