For an instant I was crowned in Mittau, with my mother’s tiara.

I saw the king’s features turn to granite, and a dark red stain show on his jaws like coloring on stone.  The most benevolent men, and by all his traits he was one of the most benevolent, have their pitiless moments.  He must have been prepared to combat a pretender before I entered the room.  But outraged majesty would now take its full vengeance on me for the unconsidered act of the child he loved.

“First two peasants, Hervagault and Bruneau, neither of whom had the audacity to steal into the confidence of the tenderest princess in Europe with the tokens she must recognize, or to penetrate into the presence,” spoke the king:  “and now an escaped convict from Ste. Pelagie, a dandy from the Empire!”

I was only twenty, and he stung me.

“Your royal highness,” I said, speaking as I believed within my rights, “my sister tries to put a good front on my intrusion into Mittau.”

I took the coronet from my head and gave it again to the hand which had crowned me.  Marie-Therese let it fall, and it rocked near the feet of the king.

“Your sister, monsieur!  What right have you to call Madame d’Angouleme your sister!”

“The same right, monsieur, that you have to call her your niece.”

The features of the princess became pinched and sharpened under the softness of her fair hair.

“Sire, if this is not my brother, who is he?”

Louis XVIII may have been tender to her every other moment of his life, but he was hard then, and looked beyond her toward the door, making a sign with his hand.

That strange sympathy which works in me for my opponent, put his outraged dignity before me rather than my own wrong.  Deeper, more sickening than death, the first faintness of self-distrust came over me.  What if my half-memories were unfounded hallucinations?  What if my friend Louis Philippe had made a tool of me, to annoy this older Bourbon branch that detested him?  What if Bellenger’s recognition, and the Marquis du Plessy’s, and Marie-Therese’s, went for nothing?  What if some other, and not this angry man, had sent the money to America—­

The door opened again.  We turned our heads, and I grew hot at the cruelty which put that idiot before my sister’s eyes.  He ran on all fours, his gaunt wrists exposed, until Bellenger, advancing behind, took him by the arm and made him stand erect.  It was this poor creature I had heard scratching on the other side of the inn wall.

How long Bellenger had been beforehand with me in Mittau I could not guess.  But when I saw the scoundrel who had laid me in Ste. Pelagie, and doubtless dropped me in the Seine, ready to do me more mischief, smug and smooth shaven, and fine in the red-collared blue coat which seemed to be the prescribed uniform of that court, all my confidence returned.  I was Louis of France.  I could laugh at anything he had to say.