When morning came, the chevalier went out and began to walk meditatively about the streets. It didn’t occur to him to have recourse again to the friendly abbé, and it would not be easy to say just why he refrained. It was as it were a mixture of fear and audacity, of false shame and romance. And indeed, what would the abbé have answered, if he had told him the story of the night before?

‘You happened to be there in the nick of time to pick up a fan: have you managed to profit by it? What did you say to the marquise?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You ought to have spoken to her.’

‘I was excited: I had lost my head.’

‘That’s a mistake: a man must always seize his chance. But that can be remedied. Would you like me to present you to Mr. So-and-so? He is a friend of mine. To Madame So-and-so? She is better still. We will try to get you as far as this marquise who frightened you, and this time,’ etc.

Now the chevalier was not worrying about anything like that. It seemed to him that in recounting his adventure, it would have been as it were spoilt and deflowered. He said to himself that chance had granted him an unheard-of, an incredible opportunity, and that it ought to be a secret between himself and fortune: to confide that secret to any chance comer, was, in his opinion, to take away all its virtue, and show himself unworthy.

‘I went yesterday all alone to the Château of Versailles,’ he thought,. ‘I will go all alone to Trianon’ (that was at the moment the abode of the favourite).

Such a way of thinking may appear, nay, even must appear, extravagant to calculating minds, who neglect nothing, and leave as little as possible to chance: but the most austere men, if they have ever been young (everybody is not young even in their youth), can recognize this odd sentiment, weak and venturesome, dangerous and seductive, which pulls us toward our destiny: we feel ourselves blind, and we want to be blind: we do not know whither we go, and we go on. The charm of it lies in this carefreeness, and this very ignorance: it is the pleasure of the artist in his visions, of the lover who spends the night under his mistress’s window: it is, too, the instinct of the soldier: it is, above all, that of the gamester.

The chevalier, then, almost without knowing it, had taken the road to Trianon. Without being very well got up, as the saying was, he was not lacking in elegance, nor in that way of carrying himself which prevents a lackey who meets you on the way, from asking where you are going. He found no difficulty, then, thanks to several inquiries he had made at his inn, in arriving at the main gate of the château, if such a name can be given to that chocolate box of marble which was a witness of so many pleasures and so much boredom. Unfortunately the gate was shut, and a big Swiss guardsman, clad in a plain greatcoat, was walking, hands behind his back, in the inside passage like a man who was not expecting visitors.

‘The king is here,’ said the chevalier to himself, ‘or the marquise is not here.’ It is self-evident that when the gates are closed and the servants are going walking, the masters are busy inside or have gone out.

What was to be done? Just as he had felt, an instant before, confidence and courage, so he experienced suddenly trouble and disappointment. The thought alone, ‘The king is here’, frightened him more than had done the evening before those six words, ‘the king is going to pass’, for then it was only an unforeseen contingency, but now he knew that cold look, that impassible majesty.

‘Oh, good God! what a figure I should cut if I tried like a rash fool to get into this garden, if I am going to find myself face to face with this proud monarch, taking his coffee by the side of a brook.’