Behind him entered a priest, who advanced up the room, and made obeisance to the king, as Bellenger did.

Madame d’Angouleme looked once at the idiot, and hid her eyes:  the king protecting her.  I said to myself,

“It will soon be against my breast, not yours, that she hides her face, my excellent uncle of Provence!”

Yet he was as sincere a man as ever said to witnesses,

“We shall now hear the truth.”

The few courtiers, enduring with hardiness a sight which they perhaps had seen before though Madame d’Angouleme had not, made a rustle among themselves as if echoing,

“Yes, now we shall hear the truth!”

The king again kissed my sister’s hand, and placed her in a seat beside his arm-chair, which he resumed.

“Monsieur the Abbe Edgeworth,” he said, “having stood on the scaffold with our martyred sovereign, as priest and comforter, is eminently the one to conduct an examination like this, which touches matters of conscience.  We leave it in his hands.”

Abbe Edgeworth, fine and sweet of presence, stood by the king, facing Bellenger and the idiot.  That poor creature, astonished by his environment, gazed at the high room corners, or smiled experimentally at the courtiers, stretching his cracked lips over darkened fangs.

“You are admitted here, Bellenger,” said the priest, “to answer his Majesty’s questions in the presence of witnesses.”

“I thank his Majesty,” said Bellenger.

The abbe began as if the idiot attracted his notice for the first time.

“Who is the unfortunate child you hold with your right hand?”

“The dauphin of France, monsieur the abbe,” spoke out Bellenger, his left hand on his hip.

“What!  Take care what you say!  How do you know that the dauphin of France is yet among the living?”

Bellenger’s countenance changed, and he took his hand off his hip and let it hang down.

“I received the prince, monsieur, from those who took him out of the Temple prison.”

“And you never exchanged him for another person, or allowed him to be separated from you?”

Bellenger swore with ghastly lips—­“Never, on my hopes of salvation, monsieur the abbe!”

“Admitting that somebody gave you this child to keep—­by the way, how old is he?”

“About twenty years, monsieur.”

“What right had you to assume he was the dauphin?”

“I had received a yearly pension, monsieur, from his Majesty himself, for the maintenance of the prince.”

“You received the yearly pension through my hand, acting as his Majesty’s almoner, His Majesty was ever too bountiful to the unfortunate.  He has many dependents.  Where have you lived with your charge?”

“We lived in America, sometimes in the woods; and sometimes in towns.”

“Has he ever shown hopeful signs of recovering his reason?”

“Never, monsieur the abbe.”