y word she may utter.
What she thinks.... Ah! who knows? She is an old woman, my friend, for
she is seventy-one. Her memories are a millstone about her neck. No
wonder she is silent. Think what her life has been. As a child, three
years of semi-captivity at the Tuileries, with the mob howling round the
railings. Three and a half years a prisoner in the Temple. Both parents
sent to the guillotine--her aunt to the same. All her world--massacred.
As a girl, she was collected, majestic; or else she could not have
survived those years in the Temple, alone--the last of her family. What
must her thoughts have been, at night in her prison? As a woman, she is
cold, sad, unemotional. No one ever lived through such troubles with so
little display of feeling. The Restoration, the Hundred Days, the second
Restoration, Louis XVIII., and his flight to England; Charles X. and his
abdication; her own husband, the Duc d'Angouleme--the Dauphin for many
years, the King for half an hour--these are some of her experiences. She
has lived for forty years in exile in Mittau, Memel, Warsaw, Konigsberg,
Prague, England; and now she is at Frohsdorf, awaiting the end. You
ask me what she says? She says nothing, but she knows--she has always
known--that her brother did not die in the Temple."

"Then--" suggested Colville, who certainly had acquired the French art
of putting much meaning into one word.

"Then why not seek him? you would ask. How do you know that she has not
done so, my friend, with tears? But as years passed on, and brought
no word of him, it became less and less desirable. While Louis XVIII.
continued to reign there was no reason to wish to find Louis XVII., you
understand. For there was still a Bourbon, of the direct line, upon the
throne. Louis XVIII. would scarcely desire it. One would not expect
him to seek very diligently for one who would deprive him of the
crown. Charles X., knowing he must succeed his brother, was no more
enthusiastic in the search. And the Duchess d'Angouleme herself, you
ask? I can see the question in your face."

"Yes," conceded Colville. "For, after all, he was her brother."

"Yes--and if she found him, what would be the result? Her uncle would
be driven from the throne; her father-in-law would not inherit; her
own husband, the Dauphin, would be Dauphin no longer. She herself could
never be Queen of France. It is a hard thing to say of a woman--"

Monsieur de Gemosac paused for a moment in reflection