The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [151]
A thin hard object slid from it as though it were a sheath and rang out with a metallic sound as it fell to the brick floor. This object was a file of incredible fineness, a jewel more than a tool, one of those steel implements with which the feeblest and clumsiest hand can cut through the thickest iron bar in a quarter of an hour.
She read the note:
Madame, tomorrow night at half past nine a man will come and chat with the gendarmes who guard you through the window on the Women’s Courtyard. While they are so engaged, Your Majesty will saw through the third bar of her window, cutting diagonally from left to right.… A quarter of an hour should suffice Your Majesty; then get ready to go through the window.… This note comes from one of your most devoted and faithful subjects, who has dedicated his life to the service of Your Majesty and would be happy to sacrifice it for her.
“Oh!” murmured the Queen. “Is this a trap? But, no, I think I recognize the writing. It is the same as at the Temple; it is the writing of the Knight of Maison-Rouge. Well, well! Perhaps God wants me to escape after all.”
With that the Queen fell on her knees and took refuge in prayer, the prisoner’s supreme balm.
43
DIXMER’S PREPARATIONS
The next day finally dawned, preceded by a night of insomnia; but the dawn was alarming, appearing as apocalyptic red streaks that could only be described, without exaggeration, as the color of blood. Every day in those days and in that particular year, the most beautiful sun had livid spots.
The Queen hardly slept a wink and what sleep she did get was not restful; barely had she closed her eyes than it seemed to her she could see blood and hear screaming. She had actually fallen asleep with the file in her hand.
She spent part of the day in prayer. The guardians were so used to seeing her praying that they took no notice of the increase in pious devotion.
Now and again the prisoner drew from her bosom the file that had been sent to her by one of her saviors; she would compare the delicacy of the implement with the strength of the bars. Luckily, the bars were sealed into the wall only at one end, that is, at the bottom. The top fitted into a crossbar. With the bottom part sawed through, one had only to yank the bar for it to come away.
But it wasn’t the physical difficulties that froze the Queen’s blood in her veins; she knew perfectly well that the thing was possible, and it was this very possibility that turned hope into a bloody flame that dazzled her.
But she realized that to reach her her friends would have to kill the men who guarded her, and she would not have consented to their deaths at any cost. Those men were the only ones to have shown her some pity for a long, long while.
On the other hand, beyond those bars she was instructed to saw, on the other side of the bodies of those two men who would bite the dust trying to prevent her saviors from reaching her, were life, liberty, and perhaps vengeance, three things so sweet, especially for a woman, that she asked God to forgive her for desiring them so passionately.
Furthermore, she believed she saw no sign that the guardians were agitated by any suspicion; they didn’t even seem to be aware of the trap they hoped to catch the prisoner in, supposing the plot was a trap. These simple men would have given themselves away to eyes as practiced as those of a woman used to sniffing out evil, having suffered so much of it.
And so the Queen almost entirely gave up thinking about the twin openings that had been presented to her like a trap. But the more the humiliation of being caught in a trap faded,