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With a heavy heart and a throbbing brow, he paced the length of his royal bedchamber, and thus did he converse with himself: "How he justified the king, almost with his dying breath! Ah! but I justify not myself. Why did I sign that silly and cruel decree, by which the prime jewel of my kingdom is lost? Why did I not consider the thing well, and consult the first president?
In the royal bedchamber the king was resting quietly, and near by, on a lounge, the state physician dozed. The Captain of the household troop of cuirassiers nodded in the ante-room. Only the archbishop remained awake. He sat in his chamber and wrote. Now and then he would moisten his lips with watered wine.
Presenting himself at three o'clock in the afternoon, after these not very satisfactory preliminaries, in the bedchamber of the Duchess, where it was her habit to grant confidential audiences, he met, as might easily be supposed, with a chilling reception: The Duchess, standing motionless in the centre of the apartment, attended by Berlaymont, the Duke of Aerachot, and Count Egmont, acknowledged his salutations with calm severity.
The crimson curtain being let down between the ladies and gentlemen, the cabin became a bedchamber for twenty persons, who were laid on shelves one above another. For a long time our various incommodities kept us all awake except five or six, who were accustomed to sleep nightly amid the uproar of their own snoring, and had little to dread from any other species of disturbance.
The four Mesdames, who are clumsy plump old wenches, with a bad likeness to their father, stand in a bedchamber in a row, with black cloaks and knotting-bags, looking good-humoured, not knowing what to say, and wriggling as if they wanted to make water. This ceremony too is very short; then you are carried to the Dauphin's three boys, who you may be sure only bow and stare.
In this place came Sir John Granville into his Highness's service, and was made a gentleman of his bedchamber. His father was a very honest gentleman, and lost his life in the King's service; and his uncle, Sir Richard, was a good commander but a little too severe. I was at Penzance with my father, and in the same town was my brother Fanshawe and his lady and children.
Furthermore, his physical constitution had proved pathetically vulnerable to nightly quartets, quintets, and even octets, on the porch below his bedchamber window, so that he was wont to tell his wife that never, never could he expect to be again the man he had been in the spring before Miss Pratt came to visit May.
With him was his son Montagu Bertie, Lord Willoughby, a noble-looking man of thirty-two, of whom it was said, that he was 'as excellent in reality as others in pretence, and that, thinking 'that the cross was an ornament to the crown, and much more to the coronet, he satisfied not himself with the mere exercise of virtue, but sublimated it, and made it grace. He had likewise seen some service against the Spaniards in the Netherlands, and after his return had been made a captain in the Lifeguards, and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber.
Ten printed sheets of the woman Lamotte's libels contain nothing so injurious to the character of Marie Antoinette as these lines, written by a man whom she honoured by undeserved kindness. He could not have had any opportunity of knowing the existence of the apartments, which consisted of a very small antechamber, a bedchamber, and a closet.
Then he said the old man went into the bedchamber and came staggering back looking broken-hearted, and saying he had expected to find that the boy had returned and laid down in there to rest, but it was not so. Hendon had waited at the hut all day; hope of the King's return died out, then, and he departed upon the quest again.
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