Then Gabrielle's mind went through a curious and unexpected phase. The queen's reference to their horoscopes had set the marquise thinking. The prophecy regarding her majesty was being fulfilled, slowly but surely, to the letter. A friend informed her with grief and lamentations, that Louise de Savoye, Princesse de Lamballe, had been seized and confined at La Force. At this moment, the least secure refuges in France were the prisons, for the blood-drunken populace had a way of making raids upon the jails, and maltreating incarcerated aristos, out of pure devilry. First, Her Majesty; then Madame de Lamballe. Who was she, Marquise de Gange, that she should hope to escape her doom? She was, like the others, predestined to misfortune. True. She had suffered deeply already, and Heaven had relented for awhile; but there was nothing to justify her in face of the prophecy, in supposing that it was more than a respite. Try to grapple with it as she would, Gabrielle, as the time for moving approached, was oppressed by a growing presentiment of ill. From what quarter it was to come she could not guess, but it was her bounden duty to take such precautions as were possible. Were the darlings to be stricken down and die? Or was the impending misfortune to consist in the sacking of the chateau? It was impossible to foresee and avert the trouble. In contrast to the storm that had blown over, the family outlook was fair enough. Though the domestic sky was cloudflecked, there was no specially black bank of vapour striding up the vault. Clovis was bearish and ill-humoured. That was nothing new. The abbé was all smiles and benevolence, his leisure much occupied in a laudable and Christian endeavour to break the chevalier of tippling. Toinon wrote that, summoned to Blois by his party, Jean Boulot was gone for awhile, and for her part she rejoiced at the riddance, for was it not too bad that he should prefer his vulgar noisy Jacobin clubs and fustian nonsense to the charming society of his betrothed? Strive as she would to argue with and laugh at herself, Gabrielle could not shake off her gloom. The gamekeeper--who had saved her life--was gone away to Blois, and Toinon hoped that he would stop there? Why should she feel as if a staunch and trusty friend had left her side? The chatelaine had every right to feel angry that a paid servant should throw up his place with such scant ceremony, and yet was not the abruptness of the act strictly in tune with the man's independent principles and the spirit of the time? He was a rough, honest, warm-hearted, wrong-headed fellow, with whom Toinon was justly annoyed in that she had failed to reform his ways. All this was true enough, but Gabrielle could not shake off a sense of loneliness, of vague uneasy dread, a conviction of impending calamity; and suddenly something whispered that before leaving Paris it would be well to execute a testament.