much ambition and pride. Would you not like someone to buy you out, so that you might return to marry Pierrette?"
"Believe me, you are unwise."
"Michel! Michel!" I cried; "have you not often told me yourself, 'Each one must make his own lot'? I do not choose to marry Pierrette with the money of others, and I am making my own lot, as you see. Besides, it was the Queen who put this idea into my head, and the Queen must know best. She said: 'He will be a soldier, and I will marry you to him.' She did not say, 'He will return after having been a soldier.'"
"But suppose," said Michel, "the Queen were to provide you with the means of marrying, would you not accept her bounty?"
"No, Michel! Even if such an unlikely thing were to happen, I would not take her money."
"And if Pierrette herself earned her dot?"
"Then, Michel, I would marry her at once."
"Well!" returned he, "I will tell that to the Queen."
"Are you crazy?" I said to him, "or are you now a servant in her house?"
"Neither the one nor the other, Mathurin, although I no longer cut stone."
"What do you cut, then?" asked I.
"I cut pieces, out of paper and ink."
"Is it possible?"
'Yes, my boy; I write simple little plays, easy to be understood. Some day, perhaps, you shall see one."
IV.
Meanwhile, my faithful Pierrette did not forget me. And one day a wonderful thing happened to her. She told me all about it afterwards.
It was Easter Monday. Pierrette was sitting before the curé's door, working and singing, when she saw a gorgeous carriage, drawn by six horses, coming through the avenue. It rolled right up to the curé's house, and then stopped. Pierrette now saw that the carriage was empty. As she was gazing with all her eyes, the equerry, taking off his hat with great politeness, begged her to enter the vehicle.
Pierrette had too much good sense to make any needless fuss. She simply slipped off her sabots, put on her shoes with the silver buckles, folded her work, and, assisted by the footman's arm, stepped into the carriage as if to the manner born.
Soon she found herself at Trianon, where she was conducted through gilded apartments into the Queen's presence. With the Queen was Madame de Lamballe, seated in an embrasure of a window, before an easel.
"Ah!" exclaimed the Queen, gaily, "here she is!" And she ran up to Pierrette, and took both her hands in her own. "How pretty she is!" she went on; "what a dear little model she will be for you! Sit there, my child."
With these words, Marie Antoinette gently pushed the bewildered Pierrette into a very
