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"It was during one of the visits, apart from Court etiquette, to the toilet of the Queen, that the Duchesse de Chartres, afterwards Duchesse d'Orleans, introduced the famous Mademoiselle Bertin, who afterwards became so celebrated as the Queen's milliner the first that was ever allowed to approach a royal palace; and it was months before Marie Antoinette had courage to receive her milliner in any other than the private apartment which, by the alteration Her Majesty had made in the arrangements of the household, she set apart for the purpose of dressing in comfort by herself and free from all intruders.
Bertin had always been inclined to satirical banter, that tendency of the French to mingle irony with the most serious sentiments, and he had often unintentionally made her sad, without knowing how to understand the subtle distinctions of women, or to discern the border of sacred ground, as he himself said.
Then Bertin rose, took Annette by the hand, led her under the portrait of her mother, in the ray of light from the reflector, and said: "Isn't this stupefying?" The Duchess was so greatly surprised that she seemed dazed; she repeated many times: "Heavens! is it possible? Heavens! is it possible? It is like someone raised from the dead. To think that I did not see that when I came in!
There was a ball at Versailles the day I was presented, and my father told me that her Majesty wished to speak with me. I was very much frightened. The Queen was standing with her back to the mirror, the Duchesse de Polignac and some other ladies beside her, when my father brought me up, and her Majesty was smiling. "'What did you say to Bertin, Mademoiselle? she asked.
She was wrapped in her bernouse, and she closed the door behind her quickly and stepped forward to meet me. She gave me greeting in her cool even tones, the pallor of her face shining forth from the hood of her garment." "'Since you are so good as to come and see me, she said, 'let us walk here for a while. Captain Bertin is occupied; and we can watch the clouds on the sand."
Dead, perhaps, too! The ten minutes she had to wait seemed interminable to her; then, when she had torn open the despatch and recognized the name of her husband, she read: "I telegraph to tell you that our friend Bertin leaves for Roncieres on the one o'clock train. Send Phaeton station. Love." "Well, mamma?" said Annette. "Monsieur Olivier Bertin is coming to see us." "Ah, how lucky! When?"
"Please do not be offended, Mademoiselle Paula," implored Madame Bertin; "she wants you to come nearer that she may feel your face. The blind have no other eyes."
He was a person of vast resource and great buoyancy of temperament. True, he had not apprehended two exceedingly noxious aristos, as he had hoped to do; but he held the threads of an abominable conspiracy in his hands, and the question of catching both Bertin and Madame la Comtesse red-handed was only a question of time. But little time had been lost.
Unhappily it was the voice of one of his oldest friends, the author Octave Bertin; for they had been school-fellows at the Lycée Henri IV. Bertin, a little Parisian, quick-witted, elegant, and precocious, had welcomed the awkward enthusiastic advances of the overgrown youth fresh from the country, ungainly in body and mind, his clothes always too short for his long legs and arms, a mixture of innocence, simplicity, ignorance, and bad taste, always emphatic, with overflowing spirits, yet capable of the most original sallies, and striking images.
I obeyed, but in a short time I had a captain, M. Bertin, killed and some twenty men put out of action. I then had recourse to a different tactic: this was to send some troopers, well spaced out, to subject the enemy gunners to carbine fire.
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