announced that the same crowd of courtiers who, in the morning, had
thronged his lever, presented themselves again at his coucher, a
remarkable piece of respect which, during the reign of the cardinal,
the court, not very discreet in its preferences, had accorded to the
minister, without caring about displeasing the king.

But the minister had had, as we have said, an alarming attack of gout,
and the tide of flattery was mounting towards the throne. Courtiers have
a marvelous instinct in scenting the turn of events; courtiers possess
a supreme kind of science; they are diplomatists in throwing light upon
the unraveling of complicated intrigues, captains in divining the issue
of battles, and physicians in curing the sick. Louis XIV., to whom his
mother had taught this axiom, together with many others, understood at
once that the 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 i