Purposely we entered Mittau about sunset, which was nearer ten o'clock than nine in that northern land; coming through wheat lands to where a network of streams forms the river Aa. In this broad lap of the province of Courland sat Mittau. Yelgava it was called by the people among whom we last posted, and they pronounced the word as if naming something as great as Paris. It was already July, St. John's day being two weeks gone; yet the echoes of its markets and feastings lingered. The word "Johanni" smote even an ear deaf to the language. It was like a dissolving fair. "You are too late for Johanni," said the German who kept the house for travelers, speaking the kind of French we heard in Poland. "Perhap it is just as well for you. This Johanni has nearly ruined me!" Yet he showed a disposition to hire my singular servant from me at a good wage, walking around and around Skenedonk, who bore the scrutiny like a pine tree. The Oneida enjoyed his travels. It was easy for him to conform to the thoughts and habits of Europe. We had not talked about the venture into Russia. He simply followed me where I went without asking questions, proving himself faithful friend and liberal minded gentleman. We supped privately, and I dressed with care. Horses were put in for our last short post of a few streets. We had suffered such wretched quarters on the way that the German guest-house spread itself commodiously. Yet its walls were the flimsiest slabs. I heard some animal scratching and whining in the next chamber. On the post-road, however, we had not always a wall betwixt ourselves and the dogs. The palace in Mittau stood conspicuous upon an island in the river. As we approached, it looked not unlike a copy of Versailles. The pile was by no means brilliant with lights, as the court of a king might glitter, finding reflection upon the stream. We drove with a clatter upon the paving, and a sentinel challenged us. I had thought of how I should obtain access to this secluded royal family, and Skenedonk was ready with the queen's jewel-case in his hands. Not on any account was he to let it go out of them until I took it and applied the key; but gaining audience with Madame d'Angouleme, he was to tell her that the bearer of that casket had traveled far to see her, and waited outside. Under guard the Oneida had the great doors shut behind him. The wisdom of my plan looked less conspicuous as time went by. The palace loomed silent, without any cheer of courtiers. The horses shook their straps, and the postilion hung lazily by one leg, his figure distinct against the low horizon still lighted by after-glow. Some Mittau noises came across the Aa, the rumble of wheels, and a barking of dogs. When apprehension began to pinch my heart of losing my servant and my whole fortune in the abode of honest royal people, and I felt myself but a poor outcast come to seek a princess for my sister, a guard stood by the carriage, touching his cap, and asked me to follow him. We ascended the broad steps. He gave the password to a sentinel there, and held wide one leaf of the door. He took a candle; and otherwise dark corridors and ante-chambers, somber with heavy Russian furnishings, rugs hung against the walls, barbaric brazen vessels and curious vases, passed like a half-seen vision. Then the guard delivered me to a gentleman in a blue coat, with a red collar, who belonged to the period of the Marquis du Plessy without being adorned by his whiteness and lace. The gentleman staring at me, strangely polite and full of suspicion, conducted me into a well-lighted room where Skenedonk waited by the farther door, holding the jewel-case as tenaciously as he would a scalp. I entered the farther door. It closed behind me. A girl stood in the center of this inner room, looking at me. I remember none of its fittings, except that there was abundant light, showing her clear blue eyes and fair hair, the transparency of her skin, and her high expression. She was all in black, except a floating muslin cape or fichu, making a beholder despise the finery of the Empire. We must have examined each other even sternly, though I felt a sudden giving way and heaving in my breast. She was so high, so sincere! If I had been unfit to meet the eyes of that princess I must have shriveled before her. From side to side her figure swayed, and another young girl, the only attendant in the room, stretched out both arms to catch her. We put her on a couch, and she sat gasping, supported by the lady in waiting. Then the tears ran down her face, and I kissed the transparent hands, my own flesh and blood, I believed that hour as I believe to this. "O Louis--Louis!" The wonder of her knowledge and acceptance of me, without a claim being put forward, was around me like a cloud. "You were so like my father as you stood there--I could see him again as he parted from us! What miracle has restored you? How did you find your way here? You are surely Louis?" I sat down beside her, keeping one hand between mine. "Madame, I believe as you believe, that I am Louis Charles, the dauphin of France. And I have come to you first, as my own flesh and blood, who must have more knowledge and recollection of things past than I myself can have. I have not long been waked out of the tranced life I formerly lived." "I have wept more tears for the little brother--broken in intellect and exiled farther than we--than for my father and mother. They were at peace. But you, poor child, what hope was there for you? Was the person who had you in his charge kind to you? He must have been. You have grown to be such a man as I would have you!" "Everybody has been kind to me, my sister." "Could they look in that face and be unkind? All the thousand questions I have to ask must be deferred until the king sees you. I cannot wait for him to see you! Mademoiselle de Choisy, send a message at once to the king!" The lady in waiting withdrew to the door, and the royal duchess quivered with eager anticipation. "We have had pretended dauphins, to add insult to exile. You may not take the king unaware as you took me! He will have proofs as plain as his Latin verse. But you will find his Majesty all that a father could be to us, Louis! I think there never was a man so unselfish!--except, indeed, my husband, whom you cannot see until he returns." Again I kissed my sister's hand. We gazed at each other, our different breeding still making strangeness between us, across which I yearned; and she examined me. Many a time since I have reproached myself for not improving those moments with the most candid and right-minded princess in Europe, by forestalling my enemies. I should have told her of my weakness instead of sunning my strength in the love of her. I should have made her see my actual position, and the natural antagonism of the king, who would not so readily see a strong personal resemblance when that was not emphasized by some mental stress, as she and three very different men had seen it. Instead of making cause with her, however, I said over and over--"Marie-Therese! Marie-Therese!"--like a homesick boy come again to some familiar presence. "You are the only one of my family I have seen since waking; except Louis Philippe." "Don't speak of that man, Louis! I detest the house of Orleans as a Christian should detest only sin! His father doomed ours to death!" "But he is not to blame for what his father did." "What do you mean by waking?" "Coming to my senses." "All that we shall hear about when the king sees you." "I knew your picture on the snuffbox." "What snuffbox?" "The one in the queen's jewel-case." "Where did you find that jewel-case?" "Do you remember the Marquis du Plessy?" "Yes. A lukewarm loyalist, if loyalist at all in these times." "My best friend." "I will say for him that he was not among the first emigres. If the first emigres had stayed at home and helped their king, they might have prevented the Terror." "The Marquis du Plessy stayed after the Tuileries was sacked. He found the queen's jewel-case, and saved it from confiscation to the state." "Where did he find it? Did you recognize the faces?" "Oh, instantly!" The door opened, deferring any story, for that noble usher who had brought me to the presence of Marie-Therese stood there, ready to conduct us to the king. My sister rose and I led her by the hand, she going confidently to return the dauphin to his family, and the dauphin going like a fool. Seeing Skenedonk standing by the door, I must stop and fit the key to the lock of the queen's casket, and throw the lid back to show her proofs given me by one who believed in me in spite of himself. The snuffbox and two bags of coin were gone, I saw with consternation, but the princess recognized so many things that she missed nothing, controlling herself as her touch moved from trinket to trinket that her mother had worn. "Bring this before the king," she said. And we took it with us, the noble in blue coat and red collar carrying it. "His Majesty," Marie-Therese told me as we passed along a corridor, "tries to preserve the etiquette of a court in our exile. But we are paupers, Louis. And mocking our poverty, Bonaparte makes overtures to him to sell the right of the Bourbons to the throne of France!" She had not yet adjusted her mind to the fact that Louis XVIII was no longer the one to be treated with by Bonaparte or any other potentate, and the pretender leading her smiled like the boy of twenty that he was. "Napoleon can have no peace while a Bourbon in the line of succession lives." "Oh, remember the Duke d'Enghien!" she whispered. Then the door of a lofty but narrow cabinet, lighted with many candles, was opened, and I saw at the farther end a portly gentleman seated in an arm-chair. A few gentlemen and two ladies in waiting, besides Mademoiselle de Choisy, attended. Louis XVIII rose from his seat as my sister made a deep obeisance to him, and took her hand and kissed it. At once, moved by some singular maternal impulse, perhaps, for she was half a dozen years my senior, as a mother would whimsically decorate her child, Marie-Therese took the half circlet of gems from the casket, reached up, and set it on my head. For an instant I was crowned in Mittau, with my mother's tiara. I saw the king's features turn to granite, and a dark red stain show on his jaws like coloring on stone. The most benevolent men, and by all his traits he was one of the most benevolent, have their pitiless moments. He must have been prepared to combat a pretender before I entered the room. But outraged majesty would now take its full vengeance on me for the unconsidered act of the child he loved. "First two peasants, Hervagault and Bruneau, neither of whom had the audacity to steal into the confidence of the tenderest princess in Europe with the tokens she must recognize, or to penetrate into the presence," spoke the king: "and now an escaped convict from Ste. Pelagie, a dandy from the Empire!" I was only twenty, and he stung me. "Your royal highness," I said, speaking as I believed within my rights, "my sister tries to put a good front on my intrusion into Mittau." I took the coronet from my head and gave it again to the hand which had crowned me. Marie-Therese let it fall, and it rocked near the feet of the king. "Your sister, monsieur! What right have you to call Madame d'Angouleme your sister!" "The same right, monsieur, that you have to call her your niece." The features of the princess became pinched and sharpened under the softness of her fair hair. "Sire, if this is not my brother, who is he?" Louis XVIII may have been tender to her every other moment of his life, but he was hard then, and looked beyond her toward the door, making a sign with his hand. That strange sympathy which works in me for my opponent, put his outraged dignity before me rather than my own wrong. Deeper, more sickening than death, the first faintness of self-distrust came over me. What if my half-memories were unfounded hallucinations? What if my friend Louis Philippe had made a tool of me, to annoy this older Bourbon branch that detested him? What if Bellenger's recognition, and the Marquis du Plessy's, and Marie-Therese's, went for nothing? What if some other, and not this angry man, had sent the money to America-- The door opened again. We turned our heads, and I grew hot at the cruelty which put that idiot before my sister's eyes. He ran on all fours, his gaunt wrists exposed, until Bellenger, advancing behind, took him by the arm and made him stand erect. It was this poor creature I had heard scratching on the other side of the inn wall. How long Bellenger had been beforehand with me in Mittau I could not guess. But when I saw the scoundrel who had laid me in Ste. Pelagie, and doubtless dropped me in the Seine, ready to do me more mischief, smug and smooth shaven, and fine in the red-collared blue coat which seemed to be the prescribed uniform of that court, all my confidence returned. I was Louis of France. I could laugh at anything he had to say. Behind him entered a priest, who advanced up the room, and made obeisance to the king, as Bellenger did. Madame d'Angouleme looked once at the idiot, and hid her eyes: the king protecting her. I said to myself, "It will soon be against my breast, not yours, that she hides her face, my excellent uncle of Provence!" Yet he was as sincere a man as ever said to witnesses, "We shall now hear the truth." The few courtiers, enduring with hardiness a sight which they perhaps had seen before though Madame d'Angouleme had not, made a rustle among themselves as if echoing, "Yes, now we shall hear the truth!" The king again kissed my sister's hand, and placed her in a seat beside his arm-chair, which he resumed. "Monsieur the Abbe Edgeworth," he said, "having stood on the scaffold with our martyred sovereign, as priest and comforter, is eminently the one to conduct an examination like this, which touches matters of conscience. We leave it in his hands." Abbe Edgeworth, fine and sweet of presence, stood by the king, facing Bellenger and the idiot. That poor creature, astonished by his environment, gazed at the high room corners, or smiled experimentally at the courtiers, stretching his cracked lips over darkened fangs. "You are admitted here, Bellenger," said the priest, "to answer his Majesty's questions in the presence of witnesses." "I thank his Majesty," said Bellenger. The abbe began as if the idiot attracted his notice for the first time. "Who is the unfortunate child you hold with your right hand?" "The dauphin of France, monsieur the abbe," spoke out Bellenger, his left hand on his hip. "What! Take care what you say! How do you know that the dauphin of France is yet among the living?" Bellenger's countenance changed, and he took his hand off his hip and let it hang down. "I received the prince, monsieur, from those who took him out of the Temple prison." "And you never exchanged him for another person, or allowed him to be separated from you?" Bellenger swore with ghastly lips--"Never, on my hopes of salvation, monsieur the abbe!" "Admitting that somebody gave you this child to keep--by the way, how old is he?" "About twenty years, monsieur." "What right had you to assume he was the dauphin?" "I had received a yearly pension, monsieur, from his Majesty himself, for the maintenance of the prince." "You received the yearly pension through my hand, acting as his Majesty's almoner, His Majesty was ever too bountiful to the unfortunate. He has many dependents. Where have you lived with your charge?" "We lived in America, sometimes in the woods; and sometimes in towns." "Has he ever shown hopeful signs of recovering his reason?" "Never, monsieur the abbe." Having touched thus lightly on the case of the idiot, Abbe Edgeworth turned to me. The king's face retained its granite hardness. But Bellenger's passed from shade to shade of baffled confidence; recovering only when the priest said, "Now look at this young man. Have you ever seen him before?" "Yes, monsieur, I have; both in the American woods, and in Paris." "What was he doing in the American woods?" "Living on the bounty of one Count de Chaumont, a friend of Bonaparte's." "Who is he?" "A French half-breed, brought up among the Indians." "What name does he bear?" "He is called Lazarre." "But why is a French half-breed named Lazarre attempting to force himself on the exiled court here in Mittau?" "People have told him that he resembles the Bourbons, monsieur." "Was he encouraged in this idea by the friend of Bonaparte whom you mentioned?" "I think not, monsieur the abbe. But I heard a Frenchman tell him he was like the martyred king, and since that hour he has presumed to consider himself the dauphin." "Who was this Frenchman?" "The Duke of Orleans, Louis Philippe de Bourbon, monsieur the abbe." There was an expressive movement among the courtiers. "Was Louis Philippe instrumental in sending him to France?" "He was. He procured shipping for the pretender." "When the pretender reached Paris, what did he do?" "He attempted robbery, and was taken in the act and thrown into Ste. Pelagie. I saw him arrested." "What were you doing in Paris?" "I was following and watching this dangerous pretender, monsieur the abbe." "Did you leave America when he did?" "The evening before, monsieur. And we outsailed him." "Did you leave Paris when he did?" "Three days later, monsieur. But we passed him while he rested." "Why do you call such an insignificant person a dangerous pretender?" "He is not insignificant, monsieur: as you will say, when you hear what he did in Paris." "He was thrown into the prison of Ste. Pelagie, you told me." "But he escaped, by choking a sacristan so that the poor man will long bear the marks on his throat. And the first thing I knew he was high in favor with the Marquis du Plessy, and Bonaparte spoke to him; and the police laughed at complaints lodged against him." "Who lodged complaints against him?" "I did, monsieur." "But he was too powerful for you to touch?" "He was well protected, monsieur the abbe. He flaunted. While the poor prince and myself suffered inconvenience and fared hard--" "The poor prince, you say?" "We never had a fitting allowance, monsieur," Bellenger declared aggressively. "Yet with little or no means I tried to bring this pretender to justice and defend his Majesty's throne." "Pensioners are not often so outspoken in their dissatisfaction," remarked the priest. I laughed as I thought of the shifts to which Bellenger must have been put. Abbe Edgeworth with merciless dryness inquired, "How were you able to post to Mittau?" "I borrowed money of a friend in Paris, monsieur, trusting that his Majesty will requite me for my services." "But why was it necessary for you to post to Mittau, where this pretender would certainly meet exposure?" "Because I discovered that he carried with him a casket of the martyred queen's jewels, stolen from the Marquis du Plessy." "How did the Marquis du Plessy obtain possession of the queen's jewels?" "That I do not know." "But the jewels are the lawful property of Madame d'Angouleme. He must have known they would be seized." "I thought it necessary to bring my evidence against him, monsieur." "There was little danger of his imposing himself upon the court. Yet you are rather to be commended than censured, Bellenger. Did this pretender know you were in Paris?" "He saw me there." "Many times?" "At least twice, monsieur the abbe." "Did he avoid you?" "I avoided him. I took pains to keep him from knowing how I watched him." "You say he flaunted. When he left Paris for Mittau was the fact generally reported?" "No, monsieur." "You learned it yourself?" "Yes, monsieur." "But he must have known you would pursue him." "He left with great secrecy, monsieur the abbe." It was given out that he was merely going to the country." "What made you suspect he was coming to Mittau?" "He hired a strong post-chaise and made many preparations." "But didn't his friend the Marquis du Plessy discover the robbery? Why didn't he follow and take the thief?" "Dead men don't follow, monsieur the abbe. The Marquis du Plessy had a duel on his hands, and was killed the day after this Lazarre left Paris." Of all Bellenger's absurd fabrications this story was the most ridiculous. I laughed again. Madame d'Angouleme took her hands from her face and our eyes met one instant, but the idiot whined like a dog. She shuddered, and covered her sight. The priest turned from Bellenger to me with a fair-minded expression, and inquired, "What have you to say?" I had a great deal to say, though the only hearer I expected to convince was my sister. If she believed in me I did not care whether the others believed or not. I was going to begin with Lake George, the mountain, and the fog, and Bellenger's fear of me, and his rage when Louis Philippe told him the larger portion of the money sent from Europe was given to me. Facing Marie-Therese, therefore, instead of the Abbe Edgeworth, I spoke her name. She looked up once more. And instead of being in Mittau, I was suddenly on a balcony at Versailles! The night landscape, chill and dim, stretched beyond a multitude of roaring mouths, coarse lips, flaming eyes, illuminated by torches, the heads ornamented with a three-colored thing stuck into the caps. My hand stretched out for support, and met the tight clip of my mother's fingers. I knew that she was towering between Marie-Therese and me a fearless palpitating statue. The devilish roaring mob shot above itself a forced, admiring, piercing cry--"Long live the queen!" Then all became the humming of bees--the vibration of a string--nothing!