Free The Strangled Queen by Maurice Druon Page B

presence.
    'And then one afternoon, in one of the Palace corridors, he had suddenly run into this handsome girl, walking calmly in front of him, her hands full of linen. He had thrown himself upon her with violence and anger as if he owed her a grudge for the fear that troubled him. It must be her or no one, now or never. However, he had not raped her; his agitation, his anxiety, his clumsiness would have rendered him incapable of doing so. He, had demanded from Eudeline that she should teach him love. Lacking a man's assurance he intended to use the prerogatives of a prince. He had been lucky; Eudeline had not laughed at him, and had indeed evinced a certain pride at surrendering to the desires of a king's son, even allowing him to believe that she had found a certain pleasure in it. She had been so successful in this that for ever after he had felt himself, to: be a man in her presence.
    Louis always sent for her when he was dressing himself to hunt or f or the exercise, of arms and Eudeline had quickly realised that he particularly needed love when he was frightened. For several months before Marguerite came to Court, and even for some time afterwards, she had helped him, by the mere presence of her calm and generous body, to overcome his fears. And if The Hutin was capab le of. any hidden capacity for tenderness, he owed it to this handsome woman.
    "Where is your daughter? " he asked.
    "She is with my mother, who is bringing her up. I didn't want her to stay here with me; she looks too like her father," replied Eudeline with a half-smile.
    "At least," Louis said, "I believe she is mine."
    "Oh, but of course,, Monseigneur, she is certainly yours Sire, I mean to say. Every day her looks becam e more like yours. And it could only embarrass you to let her be seen by the Palace people."
    Because, indeed, a child, who was to be baptised Eudeline like her mother, had resulted from his hasty love-making. Any woman with a gift for intrigue would have assured her fortune by her pregnancy, and founded a line of barons. But The Hutin was so afraid of revealing; the event to his father, that Eudeline had taken pity on him once again and remained silent. Her husband, who was clerk to Messire de Nogaret, had had some difficulty in accepting the fact that her pregnancy was due to a miracle which had, curiously enough, taken, place while he was accompanying the Justiciar along the roads of Provence.. He had protested so much that Eudeline had at last admitted the facts. The same kind of men are always attracted to the same kind of women. The clerk was not very courageous, and as soon as he knew from whom the gift came, his fear overwhelmed his anger as rain allays the wind. He too kept silent and arranged matters so that he might be absent from Paris as much as possible. He had, more over died soon afterwards, less from sorrow than from dysentery.
    And Dame Eudeline had continued to manage the Palace washing, at the rate of fivepence per hundred pieces washed. She had become first linen-maid, which in the royal household was a position of middling importance.
    During all this period the little Eudeline was growing up in that peculiar, insolence common to bastards, that they bear upon their features the characteristics of their il legitimacy. But very few people knew about it.
    Dame Eudeline always said to herself that one day The Hutin would remember. He had made so many promises, so solemnly sworn that when he became king he would lavish wealth and titles upon her daughter, and that she had everything to gain by waiting till that day!
    She now thought that she had be en right to believe, him, sur prised that he was so promptly fulfilling his promises. He really has a certain kindness of heart," she thought. "He is eccentric, but not ill-natured."
    Moved by her memories, by the thought of times past, by the strangeness of fate, she gazed at this sovereign who had found, in her arms the first expression of his anxious virility, and who w