your name was saved. And when the King was absent
from the ramparts, I took care his place should not be empty. But here
in Paris--"

Till now she had spoken slowly, coldly, in a tone of pity and maternal
reproof, as though inspired thereto by the downcast eyes and pouting
mouth of the King, who looked like a vicious child receiving a scolding.
But the name of Paris exasperated her. A city without faith, a city
cynical and accursed, its blood-stained stones ever ready for sedition
and barricades! What possessed these poor fallen kings, that they came
to take refuge in this Sodom! It was Paris, it was its atmosphere
tainted by carnage and vice that completed the ruin of the historical
houses; it was this that had made Christian lose what the maddest of his
ancestors had always known how to preserve--the respect and pride of
their race. Oh! When on the very day of their arrival, the first night
of their exile, she had seen him so excited, so gay, while all around
him were secretly weeping, Frederique had guessed the humiliation and
shame she would have to undergo. Then in one breath, without pausing,
with cutting words that lashed the pallid face of the royal rake, and
striped it red as with a whip, she recalled one after the other all his
follies, his rapid descent from pleasure to vice, and vice to crime.

"You have deceived me under my very eyes, in my own house; adultery has
sat at my table, it has brushed against my dress. When you were tired of
that dollish little face who had not even the grace to conceal her
tears, you went to the gutter, wallowing shamelessly in the slime and
mud of the streets, and bringing back the dregs of your orgies, of your
sickly remorse, all the pollution of the mire. Remember how I saw you
totter and stammer on that morning, when for the second time you lost
your throne. What have you not done! Holy Mother of angels! What have
you not done! You have traded with the royal seal, you have sold crosses
and titles."

And in a lower tone, as though she feared lest the stillness and silence
of the night might hear, she added:--

"You have stolen, yes, stolen! Those diamonds, those stones torn from
the crown--it was you who did it, and I allowed my faithful Greb to be
suspected and dismissed. The theft being known, it was necessary to find
a sham culprit to prevent the real one ever being discovered. For this
has been my one, my constant preoccupation: to uphold the King, to keep
him untouch