--See Beauchesne, "Louis
XVI., sa Vie," etc., p 145.]
The king, deeply moved by the noble and glowing face of the queen,
by the tones of her voice, and by her whole expression, turned away.
He wanted to speak, but could not; tears choked his utterance; and,
as if he were ashamed of his weakness, he pushed the queen and the
dauphin back from him, hastened through the room, and disappeared
through the door on the opposite side.
Marie Antoinette looked with a long, sad face after him, and then
returned to the balcony-room. A shudder passed through her soul, and
a dark, dreadful presentiment made her heart for an instant stop
beating. She remembered that this chamber in which she had that day
suffered such immeasurable pain--that this chamber, which now echoed
the cries of a mob that had this day for the first time prescribed
laws to a queen, had been the dying-chamber of Louis XIV. [Footnote:
Historical.--See Goncourt, "Marie Antoinette," p. 195.] A dreadful
presentiment told her that this day the room had become the dying-
chamber of royalty.
Like a pale, bloody corpse, the Future passed before her eyes, and,
with that lightning speed which accompanies moments of the greatest
excitement, all the old dark warnings came back to her which she had
previously encountered. She thought of the picture of the slaughter
of the babes at Bethlehem, which decorated the walls of the room in
which the dauphin passed his first night on French soil; then of
that dreadful prophecy which Count do Cagliostro had made to her on
her journey to Paris, and of the scaffold which he showed her.
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