tation of their bitter sorrow, a
young man, surprised by the sudden appearance of a misfortune, weakens
himself in sighs, and groans, and tears, in direct struggles with it,
and is thereby far sooner overthrown by the inflexible enemy with whom
he is engaged. Once overthrown, his struggles cease. Louis could not
hold out more than a few minutes, at the end of which he had ceased to
clench his hands, and to burn up with his looks the invisible objects of
his hatred; he soon ceased to attack with his violent imprecations not
M. Fouquet alone, but even La Valliere herself: from fury he subsided
into despair, and from despair to prostration. After he had thrown
himself for a few minutes to and fro convulsively on his bed, his
nerveless arms fell quietly down; his head lay languidly on his pillow;
his limbs, exhausted from his excessive emotions, still trembled
occasionally, agitated by slight muscular contractions; and from his
breast only faint and unfrequent sighs still issued. Morpheus, the
tutelary deity of the apartment, toward whom Louis raised his eyes,
wearied by his anger and reddened by his tears, showered down upon him
the sleep-inducing poppies with which his hands were filled; so that the
king gently closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Then it seemed to him, as it often happens in that first sleep, so light
and gentle, which raises the body above the couch, the soul above the
earth--it seemed to him, we say, as if the god Morpheus, painted on the
ceiling, looked at him with eyes resembling human eyes; that something
shone brightly, and moved to and fro in the dome above the sleeper; that
the crowd of terrible dreams which thronged together in his brain, and
which were interrupted for a moment, half-revealed a human face, with a
hand resting against the mouth, and in an attitude of deep and absorbed
meditation. And strange enough, too, this man bore so wonderful a
resemblance to the king himself, that Louis fancied he was looking at
his own face reflected in a mirror; with the exception, however, that
the face was saddened by a feeling of the profoundest pity. Then it
seemed to him as if the dome gradually retired, escaping from his gaze,
and that the figures and attributes painted by Lebrun became darker and
darker as the distance became more and more remote. A gentle, easy
movement, as regular as that by which a vessel plunges beneath the
waves, had succeeded to the immovableness of the bed. Doubtless the king
w