med to suggest the probability of
my conjecture being correct.

As a youth, Louis had proved himself both awkward and clumsy. He was
loutish, silent in company, ill at ease in his princely surroundings,
and in all respects unlike his younger brothers. He was honest, sincere,
pious, a faithful husband, a devoted father; amply endowed, indeed, with
the middle-class virtues which at that period were but rarely found in
palaces. To my childish reasoning the most convincing proof lay in his
innate craving for physical labour; a craving that no ridicule could
dispel.

With the romantic enthusiasm of youth, I used to fancy the peasant
mother stealing into the Palace among the spectators who daily were
permitted to view the royal couple at dinner, and imagine her, having
seen the King, depart glorying secretly in the strategy that had raised
her son to so high an estate. There was another picture, in whose
dramatic misery I used to revel. It showed the unknown mother, who had
discovered that by her own act she had condemned her innocent son to
suffer for the sins of past generations of royal profligates, journeying
to Paris (in my dreams she always wore sabots and walked the entire
distance in a state of extreme physical exhaustion) with the intention
of preventing his execution by declaring his lowly parentage to the mob.
The final tableau revealed her, footsore and weary, reaching within
sight of the guillotine just in time to see the executioner holding up
her son's severed head. I think my imaginary heroine died of a broken
heart at this juncture, a catastrophe that would naturally account for
her secret dying with her.

[Illustration: Madame Sans Tete]

During our winter stay at Versailles, my childish phantasies recurred to
me, and I almost found them feasible. What an amazing irony of fate it
would have shown had a son of the soil expired to expiate the crimes of
sovereigns!

But more pitiful by far than the saddest of illusions is the sordid
reality of a scene indelibly imprinted on my mental vision. Memory takes
me back to the twilight of a spring Sunday several years ago, when in
the wake of a cluster of market folks we wandered into the old Cathedral
of St. Denis. Deep in the sombre shadows of the crypt a light gleamed
faintly through a narrow slit in the stone wall. Approaching, we looked
into a gloomy vault wherein, just visible by the ray of a solitary
candle, lay two zinc coffins.

Earth holds no more dis