[Enter GRANDFATHER and a band of people]
FIRST CITIZEN.
Grandfather, I cannot help saying—yes, and repeating it five hundred times—that our King is a perfect fraud.
GRANDFATHER.
Why only five hundred times? There is no need to practise such heroic self-control—you can say it five thousand times if that adds to your pleasure.
SECOND CITIZEN.
But you cannot keep up a dead lie forever.
GRANDFATHER.
It has made me alive, my friend.
THIRD CITIZEN.
We shall proclaim to the whole world that our King is a lie, the merest and emptiest shadow!
FIRST CITIZEN.
We shall all shout from our housetops that we have no King—let him do whatever he likes if he exists.
GRANDFATHER.
He will do nothing at all.
SECOND CITIZEN.
My son died untimely at twenty-five of raging fever in seven days. Could such a calamity befall me under the rule of a virtuous King?
GRANDFATHER.
But you still have got two sons left: while I have lost all my five children one after another.