ll whether it was not a stronger
feeling--love itself?" He gave himself up for a moment to his bitter
reflections. "A satyr!" he thought, with that abhorrent hate with which
young men regard those more advanced in life, who still think of love.
"A man who has never found opposition or resistance in any one, who
lavishes his gold and jewels in every direction, and who retains his
staff of painters in order to take the portraits of his mistresses in
the costume of goddesses." The king trembled with passion as he
continued, "He pollutes and profanes everything that belongs to me! He
destroys everything that is mine. He will be my death at last, I know.
That man is too much for me; he is my mortal enemy, and he shall fall! I
hate him--I hate him--I hate him!" and as he pronounced these words, he
struck the arm of the chair in which he was sitting violently over and
over again, and then rose like one in an epileptic fit. "To-morrow!
to-morrow! oh, happy day!" he murmured, "when the sun rises, no other
rival will that bright orb have but me. That man shall fall so low, that
when people look at the utter ruin which my anger shall have wrought,
they will be forced to confess at least that I am indeed greater than
he." The king, who was incapable of mastering his emotions any longer,
knocked over with a blow of his fist a small table placed close to his
bedside, and in the bitterness of feeling from which he was suffering,
almost weeping, and half suffocated by his passion, he threw himself on
his bed, dressed as he was, and bit the sheets in the extremity of his
passion, trying to find repose of body at least there. The bed creaked
beneath his weight, and with the exception of a few broken sounds, which
escaped from his overburdened chest, absolute silence soon reigned in
the chamber of Morpheus.

CHAPTER XCI.

HIGH TREASON.

The ungovernable fury which took possession of the king at the sight and
at the perusal of Fouquet's letter to La Valliere by degrees subsided
into a feeling of pain and extreme weariness. Youth, invigorated by
health and lightness of spirits, and requiring that what it loses should
be immediately restored--youth knows not those endless, sleepless nights
which enable us to realize the fable of the vulture unceasingly feeding
on Prometheus. In instances where the man of middle life, in his
acquired strength of will and purpose, and the old man, in his state of
exhaustion, find an incessant augmen