“I do not know,” he continued, “if the Figure evoked followed me invisibly, but no sooner had my head touched the pillow in my own chamber than I saw once more that grand Shade of Catherine rise before me.  I felt myself, instinctively, in a luminous sphere, and my eyes, fastened upon the queen with intolerable fixity, saw naught but her.  Suddenly, she bent toward me.”

At these words the ladies present made a unanimous movement of curiosity.

“But,” continued the lawyer, “I am not sure that I ought to relate what happened, for though I am inclined to believe it was all a dream, it concerns grave matters.

“Of religion?” asked Beaumarchais.

“If there is any impropriety,” remarked Calonne, “these ladies will excuse it.”

“It relates to the government,” replied the lawyer.

“Go on, then,” said the minister; “Voltaire, Diderot, and their fellows have already begun to tutor us on that subject.”

Calonne became very attentive, and his neighbor, Madame de Genlis, rather anxious.  The little provincial still hesitated, and Beaumarchais said to him somewhat roughly:—­

“Go on, maitre, go on!  Don’t you know that when the laws allow but little liberty the people seek their freedom in their morals?”

Thus adjured, the small man told his tale:—­

“Whether it was that certain ideas were fermenting in my brain, or that some strange power impelled me, I said to her:  ’Ah! madame, you committed a very great crime.’  ‘What crime?’ she asked in a grave voice.  ’The crime for which the signal was given from the clock of the palace on the 24th of August,’ I answered.  She smiled disdainfully, and a few deep wrinkles appeared on her pallid cheeks.  ’You call that a crime which was only a misfortune,’ she said.  ’The enterprise, being ill-managed, failed; the benefit we expected for France, for Europe, for the Catholic Church was lost.  Impossible to foresee that.  Our orders were ill executed; we did not find as many Montlucs as we needed.  Posterity will not hold us responsible for the failure of communications, which deprived our work of the unity of movement which is essential to all great strokes of policy; that was our misfortune!  If on the 25th of August not the shadow of a Huguenot had been left in France, I should go down to the uttermost posterity as a noble image of Providence.  How many, many times have the clear-sighted souls of Sixtus the Fifth, Richelieu, Bossuet, reproached me secretly for having failed in that enterprise after having the boldness to conceive it!  How many and deep regrets for that failure attended my deathbed!  Thirty years after the Saint-Bartholomew the evil it might have cured was still in existence.  That failure caused ten times more blood to flow in France than if the massacre of August 24th had been completed on the 26th.  The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in honor of which you have struck medals, has cost more tears,