'Well, you're out of danger now, young lady,' he said at last. 'All you have to do now is get your strength back. Try to eat a little and get up for a bit. You'll live, not a doubt of it, but I don't like the look of you, all the same. We'll have to do something about that.'

Marianne summoned up a smile and answered him in a weak voice:

'Indeed, I'm truly sorry, doctor. I wish I could please you. You have looked after me so patiently. But I don't want anything… food least of all. I feel so tired…'

'And if you don't eat, you'll feel a little more tired every day,' the Emperor's doctor scolded her. 'You have lost a great deal of blood, and you have to make it up again. Good gracious, you are a young woman, and a strong one, for all your dainty looks! One does not die at your age from a miscarriage and a few burns. What do you think the Emperor will have to say to me when I tell him you won't do as I tell you?'

'It isn't your fault.'

'Oh ho! If you think His Majesty will believe that! He expects his orders to be obeyed, and we have both had our orders: me to make you better, and you to get better as fast as possible. We've neither of us a particle of choice. I attend the Emperor every morning and he always asks after you, let me tell you.'

Marianne turned her head on the pillow so that he should not see the tears in her eyes.

'The Emperor is very kind…' she said in a tight little voice.

'He is to those he cares for,' Corvisart agreed. 'Tomorrow, at all events, I mean to tell him that you are better. So don't you let me down, Princess.'

'I'll try not to, Doctor. I'll try.'

The physician smiled and bent forward on an impulse to pat his patient's cheek affectionately:

'That's better, my child. That's more what I like to hear. Until tomorrow, then. I'll have a word with your people here and I trust I'll find you've been a good girl and done as you're bid. Your servant, Madame Hamelin.'

With a bow to the exquisite Creole, Corvisart trod across the room and the door closed softly behind him. At once, Fortunée rose quietly and came to sit on the edge of her friend's bed, enveloping her in a strong scent of roses. Her dress of simple cotton lawn embroidered with tiny coloured flowers was perfect for the warm, summer day, and made her look like a young girl. A huge sun-bonnet of natural straw swung from one white-mittened hand. Looking at her, Marianne felt strangely old and tired, and the expression on her face was so bleak that Fortunée frowned quickly.

'I don't understand you, Marianne,' she said at last. 'You have been lying here for a week now and you are behaving just exactly as if wanting to be done with your life for good. It's not like you…'

'It was not like me once. But now, it's true. I do not want to live. What is the use?'

'Was it so important… the child?'

Once again, Marianne's eyes filled with tears and this time she made no attempt to restrain them, but let them flow freely.

'Of course it was important,' she said. 'It was the only thing that mattered in my whole life, my whole reason for living. I could have lived for him, through him. All my hopes were in him, and not only mine…'

Ever since she had recovered consciousness on that terrible night and learned that she had lost the child, Marianne had been blaming herself bitterly, and most of all for forgetting, all through those dreadful hours, that she was soon to be a mother. From the moment she had set eyes on Jason, everything else that had mattered to her before suddenly ceased to exist before the blinding discovery of the love which she had carried with her unwittingly for months. The garden, illumined by the blaze of fireworks, had been her road to Damascus and she had emerged from it, like Saul, blind, blind to everything around her, blind to the whole world, to her own life, to everything except this love, so deep that she could not contemplate it without a feeling of vertigo. And by risking her own life, by seeking to make an end of it, she had wantonly imperilled that of the child! Not for an instant had she thought of it, or of the man, far away in the villa in Tuscany, who would wait now in vain for news of the birth of that child on whom he had pinned every hope of his hermitic existence.

Corrado Sant'Anna had married her for the sake of a child of the imperial blood to inherit his name. And now, through her own fault, she, Marianne, had lost all hope of fulfilling her part of the bargain. The prince had been cheated.

'You are thinking of your mysterious husband, are you?' Fortunée said quietly.

'Yes. I am ashamed, ashamed, do you understand? Because I feel now as if I had stolen the name I bear.'

'Stolen it? But why?'

'I have already told you,' Marianne said wearily. 'Prince Sant' Anna married me only for the sake of the child, because it was the Emperor's and so he was not ashamed to acknowledge it…'

'So, having lost it, you think yourself unfit to live and, if I understand you correctly, your present plan is simply to go into a decline and die?'

'More or less. But don't imagine I am trying to punish myself. I told you: I just do not wish to live.'

Fortunée got up and walked nervously over to the window, threw it open and then returned to her place by the bed:

'If your will to live depends purely on the existence of a child of Napoleon's, then I should think the answer was obvious. Napoleon will give you another and all will be well.'

'Fortunée!'

Gasping, Marianne turned a shocked face to her friend, but the Creole only grinned:

'You may well say Fortunée! like that! Do I shock you? You don't appear to have been quite so squeamish in practice, do you? And if there's one thing I can't endure, it's hypocrisy. Leave that to the experts, like Madame de Genlis, or Madame Campan and her mealy-mouthed set, unless you mean to ally yourself with those mewling dowagers who come flocking back from abroad wailing about the decline in good manners! I like to call a spade a spade! If you want to do right by your invisible husband, you must give him another child, and a child of Napoleon's. Moral: Napoleon must give you another! To my mind, it's as simple as that! Besides, I hear the Austrian is in high hopes, so he may be easy on that score and will have all the more time for you.'

Marianne regarded her with awe. 'But Fortunée,' she protested, 'don't you know you are immoral?'

'Of course I know!' Madame Hamelin crowed delightedly. 'And you can't imagine how happy I am to be so! What I have seen of morality all around me makes me sick! All for love, my sweet, and a fig for your principles!'

As if in endorsement of this declaration of war on conventional principles, there was a sudden report of cannon fire outside, followed almost immediately by a second and then a third. At the same time, borne on the summer breeze, came a sound of solemn, martial music and the murmur of a crowd.

'What is it?' Marianne asked.

'Of course, you don't know! It's the state funeral of Marshal Lannes. Today is the sixth of July and the Emperor is having the body of his old comrade-in-arms transferred from the Invalides to the Pantheon. The cortege must have just now left the Invalides.'

The guns were now firing almost continuously. The melancholy sound of the trumpets and the muffled roll of drums were coming nearer, filling the garden and penetrating into the quiet room, reinforced by the tolling of every bell in Paris.

'Would you like me to shut the window?' Fortunée asked, impressed by the rumble of these solemn obsequies by which the city paid its tribute, for one day, to one of the greatest soldiers of the age. Marianne made a gesture of refusal. She too was listening, more conscious than she had been perhaps during the contrived gaieties of the marriage celebrations, of the greatness of the man who had taken charge of her fate and who, high as he was, could still find time to watch over her. Her heart stirred as she remembered the hand which had held hers through those first moments of her long agony. He had promised not to leave her and he had kept his word. He always kept his word.

She had learned from Fortunée, and also from Arcadius de Jolival, how he had stayed at the Austrian embassy, working tirelessly, until the fire was altogether extinguished, rescuing even a simple housemaid who was trapped by the fire in an attic room. She had learned, too, how angry he had been the next day, and of the retribution he had meted out: the Prefect of Police, Dubois, dismissed, Savary severely reprimanded, the architect who had thoughtlessly designed the ballroom arrested, the chief of the fire service relieved of his post and measures put in hand without delay for a complete reorganization of the entire force, such as it was. Certainly, it was reassuring to find oneself the object of his solicitude but Marianne knew now that her passion for him had snuffed itself out like a candle, leaving something else in its place, a deeper feeling, perhaps, but how much less ennobling!

When she spoke, it was in answer to this secret thought. 'I shall never give myself to him again, never…'

'What?' Fortunée said, startled. 'To whom? To the Emperor? You won't…'

'No,' Marianne said. 'I can't. Not now.'

'But – why ever not?'

Before Marianne could reply, there was a tap at the door and Agathe, her maid, appeared, deliciously neat and fresh in striped cotton dress and starched apron:

'Monsieur Beaufort is below, Your Highness. He desires to know if Your Highness is well enough to receive him.'

Marianne's cheeks were suffused with a wave of crimson: