t blues, the most
dazzling gold:--this was Versailles, as Eugenie saw it, on this autumn
day. And through it all, the blowing of a harsh and nipping wind
sounded the first approach of winter, still defied, as it were, by
these bright woods decked for a last festival.

It was the 5th of October--the very anniversary of the day when Marie
Antoinette, sitting alone beside the lake at Trianon, was startled by
a page from the chateau bringing the news of the arrival of the Paris
mob, and the urgent summons to return at once;--the day when she
passed the Temple of Love, gleaming amid the quiet streams, for
the last time, and fled back through the leafy avenues leading to
Versailles, under a sky--cloudy and threatening rain--which was
remembered by a later generation as blending fitly with the first act
of that most eminent tragedy--'The Fall of the House of France.'

Madame de Pastourelles had in her hand a recent book in which a French
man of letters, both historian and poet, had told once again the most
piteous of stories; a story, however, which seemed then, and still
seems, to be not even yet ripe for history--so profound and living
are the sympathies and the passions which to this day surround it in
France.

Eugenie had closed the book, and her eyes, as they looked out upon the
astonishing light and shade of the terrace and its surroundings, had
filled unconsciously with tears, not so much for Marie Antoinette,
as for all griefs!--for this duped, tortured, struggling life
of ours--for the 'mortalia' which grip all hearts, which none
escape--pain, and separation, and remorse, hopes deceived, and promise
mocked, decadence in one's self, change in others, and that iron
gentleness of death which closes all.

For nearly a year she had been trying to recover her forces after an
experience which had shaken her being to its depths. Not because,
when she went to nurse his last days, she had any love left, in the
ordinary sense, for her ruined and debased husband; but because of
that vast power of pity, that genius for compassion to which she
was born. Not a tremor of body or soul, not a pang of physical or
spiritual fear, but she had passed through them, in common with the
man she upheld; a man who, like Louis the Well-Beloved, former master
of the building beneath whose shadow she was sitting, was ready to
grovel for her pardon, when threatened with a priest and the last
terrors, and would have recalled his mistress, rejoic