king at the sight and
at the perusal of Fouquet's letter to La Valliere by degrees subsided
into a feeling of pain and extreme weariness. Youth, invigorated by
health and lightness of spirits, requiring soon that what it loses
should be immediately restored--youth knows not those endless, sleepless
nights which enable us to realize the fable of the vulture unceasingly
feeding on Prometheus. In cases where the man of middle life, in his
acquired strength of will and purpose, and the old, in their state of
natural exhaustion, find incessant augmentation of their bitter sorrow,
a young man, surprised by the sudden appearance of misfortune, weakens
himself in sighs, and groans, and tears, directly struggling with his
grief, 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 scorch in fancy 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 with excessive emotion, still trembled
occasionally, agitated by muscular contractions; while from his breast
faint and infrequent sighs still issued. Morpheus, the tutelary deity of
the apartment, towards whom Louis raised his eyes, wearied by his anger
and reconciled by his tears, showered down upon him the sleep-inducing
poppies with which his hands are ever filled; so presently the monarch
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, and 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 rese