hing of the old spirit of chivalry,
devoted themselves to her service, and solicited permission to watch by
her bedside till she recovered. As has been already seen, the bed-chamber
and dressing-room of a queen of France had never been guarded from
intrusion with the jealousy which protects the apartments of ladies in
other countries, so that the proposal was less startling than it would
have been considered elsewhere, while the number of nurses removed all
pretext for scandal. Louis willingly gave the required permission, being
apparently flattered by the solicitude exhibited for his queen's health.
And each morning at seven the sick-watchers[7] took their seats in the
queen's chamber, sharing with the Countess of Provence, the Princesse de
Lamballe, and the Count d'Artois the task of keeping order and quiet in
the sick-room till eleven at night. Though there was no scandal, there was
plenty of jesting at so novel an arrangement. Wags proposed that in the
case of the king being taken ill, a list should be prepared of the ladies
who should tend his sick-bed. However, the champions were not long on
duty: at the end of little more than a week their patient was
convalescent. She herself took off the sentence of banishment which she
had pronounced against the king in a brief and affectionate note, which
said "that she had suffered a great deal, but what she had felt most was
to be for so many days deprived of the pleasure of embracing him." And the
temporary separation seemed to have but increased their mutual affection
for each other.

The Trianon was now more than ever delightful to her. The new plantations,
which contained no fewer than eight hundred different kinds of trees, rich
with every variety of foliage, were beginning, by their effectiveness, to
give evidence of the taste with which they had been laid out; while with a
charity which could not bear to keep her blessings wholly to herself, she
had set apart one corner of the grounds for a row of picturesque cottages,
in which she had established a number of pensioners whom age or infirmity
had rendered destitute, and whom she constantly visited with presents from
her dairy or her fruit-trees. Roaming about the lawns and walks, which she
had made herself, in a muslin gown and a plain straw hat, she could forget
that she was a queen. She did not suspect that the intriguers, who from
time to time maligned her most innocent actions, were misrepresenting even
these simpl