"When I awoke, it was night. I was lying in a great bed with damask curtains. The ceiling of my chamber was of gold, and the room itself was richly furnished. Beside my pillow was seated the woman by whose agency I had been taken to the place. I asked her where I was. I wept at the anxiety of my parents; she calmed me, promising that they should soon be with me. She added that I was in the house of a person of great quality, who was interested in my youth, wished me much good, and would enrich my family. I knew I was not dreaming, but thought myself the heroine of a fairy tale. Two women entered. They made me rise, and put me in a perfumed bath. Then they dressed my hair, one of them winding a string of pearls through it. They dressed me in silk and lace, and served me with supper on plates of vermilion and gold. I experienced a sort of vertigo; I obeyed mechanically. Still, I kept asking for my father and mother. The woman of the carriage assured me that they would soon arrive, and be overjoyed to see me so beautiful. A hard-visaged man entered the chamber. I heard the old woman call him Monsieur Lebel, and speak to him with great respect. The man scrutinized me carefully. 'Little one,' he said to me, 'you must go to bed now.' Then he went out. "Doubtless, in the course of the repast, they had served me with several glasses of heady wine, for I felt my reason clouding. I allowed myself to be put to bed, though not without again inquiring for my parents. They promised to take me back to them the next day. The woman and her two companions bade me good night, snuffed the candles in the candelabrum, and left me for light a single alabaster lamp, which threw a pale illumination over the spacious room. I was about to succumb less to sleep than to the leaden lethargy into which I had been plunged, when a start of fright restored to me, for a few moments, all my senses. My bed was set in an alcove. Two of the gilded panels which formed the alcove slid back in their grooves, and I beheld an old man in a dressing gown. I uttered a cry of astonishment--it was the King, Louis XV. I had seen him but a short time before at a public ceremony in Paris. I was stupefied into immobility. Close behind the King, in the secret passageway leading into the alcove, stood a beautiful young woman half-clad in a night robe, and holding a candle-stick. She laughed aloud, and said to the King, pushing him by the shoulder--'Go on, France, it is the loving hour!'