“I ask your pardon for him, cardinal,” said the queen; “he is a child, not yet able to understand his obligations to you.”

The cardinal smiled.

“But,” continued the queen, “you have doubtless come for some important purpose.  What is it, then?”

Mazarin sank into a chair with the deepest melancholy painted on his countenance.

“It is likely,” he replied, “that we shall soon be obliged to separate, unless you love me well enough to follow me to Italy.”

“Why,” cried the queen; “how is that?”

“Because, as they say in the opera of `Thisbe,’ `The whole world conspires to break our bonds.’”

“You jest, sir!” answered the queen, endeavoring to assume something of her former dignity.

“Alas!  I do not, madame,” rejoined Mazarin.  “Mark well what I say.  The whole world conspires to break our bonds.  Now as you are one of the whole world, I mean to say that you also are deserting me.”

“Cardinal!”

“Heavens! did I not see you the other day smile on the Duke of Orleans? or rather at what he said?”

“And what was he saying?”

“He said this, madame:  `Mazarin is a stumbling-block.  Send him away and all will then be well.’”

“What do you wish me to do?”

“Oh, madame! you are the queen!”

“Queen, forsooth! when I am at the mercy of every scribbler in the Palais Royal who covers waste paper with nonsense, or of every country squire in the kingdom.”

“Nevertheless, you have still the power of banishing from your presence those whom you do not like!”

“That is to say, whom you do not like,” returned the queen.

“I! persons whom I do not like!”

“Yes, indeed.  Who sent away Madame de Chevreuse after she had been persecuted twelve years under the last reign?”

“A woman of intrigue, who wanted to keep up against me the spirit of cabal she had raised against M. de Richelieu.”

“Who dismissed Madame de Hautefort, that friend so loyal that she refused the favor of the king that she might remain in mine?”

“A prude, who told you every night, as she undressed you, that it was a sin to love a priest, just as if one were a priest because one happens to be a cardinal.”

“Who ordered Monsieur de Beaufort to be arrested?”

“An incendiary the burden of whose song was his intention to assassinate me.”

“You see, cardinal,” replied the queen, “that your enemies are mine.”

“That is not enough madame, it is necessary that your friends should be also mine.”

“My friends, monsieur?” The queen shook her head.  “Alas, I have them no longer!”

“How is it that you have no friends in your prosperity when you had many in adversity?”

“It is because in my prosperity I forgot those old friends, monsieur; because I have acted like Queen Marie de Medicis, who, returning from her first exile, treated with contempt all those who had suffered for her and, being proscribed a second time, died at Cologne abandoned by every one, even by her own son.”