"To Your Majesty it is a
pleasing comedy," said I, "but to me, helas! it is nearer far to
tragedy."
"Come, Marcel," said he, "may I not laugh a little? One grows so
sad with being King of France! Tell me what vexes you."
"Mademoiselle de Lavedan has promised that she will marry me only
when I have saved her father from the scaffold. I came to do it,
very full of hope, Sire. But his wife has forestalled me and,
seemingly, doomed him irrevocably."
His glance fell; his countenance resumed its habitual gloom. Then
he looked up again, and in the melancholy depths of his eyes I saw
a gleam of something that was very like affection.
"You know that I love you, Marcel," he said gently. "Were you my
own son I could not love you more. You are a profligate, dissolute
knave, and your scandals have rung in my ears more than once; yet
you are different from these other fools, and at least you have
never wearied me. To have done that is to have done something.
I would not lose you, Marcel; as lose you I shall if you marry this
rose of Languedoc, for I take it that she is too sweet a flower to
let wither in the stale atmosphere of Courts. This man, this
Vicomte de Lavedan, has earned his death. Why should I not let him
die, since if he dies you will not wed?"
"Do you ask me why, Sire?" said I. "Because they call you Louis the
Just, and because no king was ever more deserving of the title."
He winced; he pursed his lips, and shot a glance at La Fosse, who
was deep in the mysteries of his volume.
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