If at Faust You Don`t Succeed

CHAPTER 5

Ylith hurried back to Marie Antoinette. "What time have you got now?"

Marie consulted her hourglass. "Just going on eleven."

Ylith looked at her water watch. "I make it almost eight o'clock. Well, what the hell. All right, let's get going."

"I'm ready," Marie said. "Let me just get my purse."

Outside, a tall coachman stamped his feet to keep up the circulation, and looked inside his coach from time to time at the tall hourglass which rested upright in a rosewood cradle. "Damn, damn, damn," he muttered to himself in Swedish.

At last a door in the Tuileries opened and two women hurried out, one blond, the other dark.

"Your Majesty!" the tall coachman said. "Where the devil have you been?"

"What do you mean, where have I been?" Marie asked. "I am here at the appointed hour."

"I hate to contradict you, but you're four hours ate. It's going to make it difficult."

"Me? Late? Impossible!" She turned to Ylith. "What time do you have?"

Ylith consulted her small traveling hourglass. "Eight o'clock."

Marie consulted hers. "I make it just eleven."

"And I," said the coachman, "have three in the morning!"

The three looked at each other in consternation, simultaneously bemoaning the lack of a unified timekeeping system in the world at that time. To Ylith it was now painfully obvious that Marie Antoinette was figuring in French Royalist Time, the coachman in Swedish Reformed Time, and she herself in Spiritual Standard Time, and that in each of these times and many others, Marie Antoinette was late for a vital appointment.

The coachman said, "No help for it, let's go. But we're late, very late."