"I hope your majesty is satisfied with me," answered Marie Antoinette. "You feel, like me, that it is a new humiliation for us if we are to allow our very enjoyment of nature to be under the control of the people's general, and if even the air is no longer to be the free air for us!"
"I have only thought that in such unguarded walks you would be threatened with danger," answered the king, perplexed. "Lafayette has painted to me in such dark and dreadful colors, and I have so painfully had to confess that he speaks the truth, that I could only think of your safety, and take no other point of view than to see you sheltered from the attacks of your enemies, and from the rage of these factions. I have therefore approved Lafayette's proposal, and allowed him to protect your majesty on your walks."
"But you have not fixed definite hours for my walks? You have not done that, sire, have you?"
"I have indeed done that," answered the king, gently. "I am familiar with your habits, and know that in autumn and winter you usually take your walks between twelve and two, and in summer afternoons between five and seven. I have therefore named these hours to General Lafayette."
The queen heaved a deep sigh. "Sire," she said, softly, "you yourself are binding tighter and tighter the chains of our imprisonment. To-day you limit our ******* to two poor hours, and that will be a precedent for others to continue what you have begun.
We shall after this walk for two hours daily under the protection of M. de Lafayette, but there will come a time when this protection will not suffice, and no security will be great enough for us. For the royal authority which shows itself weak and dependent, and which does not draw power from itself--the royalty which suffers its crown to be borne up for it by the hands of others, confesses thereby that it is too weak to bear the burden itself. Oh, sire, I would rather you had let me break away from the rage of the people, while I might be walking unguarded, than be permitted to take my daily walks under the protection of M. de Lafayette!"
"You see every thing in too dark and sad a light," cried the king.
"Every thing will come out right if we are only wise and carefully conform to circumstances, and by well-timed concessions and admissions propitiate this hate and bring this enmity to silence."
The queen did not reply; she stooped down to the dauphin, and, pressing a kiss upon his locks, whispered: "Now yon may tell every thing, Louis. It is not longer necessary to keep silent about any thing, for silence were useless! So tell of your heroism, my son!"
"Is it of heroism that you talk?" said the king, whose nice ear had caught the words of the queen.
"Yes, of heroism, sire," answered Marie Antoinette. "But it is with us as with Don Quixote; we believed that we were fighting for our honor and our throne; now we must confess that we only fought against windmills. I beg you now, sire, to inform General Lafayette that it is not necessary to call out his National Guards on my account, I shall not walk again!"
And the queen kept her word. Never again during the winter did she go down into the gardens and park of the Tuileries. She never gave Lafayette occasion to protect her, but she at least gained thereby what Lafayette wanted to reach by his National Guard--she held the populace away from the Tuileries. At first they stood in dense masses day after day along the fence of the park and the royal garden, but when they saw that Marie Antoinette would no more expose herself to their curious and evil glances, they grew tired of waiting for her, and withdrew from the neighborhood of the Tuileries,--but only to repair to their clubs and listen to the raving speeches which Marat, Santerre, and other officers, hurled like poisoned arrows at the queen-only to go into the National Assembly and hear Mirabeau and Robespierre, Danton, Chenier, Petion, and all the rest, the assembled representatives of the nation, launch their thundering philippics against a royalty appointed by the grace of God, and causing the people to believe that it was a royalty appointed by the wrath of God.
