weeping, and half-suffocated, he threw himself on his bed, dressed as he
was, and bit the sheets in his extremity of passion, trying to find
repose of body at least there.  The bed creaked beneath his weight, and
with the exception of a few broken sounds, emerging, or, one might say,
exploding, from his overburdened chest, absolute silence soon reigned in
the chamber of Morpheus.


Chapter XVII:
High Treason.

The ungovernable fury which took possession of the king at the sight and
at the perusal of Fouquet's letter to La Valliere by degrees subsided
into a feeling of pain and extreme weariness.  Youth, invigorated by
health and lightness of spirits, requiring soon that what it loses should
be immediately restored - youth knows not those endless, sleepless nights
which enable us to realize the fable of the vulture unceasingly feeding
on Prometheus.  In cases where the man of middle life, in his acquired
strength of will and purpose, and the old, in their state of natural
exhaustion, find incessant augmentation of their bitter sorrow, a young
man, surprised by the sudden appearance of misfortune, weakens himself in
sighs, and groans, and tears, directly struggling with his grief, and is
thereby far sooner overthrown by the inflexible enemy with whom he is
engaged.  Once overthrown, his struggles cease.  Louis could not hold out
more than a few minutes, at the end of which he had ceased to clench his
hands, and scorch in fancy with his looks the invisible objects of his
hatred; he soon ceased to attack with his violent imprecations not M.
Fouquet alone, but even La Valliere herself; from fury he subsided into
despair, and from despair to prostration.  After he had thrown himself
for a few minutes to and fro convulsively on his bed, his nerveless arms
fell quietly down; his head lay languidly on his pillow; his limbs,
exhausted with excessive emotion, still trembled occasionally, agitated
by muscular contractions; while from his breast faint and infrequent
sighs still issued.  Morpheus, the tutelary deity of the apartment,
towards whom Louis raised his eyes, wearied by his anger and reconciled
by his tears, showered down upon him the sleep-inducing poppies with
which his hands are ever filled; so presently the monarch closed his eyes
and fell asleep.  Then it seemed to him, as it often happens in that
first sleep, so light and gentle, which raises the body above the couch,
and the soul above the earth - it seemed to him, we say, as if the god
Morpheus, painted on the ceiling, looked at him with eyes resembling
human eyes; that something shone brightly, and moved to and fro in the
dome above the sleeper; that the crowd of terrible dreams which thronged
together in his brain, and which were interrupted for a moment, half
revealed a human face, with a hand resting against the mouth, and in an
attitude of deep and absorbed meditation.  And strange enough, too, this
man bore so wonderful a resemblance to the king himself, that Louis
fancied he was looking at his own face reflected in a mirror; with the
exception, however, that the face was saddened by a feeling of the
profoundest pity.  Then it seemed to him as if the dome gradually
retired, escaping from his gaze, and that the figures and attributes
painted by Lebrun became darker and darker as the distance became more
and more remote.  A gentle, easy movement, as regular as that by which a
vessel plunges beneath the waves, had succeeded to the immovableness of
the bed.  Doubtless the king was dreaming, and in this dream the crown of
gold, which fastened the curtains together, seemed to recede from his
vision, just as the dome, to which it remained suspended, had done, so
that the winged genius which, with both its hand, supported the crown,
seemed, though vainly so, to call upon the king, who was fast
disappearing from it.  The bed still sunk.  Louis, with his eyes open,
could not resist the deception of this cruel hallucination.  At last, as
the light of the royal chamber faded away into darkness and gloom,
something cold, gloomy, and inexplicable in its nature seemed to infect
the air.  No paintings, nor gold, nor velvet hangings, were visible any
longer, nothing but walls of a dull gray color, which the increasing
gloom made darker every moment.  And yet the bed still continued to
descend, and after a minute, which seemed in its duration almost an age
to the king, it reached a stratum of air, black and chill as death, and
then it stopped.  The king could no longer see the light in his room,
except as from the bottom of a well we can see the light of day.  "I am
under the influence of some atrocious dream," he thought.  "It is time to
awaken from it.  Come! let me wake."

Every one has experienced the sensation the above remark conveys; there
is hardly a person who, in the midst of a nightmare whose influence is
suffocating, has not said to himself, by the help of that light which
still burns in the brain when every human light is extinguished, "It is
nothing but a dream, after all."  This was precisely what Louis XIV. said
to himself; but when he said, "Come, come! wake up," he perceived that
not only was he already awake, but still more, that he had his eyes open
also.  And then he looked all round him.  On his right hand and on his
left two armed men stood in stolid silence, each wrapped in a huge cloak,
and the face covered with a mask; one of them held a small lamp in his
hand, whose glimmering light revealed the saddest picture a king could
look upon.  Louis could not help saying to himself that his dream still
lasted, and that all he had to do to cause it to disappear was to move
his arms or to say something aloud; he darted from his bed, and found
himself upon the damp, moist ground.  Then, addressing himself to the man
who held the lamp in his hand, he said:

"What is this, monsieur, and what is the meaning of this jest?"

"It is no jest," replied in a deep voice the masked figure that held the
lantern.

"Do you belong to M. Fouquet?" inquired the king, greatly astonished at
his situation.

"It matters very little to whom we belong," said the phantom; "we are
your masters now, that is sufficient."

The king, more impatient than intimidated, turned to the other masked
figure.  "If this is a comedy," he said, "you will tell M. Fouquet that I
find it unseemly and improper, and that I command it should cease."

The second masked person to whom the king had addressed himself was a man
of huge stature and vast circumference.  He held himself erect and
motionless as any block of marble.  "Well!" added the king, stamping his
foot, "you do not answer!"

"We do not answer you, my good monsieur," said the giant, in a stentorian
voice, "because there is nothing to say."

"At least, tell me what you want," exclaimed Louis, folding his arms with
a passionate gesture.

"You will know by and by," replied the man who held the lamp.

"In the meantime tell me where I am."

"Look."

Louis looked all round him; but by the light of the lamp which the masked
figure raised for the purpose, he could perceive nothing but the damp
walls which glistened here and there with the slimy traces of the snail.
"Oh - oh! - a dungeon," cried the king.

"No, a subterranean passage."

"Which leads - ?"

"Will you be good enough to follow us?"

"I shall not stir from hence!" cried the king.

"If you are obstinate, my dear young friend," replied the taller of the
two, "I will lift you up in my arms, and roll you up in your own cloak,
and if you should happen to be stifled, why - so much the worse for you."

As he said this, he disengaged from beneath his cloak a hand of which
Milo of Crotona would have envied him the possession, on the day when he
had that unhappy idea of rending his last oak.  The king dreaded
violence, for he could well believe that the two men into whose power he
had fallen had not gone so far with any idea of drawing back, and that
they would consequently be ready to proceed to extremities, if
necessary.  He shook his head and said: "It seems I have fallen into the
hands of a couple of assassins.  Move on, then."

Neither of the men answered a word to this remark.  The one who carried
the lantern walked first, the king followed him, while the second masked
figure closed the procession.  In this manner they passed along a winding
gallery of some length, with as many staircases leading out of it as are
to be found in the mysterious and gloomy palaces of Ann Radcliffe's
creation.  All these windings and turnings, during which the king heard
the sound of running water _over his head_, ended at last in a long
corridor closed by an iron door.  The figure with the lamp opened the
door with one of the keys he wore suspended at his girdle, where, during
the whole of the brief journey, the king had heard them rattle.  As soon
as the door was opened and admitted the air, Louis recognized the balmy
odors that trees exhale in hot summer nights.  He paused, hesitatingly,
for a moment or two; but the huge sentinel who followed him thrust him
out of the subterranean passage.

"Another blow," said the king, turning towards the one who had just had
the audacity to touch his sovereign; "what do you intend to do with the
king of France?"

"Try to forget that word," replied the man with the lamp, in a tone which
as little admitted of a reply as one of the famous decrees of Minos.

"You deserve to be broken on the wheel for the words that you have just
made use of," said the giant, as he extinguished the lamp his companion
handed to him; "but the king is too kind-hearted."

Louis, at that threat, made so sudden a movement that it seemed as if he
meditated flight; but the giant's hand was in a moment placed on his
shoulder, and fixed him motionless where he stood.  "But tell me, at
least, where we are going," said the king.

"Come," replied the former of the two men, with a kind of respect in his
manner, and leading his prisoner towards a carriage which seemed to be in
waiting.

The carriage was completely concealed amid the trees.  Two horses, with
their feet fettered, were fastened by a halter to the lower branches of a

Other sites:

db3nf.com screen-capture.net floresca.net simonova.net flora-source.com flora-source.com sourcecentral.com sourcecentral.com geocities.com