Rummaging through my pockets, my fingers close round a sulfur match. I swipe it-twice-against the stone wall, and the light carves away the darkness, and I find myself staring up at an inscription: "Here lie the mortal remains of . . ."

In the next instant, I'm swinging the light away, but it's not Charles who pops out at me but a stranger. Discernible only as an oval of white, with a mouth-chasm.

I see the scream before I hear it. The uvula vibrating, the soft palate receding.

From behind us come confused shouts. A pair of rough hands f lings me to the ground; another pair f lattens Charles. I feel the press of cold stone and a blade against my neck and, above me, a voice of unusual cultivation.

"Move another inch, and you will die."

CHAPTE R 32.

Germany to the Rescue So begins my first audience with the Duchesse d'Angouleme. Although, if I'm to be strictly accurate, my first audience took place

four years earlier-on the third of May, 1814.

For a steep sum, my mother and I rented a window seat in a pothouse overlooking the Rue Saint-Denis, where we proposed to join a

few million of our fellow citizens in welcoming King Louis the Eighteenth.

Happiest of days. The Corsican had been sent off to Elba, the Bourbon exile was done. Let the forgetting begin! From every window

there f luttered a white f lag or white f lowers . . . white curtains, carpets, bed linens. As if the homes in Paris were disemboweling themselves for joy.

At precisely ten o'clock the King's carriage came through the triumphal arch of the Porte Saint-Denis, drawn by eight white horses.

Long live the King! came the roar. Long live the Bourbons! Our eyes then turned, by common consent, to the small thin woman in the King's carriage. The last time she'd met this many Parisians, they were dragging her to the Temple. Now they were throwing open their arms. She had outlived the Directorate and the Consulate and the Empire. She was our Antigone, our Clio, our new

Marianne.

And yet, as she passed down the Rue Saint-Denis-clutching her

white parasol, averting her head-she left in her wake only an itchy

muttering. My mother, in the end, had one thing to say on the subject

of the Duchesse d'Angouleme. . . .

"Such a bonnet! "

Well, having spent the previous eight years in Buckinghamshire,

the Duchess was sporting the small headwear favored by the English.

No one had told her that Parisian women preferred bonnets the size of

funerary urns.

The bonnet, of course, would have mattered nothing at all if there

had lain beneath it the face of our imaginings. This was what we saw

instead: a stern, grief-parched woman, still in her thirties but already

closed to light. Madame Royale (as she was known from birth) may

have quit the Temple; the Temple had never quit her.

Her marriage to her cousin, the Comte d'Artois' son, was barren

in every respect, and since her return to France, the Duchess has abstained from virtually all social functions, preferring to devote herself

to acts of charity. She visits hospitals and workhouses, she prays for

souls, and twice a month, she makes the pilgrimage from the Tuileries