In modern Europe a bloodthirsty despot has become an impossibility. A king no longer dares to kill his subjects for the pleasure of it. All that has been put an end to by a glorious invention of the physicians. They have invented the word monomania, a tremendous exorcism, the mere utterance of which reduces the most powerful monarch to impotence, scares away his courtiers, paralyses the arms of his guards, and tears him from his throne to bury him behind iron doors.
It was with this spell that their bewildered subjects had fought the kings of Franconia for the last two generations. There was only one man in the kingdom more powerful than the monarch. This was the Court physician.
He glided in and out among the brightly dressed throng of courtiers, wrapped in his black cloak, with his finger on his lips, and watched everything. It was like the mummy at the Egyptian feast, only more terrible, as if it had been a mummy which might at any instant start to life, and bid the giver of the feast take its place in the sarcophagus.
When the time came, the physician unclosed his lips and pronounced the fatal word. Then the king disappeared silently from view, and a new ruler took his place.
This was the new Vehmgericht.
Like the ancient Venetian doges, the kings of Franconia walked everywhere, surrounded by an atmosphere of mysterious dread. Secret eyes were upon them always. Oubliettes were prepared under their feet, into which they never knew the moment when they might not be cast. And from these oubliettes there was no chance of escape.
The dooms of science are more relentless than the dooms of superstition. In the bosom of a Grand Inquisitor there might lurk mercy as much as a grain of mustard seed. Mercy is a word which science is unable to comprehend. Its judgments are merely conclusions. Mathematical reasoning cannot be bent aside by emotional considerations.
Leopold IX. was the worst king of this line. This was because he was the most sane. He was selfish, ignorant, utterly heartless, grasping, cruel, lustful, a glutton, and a bad son and father. But he was neither a drunkard nor an epileptic. To such a man science had nothing to say. The secret inquisitor was powerless. Leopold IX. had broken the curse. He was too much like the average man to be mad.
His younger brother Otto had been an easier victim. Within a year of his marriage with the beautiful Hermengarde of Schwerin-Strelitz, he had disappeared. Men whispered that the stately, cold-looking bride had given her approval to this consummation. Be that as it may, Otto passed the years till his death plaiting straw, like many another of the Astolf princes. Some of them plaited crowns; these were light and easy to wear.
Leopold reigned on. His people had to suffer a great deal. A few of his exploits are on record.