make, in dying
ears, only an indistinct murmur. "I know thee always by
thine own hollow voice, lent to youth and age alike. How
well I know thee and thy terrors, which are no longer such
to me![253] I feel the dust that thy wings scatter in the
air as thou comest; I breathe the sickly odour of it; I see
its pale ashes fly, invisible as they may be to other men's
sight. O! thou Inevitable One, thou art here, verily thou
comest to save this man from his misery. Take him in thine
arms like a child; carry him off; save him; I give him to
thee. Save him only from the devouring sorrow that
accompanies us ever on the earth till we come to rest in
thee, O Benefactor and Friend!"

I had not deceived myself, for Death it was. The sick man
ceased to suffer, and began suddenly to enjoy the divine
moment of repose which precedes the eternal immobility of
the body. His eyes grew larger, and were charged with
amazement; his mouth relaxed and smiled; his tongue twice
passed over his lips as if to taste once more, from some
unseen cup, a last drop of the balm of Life. And then he
said with that hoarse voice of the dying which comes from
the inwards and seems to come from the very feet:

At the banquet of life a guest ill-fated.[254]

[Sidenote: The satiric episode--contrast.]

But this death-bed, and the less final but hardly less tragic wanderings
of the victim in his visit to the Archbishop (by whom also the doctor
has been summoned), are contrasted and entangled, very skilfully indeed,
with a scene--the most different possible--in which he still appears.
The main personages in this, however, are his Majesty Louis XV. and the
reigning favourite, Mademoiselle de Coulanges, a young lady who, from
the account given of her, might justify the description, assigned
earlier to one of her official predecessors in a former reign, of being
"belle comme un ange, et bete comme un panier."[255] At first the lovers
(if we are to call them so) are lying, most beautifully dressed and
quite decorously, on different sofas, both of them with books in their
hands, but one asleep and the other yawning. Suddenly the lady springs
up shrieking, and the polite and amiable monarch (apart from his
Solomonic or Sultanic weaknesses, and the perhaps graver indifference
with which he knowingly allowed France to go to the devil, Louis le
Bien-Aime was