low-pitched, grand-ducal vault, in their
coffins, dusted once a year for All Souls' Day, when the court
officials descended thither, and Mass for the dead was sung, amid an
array of dropping crape and cobwebs. The lad, with his full red lips
and open blue eyes, coming as with a great cup in his hands to life's
feast, revolted from the like of that, as from suffocation. And still
the suggestion of it was everywhere. In the garish afternoon, up to
the wholesome heights of the Heiligenberg suddenly from one of the
villages of the plain came the grinding death-knell. It seemed to come
out of the ugly grave itself, and enjoyment was dead. On his way
homeward sadly, an hour later, he enters by chance the open door of a
village church, half buried in the tangle of its churchyard. The rude
coffin is lying there of a labourer who had but a hovel to live in.
The enemy dogged one's footsteps! The young Carl seemed to be flying,
not from death simply, but from assassination.

And as these thoughts sent him back in the rebounding power of youth,
with renewed appetite, to life and sense, so, grown at last familiar,
they gave additional purpose to his fantastic experiment. Had it not
been said by a wise man that after all the offence of death was in its
trappings? Well! he would, as far as might be, try the thing, while,
presumably, a [138] large reversionary interest in life was still his.
He would purchase his freedom, at least of those gloomy "trappings,"
and listen while he was spoken of as dead. The mere preparations gave
pleasant proof of the devotion to him of a certain number, who entered
without question into his plans. It is not difficult to mislead the
world concerning what happens to these who live at the artificial
distance from it of a court, with its high wall of etiquette. However
the matter was managed, no one doubted, when, with a blazon of
ceremonious words, the court news went forth that, after a brief
illness, according to the way of his race, the hereditary Grand-duke
was deceased. In momentary regret, bethinking them of the lad's taste
for splendour, those to whom the arrangement of such matters belonged
(the grandfather now sinking deeper into bare quiescence) backed by the
popular wish, determined to give him a funeral with even more than
grand-ducal measure of lugubrious magnificence. The place of his
repose was marked out for him as officiously as if it had been the
delimitation of a kingdom, in