be happy, my faithful friend, my only friend. We are
rich, as rich as kings!"

He struck the bag of pistoles with his clenched hand as he spoke, and
it fell heavily to the ground. He resumed that dismal laugh that had so
alarmed Parry; and whilst the whole household was screaming, singing,
and preparing to install the travelers who had been preceded by their
lackeys, he glided out by the principal entrance into the street, where
the old man, who had gone to the window, lost sight of him in a moment.

Chapter VIII. What his Majesty King Louis XIV. was at the Age of
Twenty-Two.

It has been seen, by the account we have endeavored to give of it, that
the _entree_ of King Louis XIV. into the city of Blois had been noisy
and brilliant; his young majesty had therefore appeared perfectly
satisfied with it.

On arriving beneath the porch of the Castle of the States, the king met,
surrounded by his guards and gentlemen, with S. A. R. the duke, Gaston
of Orleans, whose physiognomy, naturally rather majestic, had borrowed
on this solemn occasion a fresh luster and a fresh dignity. On her
part, Madame, dressed in her robes of ceremony, awaited, in the interior
balcony, the entrance of her nephew. All the windows of the old castle,
so deserted and dismal on ordinary days, were resplendent with ladies
and lights.

It was then to the sound of drums, trumpets, and _vivats_, that the
young king crossed the threshold of that castle in which, seventy-two
years before, Henry III. had called in the aid of assassination and
treachery to keep upon his head and in his house a crown which was
already slipping from his brow, to fall into another family.

All eyes, after having admired the young king, so handsome and so
agreeable, sought for that other king of France, much otherwise king
than the former, and so old, so pale, so bent, that people called the
Cardinal Mazarin.

Louis was at this time endowed with all the natural gifts which make
the perfect gentleman; his eye was brilliant, mild, and of a clear azure
blue. But the most skillful physiognomists, those divers into the soul,
on fixing their looks upon it, if it had been possible for a subject to
sustain the glance of the king,--the most skillful physiognomists, we
say, would never have been able to fathom the depths of that abyss of
mildness. It was with the eyes of the king as with the immense depths of
the azure heavens, or with those more terrific, and almost as sublime,