"I'll dash your stupid head against the wall when we get home. To dare to make your own daughter ridiculous before this company! To make your own flesh and blood absurd, through your incorrigible idiocy! Not that you can do it, for she's an angel straight from heaven. Provoking, forsooth! My darling--the idol of my heart! The Marquis de Gange knows better than to ill-treat his wife. If he did--well; old battered soldier though I am, I'd be even with him in a way he'd not forget." "Oh--so harsh--always so harsh!" whimpered the rivulet in choking gasps. "Quite like dear M. Montgolfier's fire-balloon! I did not mean----" "Hold your tongue!" snorted the marechal in a menacing whisper--"and wait till we get home." The situation, like many born of jesting, grew embarrassing. Old soldiers, especially when rich, may be allowed a certain freedom. But the ways of the barrack-yard may not be introduced into palaces. Marie Antoinette was not averse to a certain licence, which should banish for the time being the buckramed etiquette that she so loathed. But a family skeleton suddenly popping out of ambush to shake all its joints and grin with all its teeth! How uncomely a spectacle at the Tuileries! The assembled company, too, evidently enjoyed the fun, and would surely spread the story all over Paris on the morrow as the style of repartee that obtained at the queen's gatherings. If the episode, harmless in itself, were to reach the king's ears, he would be annoyed, and justly in such times as these, when everybody's hand was beginning to clutch his neighbour's throat. How many an innocent jest of Marie Antoinette's had already been built by malice into the proportions of a mountain? Unwittingly, she had, as it appeared, set fire to a mine. Gabrielle looked sorely distressed; her husband sullen, in that his pleading had failed, and that he could do nothing on behalf of the _savant_ whom he worshipped. Her mother hazily perceived that it would be well to cork down the ebullient effervescence of her prattle, while the beady eyes of the marechal, moving from the husband to the wife and back again, seemed to have detected the trace of something that was new, the discovery of which was disconcerting. CHAPTER II. HUSBAND AND WIFE. When it is so plain to lookers-on that people ought to be happy, how perverse it is of them to be miserable! As the queen had declared, Gabrielle Marquise de Gange had no ostensible excuse for wretchedness. The specks on the sun of her good fortune were so tiny as to be well-nigh invisible. Upon the background of her portrait by Madame le Brun, that ingenious artist had inscribed in a hand so clear that all who ran might read, "The fairest woman of her time."