For years she had been searching for the son who had been taken from her; she believed now that she would find him, for when the King was dead there would be no one to care if that boy bore a striking resemblance to his father.
Madame de Cavanac believed that Louis XVI, who was said to be so kind, would help her to find her lost boy.
So she waited in the crowds, tense, expectant. She had loved the dying man; but she longed for the return of her lost child.
The Duc de Bouillon stood in the doorway of the bedchamber.
‘Messieurs,’ he said, ‘the King is dead.’
There was a brief silence; and then the silence was no more.
The stampede had begun.
The ladies and gentlemen of the Court were all eager to show how quickly they had rallied to the new King and Queen. Through the State rooms, through the anterooms, they ran to fall at the feet of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Bibliography
Pierre Gaxotte. Translated from the French by J. Lewis May. Louis the Fifteenth and his Times.
G. P. Gooch, CH, DLitt, FBA. Louis XV. The Monarchy in Decline.
Lieut-Colonel Andrew C. P. Haggard, DSO. The Real Louis XV. (2 volumes.)
Casimir Stryienski. Translated from the French by H. N. Dickinson. The National History of France: The Eighteenth Century.
Iain D. B. Pilkington. The King’s Pleasure. The Story of Louis XV.
Lieut-Colonel Andrew C. P. Haggard, DSO. Women of the Revolutionary Era, or Some Who Stirred France.
Nesta H. Webster. The French Revolution. A study in Democracy.
Stefan Zweig. Marie Antoinette.
Ian Dunlop. With a foreword by Sir Arthur Bryant. Versailles.
Robert B. Douglas. Memoirs of Madame du Barry.
The Life and Times of Madame du Barry.
Karl Von Schumacher. Translated by Dorothy M. Richardson. The Du Barry.
Pidansat de Mairobert. Edited with an introduction by Eveline Cruickshanks. Memoirs of Madame du Barry.
An Abridgement of Louis Sébastien Mercier’s ‘Le Tableau de Paris’. Translated and edited with a preface and notes by Helen Simpson. The Waiting City.
Georges Cain. Nooks and Corners of Old Paris.
G. Lenôtre. Translated by H. Noel Williams. Paris in the Revolution.
William Henry Hudson. France.
Bidou. Paris.
M. Guizot. Translated by Robert Black, MA. The History of France.
Louis Adolphe Thiers. Translated with notes and illustrations from the most authentic sources by Frederick Shoberl. The History of the French Revolution (5 volumes).
Thomas Carlyle. The French Revolution.
Baron Ferdinand Rothschild. Personal Characters from French History.
C. A. Sainte-Beuve. Portraits of the 18th Century.