cardinal must be very ill.

Scarcely had Anne of Austria conducted the young queen to her apartments
and taken from her brow the head-dress of ceremony, when she went to see
her son in his cabinet, where, alone, melancholy, and depressed, he was
indulging, as if to exercise his will, in one of those terrible inward
passions--king's passions--which create events when they break out, and
with Louis XIV., thanks to his astonishing command over himself, became
such benign tempests, that his most violent, his only passion, that
which Saint Simon mentions with astonishment, was that famous fit of
anger which he exhibited fifty years later, on the occasion of a little
concealment of the Duc de Maine's, and which had for result a shower of
blows inflicted with a cane upon the back of a poor valet who had stolen
a biscuit. The young king then was, as we have seen, a prey to a
double excitement; and he said to himself as he looked in a glass,
"O king!--king by name, and not in fact;--phantom, vain phantom art
thou!--inert statue, which has no other power than that of provoking
salutations from courtiers, when wilt thou be able to raise thy velvet
arm, or clench thy silken hand? when wilt thou be able to open, for
any purpose but to sigh, or smile, lips condemned to the motionless
stupidity of the marbles in thy gallery?"

Then, passing his hand over his brow, and feeling the want of air, he
approached a window, and looking down, saw below some horsemen talking
together, and groups of timid observers. These horsemen were a fraction
of the watch: the groups were busy portions of the people, to whom a
king is always a curious thing, the same as a rhinoceros, a crocodile,
or a serpent. He struck his brow with his open hand, crying,--"King of
France! what a title! People of France! what a heap of creatures! I
have just returned to my Louvre; my horses, just unharnessed, are still
smoking, and I have created interest enough to induce scarcely twenty
persons to look at me as I passed. Twenty! what do I say? no; there were
not twenty anxious to see the king of France. There are not even ten
archers to guard my palace of residence: archers, people, guards, all
are at the Palais Royal! Why, my good God! have not I, the king, the
right to ask of you all that?"

"Because," said a voice, replying to his, and which sounded from the
other side of the door of the cabinet, "because at the Palais Royal
lies all the gold,--that is to say, all th