It was a death-bed, this great bed of state; a death-bed situated in the heart of the greatest temple of desire ever built in all the world. He who had been master there, who had set in order those miles of stately columns, those seas of glittering gilt and crystal, he who had been magician, builder, creator, perverter, debaser—he, Louis of France, the Grand Monarque, now lay suffering like any ordinary human being, like any common man.
Last night the four and twenty violins, under the king's command, had shrilled their chorus, as had been their wont for years while the master dined. This morning the cordon of drums and hautboys had pealed their high and martial music. Useless. The one or the other music fell upon ears too dull to hear. The formal tribute to the central soul for a time continued of its own inertia; for a time royalty had still its worship; yet the custom was but a lagging one. The musicians grimaced and made what discord they liked, openly, insolently, scorning this weak and withered figure on the silken bed. The cordon of the white and blue guards of the Household still swept about the vast pleasure grounds of this fairy temple; yet the officers left their posts and conversed one with the other. Musicians and guards, spectators and populace, all were waiting, waiting until the end should come. Farther out and beyond, where the peaked roofs of Paris rose, back of that line which this imperious mind had decreed should not be passed by the dwellings of Paris, which must not come too near this temple of luxury, nor disturb the king while he enjoyed himself—back of the perfunctorily loyal guards of the Household, there reached the ragged, shapeless masses of the people of Paris and of France, waiting, smiling, as some animal licking its chops in expectation of some satisfying thing. They were waiting for news of the death of this shrunken man, this creature once so full of arrogant lust, then so full of somber repentance, now so full of the very taste of death.
On the great tapestry that hung above the head of the curtained bed shone the double sun of Louis the Grand, which had meant death and devastation to so much of Europe. It blazed, mimicking the glory that was gone; but toward it there was raised no sword nor scepter more in vow or exaltation. The race was run, the sun was sinking to its setting. Nothing but a man—a weary, worn-out, dying man—was Louis, the Grand Monarque, king for seventy-two years of France, almost king of Europe. This death-bed lay in the center of a land oppressed, ground down, impoverished. The hearts and lives of thousands were in these colonnades. The people had paid for their king. They had fed him fat and kept him full of loves. In return, he had trampled the people into the very dust. He had robbed even their ancient nobles of honors and consideration. Blackened, ruined, a vast graveyard, a monumental 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 Orléans, 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 France? Was she to govern in the household of the king even after the king had departed? The woman bent over the dying man, the covetousness of her soul showing in her eyes, struggle as she might to retain her habitual and unparalleled self-control.
The dying man muttered uneasily. His mind was clouded, his eyes saw other things. He turned back to earlier days, when life was bright, when he, Louis, as a young man, had lived and loved as any other.
"Louise," he murmured. "Louise! Forgive! Meet me—Louise—dear one. Meet me yonder—"
An icy pallor swept across the face of the arch hypocrite who bent over him. Into her soul there sank like a knife this consciousness of the undying power of a real love. La Vallière, the love of the youth of Louis, La Vallière, the beautiful, and sweet, and womanly, dead and gone these long years since, but still loved and now triumphant—she it was whom Louis now remembered.