al
starving-ground, France lay about his death-bed, and its people were but
waiting with grim impatience for their king to die. What France might do
in the future was unknown; yet it was unthinkable that aught could be
worse than this glorious reign of Louis, the Grand Monarque, this
crumbling clod, this resolving excrescence, this phosphorescent,
disintegrating fungus of a diseased life and time.

Seventy-two years a king; thirty years a libertine; twenty years a
repentant. Son, grandson, great-grandson, all gone, as though to leave
not one of that once haughty breed. For France no hope at all; and for
the house of Bourbon, all the hope there might be in the life of a
little boy, sullen, tiny, timid. Far over in Paris, busy about his games
and his loves, a jesting, long-curled gallant, the Duke of Orleans,
nephew of this king, was holding a court of his own. And from this court
which might be, back to the court which was, but which might not be
long, swung back and forth the fawning creatures of the former court.
This was the central picture of France, and Paris, and of the New World
on this day of the year 1715.

In the room about the bed of state, uncertain groups of watchers
whispered noisily. The five physicians, who had tried first one remedy
and then another; the rustic physician whose nostrum had kept life
within the king for some unexpected days; the ladies who had waited upon
the relatives of the king; some of the relatives themselves; Villeroy,
guardian of the young king soon to be; the bastard, and the wife of that
bastard, who hoped for the king's shoes; the mistress of his earlier
years, for many years his wife--Maintenon, that peerless hypocrite of
all the years--all these passed, and hesitated, and looked, waiting, as
did the hungry crowds in Paris toward the Seine, until the double sun
should set, and the crawling thumbs at last should find their shelter.
The Grand Monarque was losing the only time in all his life when he
might have learned human wisdom.

"Madame!" whispered the dry lips, faintly.

She who was addressed as madame, this woman Maintenon, pious murderer,
unrivaled hypocrite, unspeakably self-contained dissembler, the woman
who lost for France an empire greater than all France, stepped now to
the bed-side of the dying monarch, inclining her head to hear what he
might have to say. Was Maintenon, the outcast, the widow, the wife of
the king, at last to be made ruler of the Church in Franc