The King fell back, and raised his hands feebly, as if drawing something over his face. For an instant it appeared to the agitated physician as if a shroud of white had actually hidden it; but, on nearer approach, he saw that it was the frost of death that had fallen.
Long years after, a tradition which had for ages associated a muffled, incomprehensible droning with the occurrence of any death in the palace received, “in the white winter of its age,” a curious justification. Some workmen, in breaking through a wall of the old chapel, came upon an ancient spinning-wheel hidden away behind the panelling.
LOUIS XIV
Looking over the inner Cour de Marbre at Versailles Palace were two little rooms, in the main pile of the building, which constituted the very core of privacy in the Petits Appartements du Roi. One was his Majesty’s “den,” the other his wig-room, and both were elegantly simple, almost severe, in their appointments. In the Galerie des Glaces adjoining, marble, paint, crystal, and silver, in lavish profusion, represented to the public eye the habitual equipage of a Grand Monarch; these more restful surroundings represented to the monarch himself his secret possession of some emotions felt in common with the vulgar herd, to wit, the joys of a retreat where he could do just as he liked, without the necessity of posing to himself or others. A few chairs, a table, a secrétaire—all profusely painted and be-ormolued, it was true, but for the simple reason that beauty unadorned was unprocurable in the Paris of the period—sober hangings, a quiet picture or so—such was the furniture of the little apartment appropriated by Louis XIV. to his inmost meditations.
We find him in this distinguished snuggery on a certain afternoon of the year 1704—the twenty-first of August, to be exact. It is within three days of St. Bartholomew, a feast which his Most Catholic Majesty makes a particular point of solemnising. He is, in fact, pondering a minor detail of its observances at this very moment.
As he sits, his eyes fixed on nothingness in crinkled abstraction, we will seize the fearful opportunity to scrutinise him. He is sixty-six years of age, and in suggestion, we think, more like a queen-dowager than a monarch. His minute stature, his old-matronly face, worldly, shrewd, not unkindly; his immense falling wig, resembling a cap with hanging wattles; his feminine particularities and prejudices, all combine to convey that false impression of his sex. He has a woman’s tastes for dainty clothes and china and gossip; I am convinced that, were it possible to conceive him stooping to the condescension, he would play the part of Madame more realistically than the Chevalier d’Eon himself came to play it.
He is attired (for monarchs do not dress) in a full-skirted coat of apricot velvet, with silver frogs. The coat is left unbuttoned from neck to waist, revealing an ample breast of cambric and a rich lace cravat. His white silk stockings are rolled back over their garters, which are fastened above the knee, and embrace breeches of the same velvet material; and stiff diamond-buckled shoes, with square toes, long tongues, and very high silver heels, complete the exquisite picture.
So he poses, and posed, as punctilious in his homage to himself as any courtier. If he did not appear, in bulk, a star of the first magnitude, he was as brilliant a centre as his own dazzled system need desire.
An odd train of thought was in Louis’s mind as he sat thus gazing into vacancy. The nearness of the Feast of St. Bartholomew was its central subject, since it entailed the repetition of a custom long practised by him to significant effect. Or had there been any connection between the custom and the effect? That was just the question in his mind. He was inclining, for some extraordinary reason, to doubt for the first time their relationship. It had come upon him all in an instant at what, adopting the fashion, we must call a psychologic moment in his career.
He was not, according to some people, a really wise man; but there was no denying that he was a supremely self-sufficient. It had never occurred to him, in all his life, that his judgment could possibly be surpassed by another. That was the queer thing. He had tacitly, almost unconsciously, it seemed, permitted, in one curious instance, his mental supremacy to subordinate itself to a superstition. He appeared to recognise the fact all at once, and with an amazement that was like one of those sudden developments of reason which a child will exhibit between a single night’s sleeping and waking. Something had happened to him, and he saw himself in a moment—not a fool; that were impossible—but, in a certain solitary direction, a dupe to his own modesty. Quality, kingship, all his greatness as it stood, he had let be accounted, by default, less to the essence of divinity in himself than to a paltry charm, in the accidental possession of which any quacksalver might boast himself omniscient. He felt strangely small all of a sudden.