d broken through the flooring of his room at Vaux;
that death had resulted from the occurrence; and that, still carrying
out his dream, as the king, Louis XIV., now no longer living, was
dreaming one of those horrors, impossible to realize in life, which is
termed dethronement, imprisonment and insult toward a sovereign who
formerly wielded unlimited power. To be present at--an actual witness,
too--of this bitterness of death; to float, undecisively, in an
incomprehensible mystery, between resemblance and reality; to hear
everything, to see everything, without interfering with a single detail
of agonizing suffering, was--so the king thought within himself--a
torture far more terrible, since it might last forever. "Is this what is
termed eternity--hell?" he murmured, at the moment the door closed upon
him, which Baisemeaux had himself shut.

He did not even look round him; and in the room, leaning with his back
against the wall, he allowed himself to be carried away by the terrible
supposition that he was already dead, as he closed his eyes, in order to
avoid looking upon something even worse still. "How can I have died?" he
said to himself, sick with terror. "The bed might have been let down by
some artificial means? But no! I do not remember to have received any
contusion, nor any shock either. Would they not rather have poisoned me
at one of my meals, or with the fumes of wax, as they did my ancestress,
Jeanne d'Albret?" Suddenly the chill of the dungeon seemed to fall like
a cloak upon Louis's shoulders. "I have seen," he said, "my father lying
dead upon his funeral couch, in his regal robes. That pale face, so calm
and worn; those hands, once so skillful, lying nerveless by his side;
those limbs stiffened by the icy grasp of death; nothing there betokened
a sleep peopled with dreams. And yet how numerous were the dreams which
Heaven might have sent that royal corpse--him, whom so many others had
preceded, hurried away by him into eternal death! No, that king was
still the king; he was enthroned still upon that funeral couch, as upon
a velvet armchair; he had not abdicated aught of his majesty. God, who
had not punished him, cannot, will not punish me, who have done
nothing."

A strange sound attracted the young man's attention. He looked round
him, and saw on the mantel-shelf, just below an enormous crucifix,
coarsely painted in fresco on the wall, a rat of enormous size engaged
in nibbling a piece of dry bread, bu