of Nancy from his dictation.  He must have several copies of it.”  At midnight the King came to the Queen’s apartments, and said to me, smiling, “You did not expect to become my secretary, and that, too, during the night.”  I followed the King into the council chamber.  I found there sheets of paper, an inkstand, and pens all ready prepared.  He sat down by my side and dictated to me the report of the Marquis de Bouille, which he himself copied at the same time.  My hand trembled; I wrote with difficulty; my reflections scarcely left me sufficient power of attention to listen to the King.  The large table, the velvet cloth, seats which ought to have been filled by none but the King’s chief councillors; what that chamber had been, and what it was at that moment, when the King was employing a woman in an office which had so little affinity with her ordinary functions; the misfortunes which had brought him to the necessity of doing so,—­all these ideas made such an impression upon me that when I had returned to the Queen’s apartments I could not sleep for the remainder of the night, nor could I remember what I had written.

The more I saw that I had the happiness to be of some use to my employers, the more scrupulously careful was I to live entirely with my family; and I never indulged in any conversation which could betray the intimacy to which I was admitted; but nothing at Court remains long concealed, and I soon saw I had many enemies.  The means of injuring others in the minds of sovereigns are but too easily obtained, and they had become still more so, since the mere suspicion of communication with partisans of the Revolution was sufficient to forfeit the esteem and confidence of the King and Queen; happily, my conduct protected me, with them, against calumny.  I had left St. Cloud two days, when I received at Paris a note from the Queen, containing these words: 

“Come to St. Cloud immediately; I have something concerning you to communicate.”  I set off without loss of time.  Her Majesty told me she had a sacrifice to request of me; I answered that it was made.  She said it went so far as the renunciation of a friend’s society; that such a renunciation was always painful, but that it must be particularly so to me; that, for her own part, it might have been very useful that a deputy, a man of talent, should be constantly received at my house; but at this moment she thought only of my welfare.  The Queen then informed me that the ladies of the bedchamber had, the preceding evening, assured her that M. de Beaumetz, deputy from the nobility of Artois, who had taken his seat on the left of the Assembly, spent his whole time at my house.  Perceiving on what false grounds the attempt to injure, me was based, I replied respectfully, but at the same time smiling, that it was impossible for me to make the sacrifice exacted by her Majesty; that M. de Beaumetz, a man of great judgment, had not determined to cross over to the left of the Assembly with the intention