d with material chains. Towards
this true happiness it is mine to guide you--be it yours to attend to my
instructions."

"And it is to such philosophical freedom that your lessons would have
guided me?" said the King very bitterly. "I would you had told me at
Plessis that the dominion promised me so liberally was an empire over
my own passions; that the success of which I was assured, related to my
progress in philosophy, and that I might become as wise and as learned
as a strolling mountebank of Italy! I might surely have attained this
mental ascendency at a more moderate price than that of forfeiting
the fairest crown in Christendom, and becoming tenant of a dungeon in
Peronne! Go, sir, and think not to escape condign punishment.--There is
a Heaven above us!"

"I leave you not to your fate," replied Martius, "until I have
vindicated, even in your eyes, darkened as they are, that reputation,
a brighter gem than the brightest in thy crown, and at which the world
shall wonder, ages after all the race of Capet [the surname of the kings
of France, beginning with Hugh Capet, 987] are mouldered into oblivion
in the charnels of Saint Denis."

"Speak on," said Louis. "Thine impudence cannot make me change my
purposes or my opinion.--Yet as I may never again pass judgment as a
King, I will not censure thee unheard. Speak, then--though the best thou
canst say will be to speak the truth. Confess that I am a dupe, thou
an impostor, thy pretended science a dream, and the planets which shine
above us as little influential of our destiny as their shadows, when
reflected in the river, are capable of altering its course."

"And how know'st thou," answered the Astrologer boldly, "the secret
influence of yonder blessed lights? Speak'st thou of their inability to
influence waters, when yet thou know'st that ever the weakest, the moon
herself--weakest because nearest to this wretched earth of ours--holds
under her domination not such poor streams as the Somme, but the tides
of the mighty ocean itself, which ebb and increase as her disc waxes and
wanes, and watch her influence as a slave waits the nod of a Sultana?
And now, Louis of Valois, answer my parable in turn.--Confess, art thou
not like the foolish passenger, who becomes wroth with his pilot
because he cannot bring the vessel into harbour without experiencing
occasionally the adverse force of winds and currents? I could indeed
point to thee the probable issue of thine enterprise