duties with his ministers, had gone to his workshop in order to work
with his locksmith, Girard, upon a new lock, whose skilful
construction was an invention of the king.

The queen, too, had not left her room the whole day, and even her
friend, the Duchess Julia de Polignac, had not been able to cheer up
the queen by her pleasant talk.

At last, when she saw that all her efforts were vain, and that
nothing could dissipate the sadness of the queen, the duchess had
made the proposition to go to Trianon, and there to call together
the circle of her intimate friends.

But the queen sorrowfully shook her head, and gazed at the duchess
with a troubled look.

"You speak of the circle of my friends," she said. "Ah! the circle
of those whom I considered my friends is so rent and broken, that
scarcely any torn fragments of it remain, and I fear to bring them
together again, for I know that what once is broken cannot be mended
again."

"And so does your majesty not believe in your friends any more?"
asked the duchess, reproachfully. "Do you doubt us? Do you doubt
me?"

"I do not doubt you all, and, before all things else, not you," said
Marie Antoinette, with a lingering, tender look. "I only doubt the
possibility of a queen's having faithful friends. I always forgot,
when I was with my friends, that I was the queen, but they never