Explore "Marie Antoinette" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE noisy, good-natured, and very dangerous mob had gone at last; their final stragglers, gazing, curious and tired, at the pictures and the gilding (the trappings of their Public King in his great Public Palace), had wandered out. A few steps on the wide stone stairs of the central pavilion were still heard lazily descending. The dishevelled family was at rest.
A little group of Deputies remained behind, and talked in low and careful voices to the King and Queen-principally to the Queen, for she was voluble. She was suave, though somewhat garrulously suave. "Would not some of these gentlemen come and see her put the Dauphin to bed? " A familiar appeal made by the very wealthy to the middle class rarely fails. They followed respectfully and a little awkwardly to where, in a small bed out of her room, the child slept. She had him ready for bed in a few moments; then she said to him, smiling: