Another imposing instance in which Forrest so rendered a towering sense of genius and personal superiority as to change it from egotism to revelation, merging the individual peculiarity in a universal attribute, was where the armed De Mauprat comes upon the solitary cardinal and tells him the next step will be his grave. The defiant retort to this threat was so given as to impress the audience with a sense of prophetic power, a feeling that the destiny of man is mysteriously linked with unseen and supernatural ranks of being:
“Thou liest, knave!
I am old, infirm, most feeble—but thou liest.
Armand de Richelieu dies not by the hand
Of man. The stars have said it, and the voice
Of my own prophetic and oracular soul
Confirms the shining sibyls!”
A crowning glory of the impersonation of this great rôle by Forrest was the august grandeur of the method by which he set the intrinsic royalty of Richelieu over against the titular royalty of Louis. In many nameless ways besides by his subtile irony, his air of inherent command masked in studied courtesy of subordination, and the continual contrast of the comprehensive measures and sublime visions of the one with the petty personal spites and schemes of the other, he made it ever clear that the crowned monarch was a sham, the statesman the real one anointed and sealed by heaven itself. This true and democratic idea of superiority, that he is the genuine king, not who chances to hold the throne, but who knows how to govern, received a splendid setting in all the interviews of the king and the cardinal. When the conspirators had won Louis to turn his back on his minister with the words,—
“Remember, he who made can unmake,”—
who that saw it could ever forget the dilating mien and burning oratoric burst which instantly made the sovereign seem a menial subject, and the subject a vindicated sovereign?