“Monsieur le Vicomte de Nérac waits on Madame la Marquise,” said the gentleman-usher.

Madame de Pompadour glanced at the clock. As André bowed it began to strike ten distinctly.

“You are punctual, Vicomte, and a man of your word,” the lady said with a faint smile.

André bowed again. What a contrast! The salon was as gay and refined as it had been a week ago. All traces of disorder had vanished and Madame herself in her heliotrope silk was as divinely seductive, as fresh and unconquerable, as when she had captivated Paris and the King at the ball of the Hôtel-de-Ville. And against that vision of loveliness he saw reflected in the mirror his own grim face, with the haggard eyes and deep-cut lines round mouth and chin of a man who had “been in hell” since he last stood in this room.

“You are tired,” Madame said gently. “If you please—” she wheeled a chair forward. But André remained standing. “I have to ask your pardon,” she continued, dropping her eyes. “I am sorry that last night I used words which I deeply regret using. But though I cannot ask you, Vicomte, to forget them, I can and do ask you to forgive.”

André’s hand tightened unconsciously on the back of the chair. He was here to demand an apology, and he had been swiftly disarmed by one gentle stroke.

“This is the jewel of the Marquise de Beau Séjour,” Madame said, “it is useless to me. I return it to you, unless you prefer I should return it to the Marquise herself in your presence and repeat what I have tried to say to you.”

André took the jewel mechanically. An apology also to Denise! That, too, he had come to extort, and it was his and hers without the asking. The pastels on the panelled walls rocked slowly in a blur of the October sunlight which kissed the heliotrope ribbon on Madame’s throat.

“You have served me,” she added, “as no man has ever done or ever will. I was ungrateful and false and cruel and unjust. Let me atone now.” She had held out a hand.

A third time André felt that he did not know Madame de Pompadour; he was learning as some men can that the heart and thoughts of a woman of genius, born to conquer a king and subjugate a court, are not to be fathomed in a few weeks, even by one to whom many other women have laid bare the mysterious workings of a woman’s heart.

“I have brought you your despatch, Madame,” he said, choosing his words slowly, and conscious of his clumsiness before the ease and tact of this bourgeoise adventuress.

“Yes,” she took it almost indifferently, but the flash that turned her eyes from grey to blue, the quick movement of the locket on her breast, would have revealed much to another woman. She placed it on the table beside a tiny heap of torn papers. André recognised these fragments. They had once been the lettre de cachet for Denise, which Madame had destroyed before he came. “Yes,” she said, “though the despatch is useless now, none the less I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“Useless,” André stammered.

“For two reasons,” she smiled. “The agent from whom you forced that despatch at the peril of your life took poison an hour after he was lodged at the Bastille. You had not heard? Well, the dead tell no embarrassing tales. Secondly,” she pulled out her watch, “the Jacobites have already been informed in the King’s own handwriting that they might have a forgery in my writing imposed on them, and that information has already been privately conveyed to the English Government. The English would not give a sou for the secret despatch to-day.”

So that was how Madame had spent her night, and it had left her radiant as Aphrodite rising from the foam, while he, André, was oppressed by the weariness of the defeated.

“Yes, the Marquise de Beau Séjour is safe, you are safe, Vicomte, and I am safe, and the King is happy and well. The only persons who are not safe and happy,” she smiled with the daintiest irony, “are or will be some of your enemies and mine. My hour has come. I shall not ask them to forgive, nor will they forget.”

Had Denise been in the room she would have recalled the words of the girl whom André had conducted to the Barrier of St. Louis. This woman was the destiny of France, against whom men fought in vain. As it was, Mont Rouge’s letter in his breast pocket seemed to cry out, and André shivered. Madame de Pompadour’s triumph was complete.

“No, they will not forget,” Madame continued, “because they conspired to ruin you, my friend, you to whom Antoinette de Pompadour will always be grateful, for when you might have deserted her and saved yourself you refused. You may not forgive me, but I can punish them, and I will.”

André impulsively took her hand. “Forget my words, Madame,” he cried.

“They were forgotten hours ago,” she answered softly. “I only remember your oath of loyalty and how nobly you kept it.”

It was the vivandière at Fontenoy who was looking at him now; nay, rather it was the woman the beating of whose heart he had heard on the secret stair. Death alone would silence that beating now.

“See,” she said, “you are again the Captain of the Queen’s Guards, the King has promised, and you shall be Minister for War. And,” she unrolled a sheet of paper, “if you choose, to-morrow in the Galerie des Glaces they shall know that before long you will be Marquis de Beau Séjour as well as Vicomte de Nérac. But neither I nor you can settle that, nor the King, for kings and men alone,” she laughed gently, “cannot make a man’s fate.”

“I thank you, Madame. His Majesty, I hope, will know that I am his servant always, but my decision is already taken, and from to-day I shall not live at Versailles nor Paris; De Nérac is to be my home, and perhaps some day Beau Séjour.”

Madame had dropped the roll of paper in an astonishment she failed to master. Her lips parted as she looked him in the face.

“Yes,” André repeated. “The Marquise de Beau Séjour and I have decided. Nothing can alter that decision.”

“Is it because of me?” she asked in a low voice.

“No, Marquise. I had made up my mind before I knew Mademoiselle had made up hers.”

Madame endeavoured to penetrate his motives. There were mysteries fascinating to a woman, the wrestlings of the spirit that alter a human soul, to be read in that handsome face so grey, so tried, yet so nobly firm. Madame de Pompadour could discover no more than that a new element, born of spiritual travail in the night that had passed, had entered into André’s life. What it was, whence it came, and why, baffled her. It is, perhaps, well for women of genius to learn early that there are gifts of the spirit to a few men that it is not for a woman to comprehend, just as there are impulses in a woman that the choicest soul of man must accept by faith in the acts in which they find expression.

“Then your ambitions are gone?” she asked, with that touch of sadness that can quicken sympathy into inspiration. “You are destined to be great, and,” her eyes pierced the vision of the future, “I desired to help to make you great.”

“Madame,” he answered simply, “I have achieved my greatest ambition, and I believe I can serve my France better at Beau Séjour than at Versailles.”

She was playing the great game that was her life, and she was not beaten yet.

“And ‘No. 101’?” she asked gravely.

“There will be treachery, no doubt, in the future,” André replied, “there may even be a ‘No. 101’; but the ‘No. 101’ that you and I, Madame, have fought with will not trouble you again.”

Madame de Pompadour studied the speaker’s face, reflecting on the mysterious confidence in this answer. The riddle was as puzzling to her to-day as it had been at Fontenoy. André, she saw, could have told her much; but she also felt he would never tell. And it was not the least of her rare gifts instinctively to recognise when to stop and when to yield. The future was her absorbing care always, and the Vicomte de Nérac would belong to that future.

“You keep your best news to the end,” she said with graceful gratitude. “Thanks to you, Vicomte, I hope I have heard the last of ‘No. 101.’ I shall not forget you at Beau Séjour; do not, in the years to come, think too harshly of me. Good-bye!”

“Adieu, Madame,” he raised her fingers to his lips. “Adieu!”

And as the door closed on him she knew, if “No. 101” had defeated her after all, that whatever the past had been, whatever the future might bring, she would never triumph over any man as she had triumphed that morning over André de Nérac. Nor would he ever forget the salon of Madame de Pompadour. The spell of a woman’s genius once cast on any man touched to the finer issues of human destinies can never be effaced.

But one thing remained, and it was settled in the parlour of “The Cock with the Spurs of Gold,” in which the Comtesse des Forges, the Duc de Pontchartrain, and the Comte de Mont Rouge, still a prisoner, unknown to the Court and the King, were waiting for André.

They had dimly guessed why they had been summoned, and their bitter fears were confirmed by the sight of Denise, whom André had brought with him.

“The Comte de Mont Rouge,” André began without ceremony, “was arrested last night by myself. The reason will be found in these three letters, copies of which I now give you.”

Denise alone was surprised. André had been given something at the Barrier of St. Louis after all. The letters proved to have been written by Mont Rouge, the Duke, and the Comtesse.

“If I chose,” André continued, “all of you three might now be in the Bastille, noble though you be. But the Marquise de Beau Séjour, who has not read those letters, has asked me to spare you because you were once her friends. I have agreed.”

“I shall not forget your indulgence, Mademoiselle,” the Comtesse burst out, beside herself with vindictive rage.

“Nor will Madame de Pompadour,” André answered drily. “The originals of those letters are now in her possession in a sealed envelope. She does not yet know what they contain; may I hope you will never make it necessary for her to ask for permission from the Marquise de Beau Séjour to break that seal? You may not find either the King or Madame as indulgent as the lady whom you have wronged.”

“Mademoiselle,” said the Duke, after a pause, “the pleasantest task for a gentleman in life is to confess to a lady that he has been a fool, when the folly has been inspired by herself. You will give me that pleasure now.”

And with his finished smile he had kissed her hand and bowed himself out of the room. Not so Mont Rouge.

“You shall give me satisfaction, Vicomte,” he growled sulkily.

André looked him all over with a quiet scorn. “Monsieur le Comte,” he said, “the Vicomte de Nérac does not cross swords with traitors nor with men who use loaded dice.”

Then he took Denise to her carriage and returned.

“And when your sword arm is healed,” he added, “two other gentlemen have a prior claim, and I understand they will both insist on it, the Comte des Forges,” he bowed to the Comtesse, “and my friend the Vicomte de St. Benôit, whose name you pledged to an English traitor without his knowledge, and whom you tricked into being the accomplice of a card-sharper’s rascality. I am afraid I shall not have the pleasure of showing you that for such as you the Vicomte de Nérac does not use a sword, but his hunting whip.”

And André left him to his fate.

Neither he nor Denise altered their decision. To Beau Séjour they went, and at Beau Séjour they remained. Had you visited, as so many travellers then and since have done, the famous château, two questions you would certainly have been tempted to ask: To whom had that noble coat of arms in the great hall once belonged, a coat not of the Beau Séjour nor of the De Néracs? And the other would rise to your lips in the crypt of the village church, where amidst the nameless tombs of many who bear the same coat of arms with the same motto lay a single slab. “François de St. Amant” is all the name it bears. It has no date, no heraldic symbol to show why it is there, but at the foot are cut the familiar words, “Dieu Le Vengeur.” Nor could any one now or since explain why these things were so, nor why beside that simple slab lay for many years another with no inscription on it at all, a tomb waiting, as it were for some one whom death had not yet claimed. To the villagers, happier than any serfs on any demesne in France, these mysteries were simply the will of Madame la Marquise, nor did the curious ever succeed in getting a more satisfying answer.

The villagers were right. It was Denise’s act, and André, whatever he may have guessed, never asked why, for of certain events in the past both he and she were content with the better part of silence. Friends came to them from Paris and Versailles; they heard of all that was being done at the Court, of the unshaken supremacy of Madame de Pompadour; they lived through the years of hollow truce that followed the war of Fontenoy, through the terrible humiliation of the Seven Years’ War that followed the hollow truce, through the sombre and bleak tragedies of misery, disgrace, and starvation, defeat on sea and land for their France. Once only did they go together to Paris, in 1768, to attend the funeral of Queen Marie Leczinska. And once only before then André had been summoned alone to Versailles, to say good-bye to the dying Madame de Pompadour, to find her a wasted skeleton, her face a pitiful wreck of the beauty which twenty years before had stormed the privileged citadel of royalty and the noblesse, but a woman in whom the spirit and the wit that had dominated France were unquenched and unquenchable.

Nor did André ever again forget that April day with its chilling rain. He stood at the windows of the Palace, where, if you will, you can stand to-day, and watched the cortège that carried the last remains of the Marquise de Pompadour from the Cour d’Honneur into the Place d’Armes and down the Avenue de Paris to the magnificent sepulchre that had been prepared in the Church of the Capuchins in the Place Vendôme for the Mistress of France.

To one who had heard the crystal-gazer’s prediction, and had lived through these twenty years, there was more than a sermon in the King’s heartless comment as he, too, eyed the long procession wind away in the drenching squalls.

“Madame,” he said, “has a cold day for her journey.” That was all.

And Queen Marie did not exaggerate when she wrote, “She is forgotten as if she had never existed. Such is the way of the world.” What a world is this, and how does Fortune banter us! as a greater person than Queen Marie remarked.

When André returned to his château from that melancholy visit, Denise asked no questions, not even about the new ring he wore, with a crest she knew and the historic motto, “Discret et Fidèle.” Versailles and Fontenoy alike belonged to a buried past.

Still less had either reason or wish to witness the degradation of the Palace of Louis Quatorze by Madame du Barry, under the grandson for whose death the nation that had once called him “Louis the Well-Beloved” now prayed. With the accession of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette they both believed that the night of bankruptcy and shame had at last passed, and death in his mercy took them away before the belief could be shattered, before the silver trumpets of the nobles of the Chevau-légers de la Garde de la Maison du Roi, that had blown for the monarchy of France on so many stricken fields, were silenced by the tumbrils of the Conciergerie for ever. Perhaps they were happier in their ignorance than those whose footsteps to-day so inquisitively mock the proud silence of the Galerie des Glaces, whose voices scare the ghostly echoes in the loneliness of what was once the salon of Madame de Pompadour; for these are reminded at every turn that in the new France, Versailles, once the emblem of a nation’s greatness, is now only a museum of pictures; that if it has a history for the French children playing on the terrace it is because it is a tomb of bitter memories, of blood shed not only by the hand of an alien foe, of the disaster that cries out for a nation’s revenge, but is not blessed with the heritage of a people’s love, still less has the right to ask for a people’s tears.