The days were full for Antoinette and it was a matter of dashing from pleasure to pleasure. She rarely rose before four or five in the afternoon. How could she, when she had been dancing through the night? The ceremony of the rising would begin with her going through her book in which were pinned miniature models of all the dresses in her wardrobe. She would take a pin and place it in the model of the dress she wished to wear for the beginning of her day. There were endless discussions with her favourites, and Madame de Polignac was always nearest to the Queen, and the Princesse de Lamballe not far distant. And while the Queen was being dressed they would chatter together about the night’s fête or ball or entertainment. There might be a session with dear Madame Bertin who had become almost as great a friend as Lamballe and Polignac.

One day Antoinette’s carriage broke down as she was riding masked to Paris for a ball, and while the driver went to procure another carriage, the Queen saw a fiacre, hailed it and arrived at the ball in it.

Antoinette, delighted with her adventure, immediately began to talk of it. It was so amusing; and she had never ridden in a fiacre before.

This story was hailed with horror by all the Court. What lack of etiquette! What defiance of form!

The people of Paris supplied a sequel. The Queen had had her reasons for riding in a fiacre. Quite clearly she had come from a rendezvous with her latest lover.

This story brought protests from the Empress.

Antoinette must mend her ways. Whither was she going? asked her distracted mother. Gossip abounded. She danced through the night, slept through the day, scarcely saw her husband and had so far failed to give France a Dauphin.

She must change her mode of living.


* * *

It was a hot summer’s day. The Queen’s calash was speeding along the road past a group of cottages when a child ran out.

There was a wild scream and the boy was lying bleeding by the roadside.

The Queen called at once to the coachman to stop. The calash drew up and Antoinette alighted.

Several people came out from the cottages, but Antoinette did not see them; she had picked up the child and was looking with dismay at the blood on his woollen cap.

And as she looked at him he opened his eyes and met her gaze.

‘I thank God,’ said the Queen, ‘he is not dead.’ She turned to a woman who was standing near by. ‘Could we not take him into his home? He ran out in front of the horses. I feared he might have been killed. Where does he live?’

The woman indicated a cottage.

‘I will carry him there,’ said the Queen.

The driver of her calash was beside her. ‘Permit me, Your Majesty.’

But Antoinette, deeply conscious of that emotion which children never failed to arouse in her, held the child tightly in her arms and refused to relinquish him. The boy was gazing up at her and a little colour had returned to his cheeks. Antoinette saw with relief that he was not badly hurt after all.

An old woman had come to the door of that cottage for which they were making. She saw Antoinette, recognised her, and knelt beside her water butt.

‘I pray you rise,’ said Antoinette. ‘This little boy has been hurt. He is yours?’

‘He is my grandson, Your Majesty.’

‘We must see how badly hurt he is.’

The old woman turned and led the way into the cottage. Antoinette had never before been inside such a place. There was one room only, which housed a big family, and it seemed that there were children everywhere. They were all regarding the splendid apparition with astonished bewilderment.

‘Make your curtsys,’ said the old woman. ‘This is the Queen.’

The children bobbed quaint curtsys which made the susceptible Antoinette’s eyes fill with tears.

Oh, the squalor, the unclean smell – and so many children in one small room, when the spacious royal nursery was quite bare! It was heartbreaking.

She laid the child on the table because there appeared to be nowhere else to put him.

‘I don’t think he is badly hurt,’ she said. ‘I was afraid when I saw the blood on his face.’

‘What was he up to?’ asked the old woman. And the Queen noticed that the child cowered away from her. One small hand was grasping the Queen’s dress, and it was as though those round eyes were pleading for royal protection.

‘ ’Twas but natural for a child to run into the road,’ said the Queen. ‘If we had some water we could bathe that wound on his forehead and mayhap we could bandage it.’

‘Odette,’ cried the woman. ‘Get some water.’

A dark-eyed girl, whose matted hair fell about her face, could not remove her eyes from the Queen as she took a bucket and went out to the well.

‘What is the little one’s name?’ asked the Queen.

‘James Armand, Madame,’ the woman replied.

‘Ah, Monsieur James Armand,’ said Antoinette, ‘are you feeling better now?’

The child smiled, and again she felt the tears spring to her eyes. There was a fascinating gap in his teeth; she noticed that his hand had tightened on her sleeve.

‘Could you stand, my dear, then we shall see if there are any bones broken?’ She lifted him up and he stood on the table – a minute little man in the woollen cap and clogs of the peasantry.

‘Do your legs feel all right?’ asked Antoinette.

He nodded.

‘Does he talk?’ she wanted to know.

‘Oh, he talks well enough. There’s no stopping him. He knows he’s done wrong though. He’s a cunning one.’

‘It was not wrong,’ said the Queen. ‘It was but a childish action.’

The girl had returned with the bucket of water, and the Queen took off the woollen cap and bathed the child’s brow. She longed now to leave the cottage. It was so stuffy and malodorous; yet she was loth to leave little James Armand.

The water was cold; there was no cloth, so she tore her fine kerchief into two pieces and damped one with water.

‘Does that hurt?’ she asked tenderly. ‘Ah, I see you are brave, Monsieur James Armand.’

The little boy had moved closer to her.

‘You have a large family,’ she said to the woman.

‘These five are my daughter’s,’ was the answer. ‘She died last year and left me to care for them.’

‘That is very sad. I am sorry for you.’

‘That is life, Madame,’ said the woman with bleak stoicism.

Antoinette tied the dry half of her kerchief about the boy’s head. ‘There! Now I think you will suffer no harm, monsieur.’

She drew away from the table, but the boy kept hold of her sleeve; his mouth began to turn down at the corners and his eyes filled with tears.

‘Let go of the lady,’ said the grandmother sharply.

He refused. The woman was about to snatch him away, when the Queen prevented her.

‘You do not want me to go away?’ asked Antoinette.

‘You stay here,’ said the boy. ‘You stay always.’

‘He’s a forward little villain, that one is,’ said the grandmother. ‘That’s the Queen you’re speaking to.’

‘Queen,’ said the little boy, and in all her life Antoinette had never sensed so much adoration as she did now in that small voice.

She made one of her impulsive decisions.

‘Let me take him,’ she said. ‘Would you come with me? Would you be my little boy?’

The joy in his face was the most moving thing she had ever seen. The little hand was in hers now, clinging, clinging as though he was never going to let her go.

The Queen turned to the woman. ‘If you will let me take this boy, and adopt him,’ she said, ‘I will provide for the upbringing of the four who are left to you.’

The woman’s answer was to fall on her knees and kiss the hem of the Queen’s gown.

Antoinette was never so happy as when she was giving happiness.

‘Then rise,’ she said, ‘rise, my good woman. And have no fear for your family. All will be well, I promise you. And I shall take James Armand away with me now.’

She lifted the child in her arms. She kissed his grubby face; her reward was a pair of arms about her neck – a tight and suffocating hug.

She thought: he shall be bathed; he shall be suitably dressed. James Armand, you are my little boy from now on.


* * *

For a long time she was happy.

Each morning James Armand was brought to her; he would climb on to her bed; he would be happy merely to be with her. He asked nothing else. He was not like other children. He was glad of sweetmeats; he liked handsome toys; but nothing but the company of the Queen could give him real pleasure.

If she had danced late and was too tired to be disturbed he would sit outside her door waiting disconsolately. None of her ladies could lure him away with any promise of a treat.

There was only one thing which could satisfy James Armand, and that was the presence of his most beautiful Queen who had by the miracle of a summer’s morning become his own mother.

Sometimes he dreamed that he was at the cottage door watching the carriage pass by. There was a heavy gloom in those dreams because in them the royal calash had not pulled up and he was still living with his grandmother in her dark one-roomed cottage … the miracle had not happened, his enchantress had not appeared.

He would wake whimpering; then his little fingers would touch the fine linen of his bedclothes and he would see the gilded furniture in his room, and he would know that all was well.

Once she had seen the traces of tears on his cheeks and demanded to know the reason.

‘Dreamed you did not come,’ said James Armand.

Then he was caught in that perfumed embrace, and his happiness was so great that he was glad of the bad dream which had made it possible.


* * *

So heedlessly she lived through those gilded days.

The hours flew past, there was never time to be bored; and she dreaded boredom more than anything on earth. She confided this to Artois. It was a fear they had in common. So she must plan more dresses with Rose Bertin; she must give a ball, have firework displays; she would spend an hour or so playing with her dear James Armand who so adored her; she would ride out to Paris, masked for the Opéra ball, as she used to in the old days.

But there was something missing in her life. Her dear friends, Madame de Polignac and the Princesse de Lamballe, could not make up for that. Indeed, those young men who hovered about her, paying their compliments which could be delicate or bold, came nearer to providing it. Madame de Polignac had taken a lover – the Comte de Vaudreuil, a Creole, not very handsome, his face having been pitted by the smallpox, but so witty, so amusing that he was quite charming. Gabrielle Yolande confided in the Queen, and Antoinette felt those twinges of envy for women who could enjoy such a relationship.

Another of her friends, Madame de Guémenée, took the Duc de Coigny for her lover. It was not that Antoinette shared her confidence, nor indeed that she liked her, but she was often at her card parties, for gambling, Antoinette had discovered, was one of the surest ways of driving boredom away. It was purely for the sake of Madame de Guémenée’s card parties that the Queen frequented her apartments.

Madame de Guémenée belonged to the Rohan family and the Queen did not feel very friendly disposed towards one member of that family. This was Louis, Prince de Rohan, that Cardinal whom she had never forgotten because he was the first man who had looked at her with that kind of admiration which she now met on every side. He was the young man who had received her in place of his uncle the Bishop in the Strasbourg Cathedral, when she was on her way to France from Vienna.

She had good reason not to forget this man, for she had discovered that he had written disparagingly of her mother in a letter from Vienna, whither he had gone soon after the occasion of his first meeting with Antoinette. She had heard no other than Madame du Barry reading it aloud. And for that, Antoinette had said, she would never forgive Louis, Prince de Rohan. All the same she could not resist his relative’s card parties. Moreover Madame de Guémenée was a friend of Gabrielle’s and that meant that the Queen must receive her and try to like her.

And so, looking round at her friends and seeing their happiness, she found new emotions being stirred within her. She found herself listening more eagerly to the fulsome compliments of the men about her; she found herself encouraging these compliments.