atened to overturn everything
and you gave no attention to the still water. There is, however, a
proverb current in France relating to water which is quiet."

"Continue," said the queen.

"Well, then, madame, not a day passes in which I do not suffer affronts
from your princes and your lordly servants, all of them automata who do
not perceive that I wind up the spring that makes them move, nor do they
see that beneath my quiet demeanor lies the still scorn of an injured,
irritated man, who has sworn to himself to master them one of these
days. We have arrested Monsieur de Beaufort, but he is the least
dangerous among them. There is the Prince de Conde----"

"The hero of Rocroy. Do you think of him?"

"Yes, madame, often and often, but pazienza, as we say in Italy; next,
after Monsieur de Conde, comes the Duke of Orleans."

"What are you saying? The first prince of the blood, the king's uncle!"

"No! not the first prince of the blood, not the king's uncle, but the
base conspirator, the soul of every cabal, who pretends to lead the
brave people who are weak enough to believe in the honor of a prince of
the blood--not the prince nearest to the throne, not the king's uncle,
I repeat, but the murderer of Chalais, of Montmorency and of Cinq-Mars,
who is playing now the same game he played long ago and who thinks that
he will win the game because he has a new adversary--instead of a man
who threatened, a man who smiles. But he is mistaken; I shall not
leave so near the queen that source of discord with which the deceased
cardinal so often caused the anger of the king to rage above the boiling
point."

Anne blushed and buried her face in her hands.

"What am I to do?" she said, bowed down beneath the voice of her tyrant.

"Endeavor to remember the names of those faithful servants who crossed
the Channel, in spite of Monsieur de Richelieu, tracking the roads along
which they passed by their blood, to bring back to your majesty certain
jewels given by you to Buckingham."

Anne arose, full of majesty, and as if touched by a spring, and looking
at the cardinal with the haughty dignity which in the days of her youth
had made her so powerful: "You are insulting me!" she said.

"I wish," continued Mazarin, finishing, as it were, the speech this
sudden movement of the queen had cut; "I wish, in fact, that you should
now do for your husband what you formerly did for your lover."

"Again that accusation!" cried the queen. "I