The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [150]
“That’s odd,” he said when they were outside with the door firmly shut behind them and the fresh air had cooled his burning brow. “Oh, yes! Very odd!” muttered Geneviève.
In the days when they had been close, husband and wife would have communicated the source of their amazement to each other. But Dixmer shut his thoughts away in his mind, battling with them as he would some hallucination, while Geneviève simply threw a backward glance over the somber Palais when they had turned into the pont-au-Change. As she looked back, something like the phantom of a lost friend materialized, stirring up a whole host of memories both bitter and sweet at once.
They reached the place de Grève without having uttered a single word.
During that time, the gendarme Gilbert had stepped out and taken the basket of provisions destined for the Queen. It contained fruit, a cold chicken, a bottle of white wine, a carafe of water, and half of a two-pound loaf of bread.
Gilbert removed the napkin and recognized the normal arrangement of things packed in the basket by citizeness Richard. Then he shifted the screen and spoke loudly to the Queen.
“Citizeness, here is your supper.”
Marie Antoinette broke the bread, but scarcely had her fingers made an impression in it than she felt the cold contact of silver and understood that the bread enclosed something out of the ordinary. She looked around, but the gendarme had already withdrawn. For a moment the Queen didn’t move, measuring as she was Gilbert’s gradual retreat. When she was sure he had gone to sit down next to his comrade, she pulled the case out of the bread.
The case contained a note. She unfolded it and read the following words:
Madame, be ready tomorrow at the same time as you receive this note, for tomorrow at this time a woman will be introduced into Your Majesty’s prison cell. This woman will take your clothes and give you hers; then you will walk out of the Conciergerie on the arm of one of your most devoted servants.
Do not worry about the commotion that will occur in the neighboring room, do not stop at the cries or groans; concentrate only on quickly putting on the dress and mantle of the woman who is to take Your Majesty’s place.
“What devotion!” murmured the Queen. “Thank you, Lord! So I am not, as they claim I am, an object of execration for everyone.”
She reread the note. The second paragraph suddenly hit her.
“ ‘Do not stop at the cries or groans,’ ” she murmured. “Oh! That means they’ll strike my two guardians, poor fellows, who’ve shown me so much pity. Oh, never! Never!”
She tore off the bottom half of the note, which was on white paper, and as she had no pencil or quill with which to reply to this unknown friend who so concerned himself with her, she took the brooch from her fichu and pricked the paper to form the letters that composed the following words:
I cannot and should not accept the sacrifice of anyone’s life in exchange for mine.
M. A.
Then she slipped the note back into the case and drove the case into the untouched part of the broken loaf of bread.
This operation had only just been completed when the clock struck ten. The Queen was holding the piece of bread in her hand and sadly counting the notes ringing out the hours as they vibrated slowly and distinctly, when she heard a jarring noise such as a diamond would make scratching glass at one of the windows overlooking what was known as the Women’s Courtyard. This noise was followed by a faint shock at the windowpane, a shock repeated several times and covered deliberately by a man’s cough. Then a small piece of rolled-up paper appeared at a corner of the window, slid slowly in, and fell to the foot of the wall. The Queen heard the sound of keys jangling and footsteps ringing on the cobblestones as they moved away.
She realized that a hole had just been made in a corner of the window and