ted three prepared tables. At one of these tables
the king and the two queens were seated. Louis XIV., placed opposite to
the young queen, his wife, smiled upon her with an expression of real
happiness. Anne of Austria held the cards against the cardinal, and her
daughter-in-law assisted her in the game, when she was not engaged in
smiling at her husband. As for the cardinal, who was lying on his bed
with a weary and careworn face, his cards were held by the Comtesse de
Soissons, and he watched them with an incessant look of interest and
cupidity.

The cardinal's face had been painted by Bernouin; but the rouge, which
glowed only on his cheeks, threw into stronger contrast the sickly
pallor of his countenance and the shining yellow of his brow. His eyes
alone acquired a more brilliant luster from this auxiliary, and upon
those sick man's eyes were, from time to time, turned the uneasy looks
of the king, the queen, and the courtiers. The fact is, that the two
eyes of the Signor Mazarin were the stars more or less brilliant in
which the France of the seventeenth century read its destiny every
evening and every morning.

Monseigneur neither won nor lost; he was, therefore neither gay nor
sad. It was a stagnation in which, full of pity for him, Anne of Austria
would not have willingly left him; but in order to attract the attention
of the sick man by some brilliant stroke, she must have either won
or lost. To win would have been dangerous, because Mazarin would have
changed his indifference into an ugly grimace; to lose would likewise
have been dangerous, because she must have cheated, and the infanta,
who watched her game, would, doubtless, have exclaimed against her
partiality for Mazarin. Profiting by this calm, the courtiers were
chatting. When not in a bad humor, M. de Mazarin was a very debonnaire
prince, and he, who prevented nobody from singing, provided they paid,
was not tyrant enough to prevent people from talking, provided they made
up their minds to lose.

They were therefore chatting. At the first table, the king's younger
brother, Philip, Duc d'Anjou, was admiring his handsome face in the
glass of a box. His favorite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, leaning over
the back of the prince's chair, was listening, with secret envy, to
the Comte de Guiche, another of Philip's favorites, who was relating in
choice terms the various vicissitudes of fortune of the royal adventurer
Charles II. He told, as so many fabulous