ry principles, we may ask, that compose human strength? Is it
not--more than anything else--exercise, habit, experience? We shall not
even take the trouble to demonstrate this, for it is an axiom in morals,
as in physics. When the young king, stupefied and crushed in every sense
and feeling, found himself led to a cell in the Bastile, he fancied
death itself is but a sleep; that it, too, has its dreams as well; that
the bed had broken through the flooring of his room at Vaux; that death
had resulted from the occurrence; and that, still carrying out his
dream, 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 towards a sovereign who formerly
wielded unlimited power. To be present at--an actual witness, too--of
this bitterness of death; to float, indecisively, in an incomprehensible
mystery, between resemblance and reality; to hear everything, to
see everything, without interfering in 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 was closed upon
him, which we remember Baisemeaux had shut with his own hands. 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 felt a bruise,
nor any shock either. Would they not rather have poisoned me at my
meals, or with the fumes of wax, as they did my ancestress, Jeanne
d'Albret?" Suddenly, the chill of the dungeons seemed to fall like a wet
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 that was disturbed by 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 ki