Marie, with sweet innocence, accepted the invitation; then timidly asked Lebel if she might sit beside him at the dinner, as all the others would be strangers to her. The bare thought of his presuming to sit down in the presence of the king--otherwise "the Baron de Gonesse"--so filled Lebel with horror that he forgot his role of diplomacy and blurted out: "~I?~ Sit at the table with ~him~? I--I shall be unexpectedly called from the room, as usual, just as dinner is served. And I shall not return until it is over." When Marie--carefully coached as to behavior, repartee, and so forth, by the ever-thoughtful Jean--arrived at Lebel's apartments in the palace, on the night of the dinner, she found, to her disgust, that the king was nowhere in sight--not even disguised as "the Baron de Gonesse"--and that her fellow guests were merely a group of Versailles officials. Not being versed in palace secrets, she did not know that Louis was seated in a dark closet behind a film-curtained window, looking into the brightly lighted dining room and noting everything that went on, nor that cunningly arranged speaking tubes brought every whispered or loud-spoken word to him. Finding the king was not to be one of the guests, the girl philosophically choked back her chagrin and set herself to get every atom of fun out of the evening that she could. She ate much, drank more, and behaved pretty quite like a gloriously lovely street gamin. There was no use in wasting on these understrappers the fine speeches and the courtesy she had been learning for the king's benefit. So she let herself go. And the dinner was lively, to say the very least. In fact, it was the gayest, most deliciously amusing dinner ever held in those sedate rooms--thanks to Marie. Louis, in paroxysms of laughter, looked on until the sound of his guffaws betrayed his royal presence. Then he came out of hiding. Marie, for an instant, was thunder-struck at what she had done. She feared she had ruined her chances by the boisterous gayety of the past hour or so. Then--for her brain was as quick as her talk was dull--she saw the fight was not lost, but won, and she knew how she had won it. Louis XV. was fifty-eight years old. He lived in France's most artificial period. No one dared be natural; least of all in the presence of the king. All his life he had been treated to honeyed words, profound reverence, the most polished and adroit courtesy. People--women especially--had never dared be ~human~ when he was around.