"You are right welcome, M. le Ministre," she said in a tone that was not altogether steady, although she struggled to suppress all outward emotion. "You are doubtless already apprised that the King has withdrawn from the capital in anger, but you have yet to learn that he has left me no whit more satisfied than himself. I was unprepared for so abrupt a departure; and as I had still much to say to him on the subject of our disagreement, I find myself compelled to the exercise of my clerkly skill, and am now occupied in telling him in writing all that I had left unsaid. There is the letter," she continued with a bitter smile, as she threw the ample scroll across the table; "read it, and tell me if I have not more than sufficient cause to consider myself both aggrieved and outraged." "Madame," said the incorruptible minister, when he had perused the document thus submitted to him, "you must pardon me if I venture to declare that you must never suffer that letter to meet the eye of your royal consort: it contains matter to induce your eternal separation." "Can you deny one assertion which I have made?" demanded the Queen impatiently. "I sympathize in all the trials and troubles of your Majesty," was the evasive reply. "I would leave no effort untried to terminate them; a fact of which you have long, I trust, Madame, felt convinced; and thus I cannot see you about to wilfully destroy every chance of happiness, without imploring of you to reflect deeply and calmly before you take so extreme a measure as that which you now contemplate. The King is already incensed against you; and if spoken words have thus angered him, I dare not contemplate the consequences of such as these before me, written hours after your contention. I therefore beseech you to suppress this letter; and both for your own sake, and for that of the French nation, rather to seek a reconciliation with His Grace your husband than to increase the ill-feeling which so unhappily exists." "You make no allowance for me, Monsieur, as a woman and a wife; you only argue with the Queen." "Madame," persisted Sully, "in this instance it is rather to the woman and the wife that I address myself than to the Queen. As a woman, the bitterness and invective of this missive," and he laid his spread hand emphatically upon the paper, "would suffice to cover you with blame and to deprive you of sympathy, while as a mother it would authorize your separation from your children. Let me entreat of you therefore to forego your purpose."