In the first place, how can we give credence to the ceremony itself?—a ceremony reserved only for the dead by the Roman-catholic church, and never performed for the living? A council held at Toulouse in the beginning of the 14th century pronounced, that the church considered an anticipated funeral to be an act of censurable superstition, and prohibited any priest under pain of excommunication, from taking part in it. This circumstance would perhaps be insufficient to cast a doubt upon the obsequies of Charles V., if it stood alone, but it is supported by others. The greater number of the incidents related by the monks are improbable or false. The Hieronymite chroniclers allege that Charles V. expended on this ceremony two thousand crowns which he had saved up. Now a forcible objection arises to the employment of so enormous a sum for so simple a service. Only a very small part of it could have been used in obsequies which were without pomp and needed scarcely any outlay. It is more probable, on the contrary, as Sandoval affirms (Vida del Emperador Carlos V. en Yuste), that it was from this sum that the expenses of the real funeral were drawn, the solemn services of which lasted nine days. Moreover, the physical strength of the Emperor, which was on the wane, could not have borne the fatigue of any such mock display. On the 15th August he was carried to the church, and received the sacrament sitting. It was only on the 24th that he was free from gout: the eruption on his legs succeeded the gout: and he was quite unfit to present himself before the altar on the 29th. On the 31st August, the day that has been selected for these obsequies, he was confined for twenty hours to his room by illness. If all these impossibilities and improbabilities do not settle the question, it remains to be explained why neither the major-domo, nor the Emperor’s secretary, nor his physician, who mention in their letters all the ordinary incidents of his religious life, especially when they bear some reference to the state of his health, do not speak of so extraordinary a ceremonial?—why, remembering the funeral service of the Empress on the anniversary of the 1st May, they make no mention of the sham funeral that the emperor had devised for himself?—why, after stating that he had been carried to church on the 15th of August, where he received the sacrament sitting, they are entirely silent respecting the absurd obsequies of the 31st, to which their master would undoubtedly have summoned them, and which were so immediately followed by his death? But they are even more than silent, they indirectly deny all the alleged circumstances. Their narrative is at complete variance with that of the monks.
About two o’clock on the morning of the 21st September 1558, the Emperor perceived that his life was slowly ebbing away and that death was near. Feeling his own pulse, he shook his head as much as to say: “It is all over.” He then begged the monks, says Quijada, in a letter to Vasquez of the 21st September, to recite the litanies by his bedside, and the prayers for the dying. The archbishop, at his request, gave him the crucifix which had been embraced by the empress in her last hours; he carried it to his lips, pressed it twice to his breast and said: “The moment has come!” Shortly after he again pronounced the name of Jesus and expired breathing two or three sighs.
“So passed away,” wrote Quijada, with mingled grief and admiration, “the greatest man that ever was or ever will be.” The inconsolable major-domo adds: “I cannot persuade myself that he is dead.” And he continually entered the chamber of his master, fell on his knees by his bedside, and with many tears kissed over and over again his cold inanimate hands.
THE INVENTOR OF THE
STEAM-ENGINE.
A. D. 1625.
The biography of Salomon de Caus and the account of his labours and his discoveries were scarcely known until the year 1828, when a learned French scholar, Arago, published for the first time in L’Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes, a remarkable article upon the history of the steam-engine.
In it he cites the work of Salomon de Caus entitled Les raisons des forces mouvantes avec diverses machines, &c., which was first published at Frankfort in 1615 and reprinted at Paris in 1624. M. Arago draws from it the conclusion that De Caus was the original inventor of the steam-engine. Six years later there appeared in the Musée des Familles, a letter from the celebrated Marion Delorme, supposed to have been written on the 3rd February 1641 to her lover Cinq-Mars. It is as follows:
“My dear d’Effiat,[36] Whilst you are forgetting me at Narbonne and giving yourself up to the pleasures of the court and the delight of thwarting the cardinal, I, pursuant to the wishes you have expressed, am doing the honours to your English lord, the Marquis of Worcester, and I am taking him, or rather he is taking me, from sight to sight, always choosing the dullest and the saddest; speaking little, listening with great attention, and fixing upon those whom he questions two large blue eyes which seem to penetrate to the very depths of their understanding. Moreover, he is never satisfied with the explanations that are given him, and scarcely ever sees things from the point of view in which they are represented. As an instance of this I will mention the visit we made together to Bicêtre, where he thinks he has discovered in a maniac a man of genius. If the man were not raging mad I really believe that your Marquis would have demanded his freedom, that he might take him with him to London and listen to his ravings from morning till night.
“As we were crossing the court-yard of the asylum, I more dead than alive from fright, a hideous face appeared behind the large grating and began to call out in a crazy voice. ‘I am not mad; I have made a great discovery that will enrich any country that will carry it out.’ ‘What is this discovery?’ said I to the person who was shewing us over the asylum. ‘Ah!’ said he, shrugging his shoulders, ‘it is something very simple, but you would never guess it. It is the employment of the steam of boiling water.’ At this I burst out laughing. ‘This man,’ resumed the warder, ‘is called Salomon de Caus. He came from Normandy four years ago to present a memoir to the king upon the marvellous effects that might be produced from his invention. To listen to him, you might make use of steam to move a theatre, to propel carriages, and in fact to perform endless miracles.’ The Cardinal dismissed this fool without giving him a hearing. Salomon de Caus, not at all discouraged, took upon himself to follow my lord cardinal everywhere, who, tired of finding him incessantly at his heels, and importuned by his follies, ordered him to Bicêtre, where he has been confined for three years and a half, and where, as you have just heard, he cries out to every visitor, that he is not mad, and that he has made a wonderful discovery. He has even written a book on this subject which is in my possession.’