Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas (suggested reading TXT) 📗

and you will eclipse all the ladies present as much by your brilliancy as by your rank.”

Maria Theresa left full of delight. An hour afterwards, Anne of Austria received a visit from Madame, whom she covered with caresses, saying, “Excellent news! the king is charmed with my lottery.”

“But I,” replied Madame, “am not so greatly charmed: to see such beautiful bracelets on any one’s arms but yours or mine, is what I cannot reconcile myself to.”

“Well, well,” said Anne of Austria, concealing by a smile a violent pang she had just experienced, “do not look at things in the worst light immediately.”

“Ah, Madame, Fortune is blind, and I am told there are two hundred tickets.”

“Quite as many as that; but you cannot surely forget that there can only be one winner.”

“No doubt. But who will that be? Can you tell?” said Madame, in despair.

“You remind me that I had a dream last night; my dreams are always good,—I sleep so little.”

“What was your dream?—but are you suffering?”

“No,” said the queen, stifling with wonderful command the torture of a renewed attack of shooting pains in her bosom; “I dreamed that the king won the bracelets.”

“The king!”

“You are going to ask me, I think, what the king could possibly do with the bracelets?”

“Yes.”

“And you would not add, perhaps, that it would be very fortunate if the king were really to win, for he would be obliged to give the bracelets to some one else.”

“To restore them to you, for instance.”

“In which case I should immediately give them away; for you do not think, I suppose,” said the queen, laughing, “that I have put these bracelets up to a lottery from necessity. My object was to give them without arousing any one’s jealousy; but if Fortune will not get me out of my difficulty—well, I will teach Fortune a lesson—and I know very well to whom I intend to offer the bracelets.” These words were accompanied by so expressive a smile, that Madame could not resist paying her by a grateful kiss.

“But,” added Anne of Austria, “do you not know, as well as I do, that if the king were to win the bracelets, he would not restore them to me?”

“You mean he would give them to the queen?”

“No; and for the very same reason that he would not give them back again to me; since, if I had wished to make the queen a present of them, I had no need of him for that purpose.”

Madame cast a side glance upon the bracelets, which, in their casket, were dazzlingly exposed to view upon a table close beside her.

“How beautiful they are,” she said, sighing. “But stay,” Madame continued, “we are quite forgetting that your majesty’s dream was nothing but a dream.”

“I should be very much surprised,” returned Anne of Austria, “if my dream were to deceive me; that has happened to me very seldom.”

“We may look upon you as a prophetess, then.”

“I have already said, that I dream but very rarely; but the coincidence of my dream about this matter, with my own ideas, is extraordinary! it agrees so wonderfully with my own views and arrangements.”

“What arrangements do you allude to?”

“That you will get the bracelets, for instance.”

“In that case, it will not be the king.”

“Oh!” said Anne of Austria, “there is not such a very great distance between his majesty’s heart and your own; for, are you not his sister, for whom he has a great regard? There is not, I repeat, so very wide a distance, that my dream can be pronounced false on that account. Come, let us reckon up the chances in its favor.”

“I will count them.”

“In the first place, we will begin with the dream. If the king wins, he is sure to give you the bracelets.”

“I admit that is one.”

“If you win them, they are yours.”

“Naturally; that may be admitted also.”

“Lastly;—if Monsieur were to win them!”

“Oh!” said Madame, laughing heartily, “he would give them to the Chevalier de Lorraine.”

Anne of Austria laughed as heartily as her daughter-in-law; so much so, indeed, that her sufferings again returned, and made her turn suddenly pale in the very midst of her enjoyment.

“What is the matter?” inquired Madame, terrified.

“Nothing, nothing; a pain in my side. I have been laughing too much. We were at the fourth chance, I think.”

“I cannot see a fourth.”

“I beg your pardon; I am not excluded from the chance of winning, and if I be the winner, you are sure of me.”

“Oh! thank you, thank you!” exclaimed Madame.

“I hope that you look upon yourself as one whose chances are good, and that my dream now begins to assure the solid outlines of reality.”

“Yes, indeed: you give me both hope and confidence,” said Madame, “and the bracelets, won in this manner, will be a hundred times more precious to me.”

“Well! then, good-bye, until this evening.” And the two princesses separated. Anne of Austria, after her daughter-in-law had left her, said to herself, as she examined the bracelets, “They are, indeed, precious; since, by their means, this evening, I shall have won over a heart to my side, at the same time, fathomed an important secret.”

Then turning towards the deserted recess in her room, she said, addressing vacancy,—“Is it not thus that you would have acted, my poor Chevreuse? Yes, yes; I know it is.”

And, like a perfume of other, fairer days, her youth, her imagination, and her happiness seemed to be wafted towards the echo of this invocation.