If Adrienne would adjure her allegiance to the stage and banish all earthly thoughts, he would absolve her and would grant her the rite of Extreme Unction. "Do you place your hope in the God of the Universe?" he intoned. Slowly the great dark eyes--already wide with the Eternal Mystery--turned from the priest to the sobbing giant who knelt at the opposite side of her bed. Adrienne Lecouvreur stretched out her arms toward Saxe, for the last of many thousand times. Pointing at her weeping lover, she whispered to the priest: "~There~ is my Universe, my Hope, my ~God~!" The good priest scuttled away in pious horror. Adrienne Lecouvreur sank back upon the pillows, dead--and unabsolved. That night--acting on a strong hint from the Bouillon family, who had heard that Voltaire intended to demand an autopsy--the police carried Adrienne's body away in a cab, and buried it in a bed of quick-lime. For nearly two long months, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, scarcely looked at another woman. CHAPTER SEVEN CLEOPATRA "THE SERPENT OF OLD NILE" Some thirty-five years ago, in the north Jersey village of Pompton, the township undertaker's barn burned down. It was a spectacular midnight fire. All the natives turned out to view it. Dominie Jansen even hinted, I remember, that it was a visitation on the community for some of his neighbors' sins. Whereat, Lem Saulsbury took the pledge--for the eighth time that year. Well, the next week, when the Pompton ~Clarion~ appeared, no mention was made of the fire--the only event of intense human interest, by the way, since Joel Binswanger, the official local sot, six months earlier had, at the village tavern, swallowed a half-pint flask of carbolic acid--set aside for cleaning the brasses--under the conviction that it was applejack. Joel had complained of a rough throat and an unwonted taste in his mouth for days afterward. The Clarion editor, taken to task for printing nothing about the fire, excused the omission by saying; "What'd 'a been the use of writing the story? Everybody knows about it." That's all there is to the anecdote. Yes, I've heard better, myself. I've even heard the same one better told. It serves, though, as a fitting preamble to my story about Cleopatra. "Everybody knows about it." Who can say anything about her that you have not heard? Perhaps I can. Probably not. Will you be patient with me, and, even as tourists visit European shrines to verify their Baedekers, read this story to verify what you have always known? Cleopatra cannot be omitted from any super-woman series. And I will make her as interesting as I know how. Personally, I believe the Pomptonians would far rather have read about that barn blaze, which they had seen, than about the conflagration of a whole foreign metropolis. At sixteen--in 52 B.C.--Cleopatra's known career as a heartbreaker began; although there are rumors of more than one still earlier affair, with Egyptian nobles as their heroes.