The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Alexandre Dumas
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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 is 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 win 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 not you 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, almost 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 you look upon yourself as one whose chances are good, and that my dream now begins to assume the solid form 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-by, 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, and, at the same time, shall have guessed a secret."
Then, turning toward 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 days gone by, her youth, her imagination, and her happiness, seemed to return to her with the echo of this invocation.
CHAPTER VII.
THE LOTTERY.
At eight o'clock in the evening, every one had assembled in the queen-mother's apartments. Anne of Austria, in full dress, beautiful still, from former loveliness, and from all the resources which coquetry can command at the hands of clever assistants, concealed, or rather pretended to conceal, from the crowd of young courtiers who surrounded her, and who still admired her, thanks to the combination of circumstances which we have indicated in the preceding chapter, the ravages, which were already visible, of the acute suffering to which she finally yielded a few years later. Madame, almost as great a coquette as Anne of Austria, and the queen, simple and natural as usual, were seated beside her, each contending for her good graces. The ladies of honor, united in a body, in order to resist with greater effect, and consequently with more success, the witty and lively conversations which the young men held about them, were enabled like a battalion formed in square, to offer each other the means of attack and defense which were thus at their command. Montalais, learned in that species of warfare which consists of a skirmishing character, protected the whole line by the sort of rolling-fire which she directed against the enemy. Saint-Aignan, in utter despair at the rigor, which became insulting almost, from the very fact of her persisting in it, which Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente displayed, tried to turn his back upon her; but, overcome by the irresistible brilliancy of her large eyes, he, every moment, returned to consecrate his defeat by new submissions, to which Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente did not fail to reply by fresh acts of impertinence. Saint Aignan did not know which way to turn. La Valliere had about her, not exactly a court, but sprinklings of courtiers. Saint-Aignan, hoping by this maneuver to attract Athenaïs's attention toward him, had approached the young girl, and saluted her with a respect which induced some to believe that he wished to balance Athenaïs by Louise. But these were persons who had neither been witnesses of the scene during the shower, nor had heard it spoken of. But, as the majority was already informed, and well informed, too, on the matter, the acknowledged favor with which she was regarded, had attracted to her side some of the most astute, as well as the least sensible, members of the court. The former, because they said with Montainge, "What can we tell?" and the latter, who said with Rabelais, "It is likely." The greatest number had followed in the wake of the latter, just as in hunting five or six of the best hounds alone follow the scent of the animal hunted, while the remainder of the pack follow only the scent of the hounds. The two queens and Madame examined with particular attention the toilets of their ladies and maids of honor; and they condescended to forget they were queens in recollecting that they were women. In other words, they pitilessly