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“Strange fate, sublime spectacle!” she muttered. “Two plots come together to save a poor queen, or rather a poor woman prisoner who has done nothing to lure or encourage the plotters, and they are going to break at the exact same time! But who knows? Perhaps they are one and the same plot. Perhaps it’s like drilling two tunnels that are meant to meet up at the same point.

“I would thus be saved—it is up to me!

“But a poor woman sacrificed in my place!

“And two men killed so the woman can get to me!

“God and the future would not forgive me.

“I can’t! I can’t!…”

Yet her mind kept being visited and revisited by those great notions having to do with the devotion of servants for their masters, along with the antique tradition of the rights of masters over the lives of their servants; phantoms almost effaced of a dying royalty.

“Anne of Austria1 would have said yes,” she told herself. “Anne of Austria would have placed the grand principle of the salvation of royalty above all else. Anne of Austria was of the same blood as I am and almost in the same situation as I am in. What madness to have come to pursue the royalty of Anne of Austria in France! And anyway, it wasn’t I who came! Two kings2 said: ‘It is important that two royal children who have never seen each other, who do not love each other, who perhaps will never love each other, be married at the same altar, and die on the same scaffold.’ ”

“And then again, won’t my death entail that of the poor child who, in the eyes of my few remaining friends, is still King of France?

“And when my son is dead as my husband is dead, won’t their two shades smile with pity to see me stain the throne of Saint Louis with my blood to spare a few drops of common blood from spilling?”

The Queen grew increasingly fretful, her doubts increasingly feverish as the day wore on, until finally, full of the horror her fears engendered, she made it to the evening. Several times she had examined her two guardians; never had they looked more tranquil; and never had the small attentions of these coarse but good men struck her more forcefully.

When darkness came to the prison cell, when the marching feet of the rounds could be heard, when the sound of arms and the howling of dogs gave the echo throughout the somber vaults new life, when, finally, the whole prison showed itself fearful and without hope, Marie Antoinette stood appalled, overcome by an inherently feminine weakness.

“Oh! I will flee,” she said. “Yes, yes, I will flee. When they come, when they start to talk, I’ll saw the bar and I will await what God and my liberators command of me. I owe myself to my children; they will not kill them, or if they kill them and I am free, oh! Well then, at least …”

She did not finish, her eyes closed, her voice was bitten off. It was a frightful dream, the dream of this poor Queen in a room sealed with locks and bolts and iron bars. But soon, in her dream, bars and bolts fell away; she saw herself in the middle of a great army, somber and pitiless; she ordered the flames to burn, the blades to shoot out of their sheaths; she took her revenge on a people who were not, in the end, her own.

Meanwhile, Gilbert and Duchesne chatted quietly as they prepared their evening meal.

Meanwhile, too, Dixmer and Geneviève entered the Conciergerie and as usual set themselves up in the office. After an hour, also as usual, the registrar of the Palais completed his work and left them to it. As soon as the door had shut on his colleague, Dixmer rushed to the empty basket placed at the Queen’s door, waiting to be exchanged for that evening’s basket.

He seized the bit of bread left over, broke it and found the case with the Queen’s message hidden in it. As he read what she had pricked, the color drained away from his face. Geneviève watched as he tore the paper into tiny pieces, which he tossed into the fiery mouth of the furnace.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Everything’s agreed.” He turned to Geneviève. “Come here, madame.”

“Me?”

“Yes, there’s something