Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/25

Rh I know you will feel, that I write to tell you that Madame died last Sunday, as the last stroke of midnight sounded.

"She had been seized, two days before, just as she was writing to you, with an attack of indisposition which we thought little of at first, but which grew worse and worse till it terminated fatally.

"I have the honour to send you, unfinished as it is, the letter she had begun to write to you. This letter will show you that to the day of her death the sentiments she entertained for you remained unaltered.

"I am, sir, in great sorrow, as you may suppose, always your humble servant,

Monsieur de Villenave had kept his eyes on mine as I read.

"At midnight!" he exclaimed when I had finished; "it was at midnight, look you, that the portrait fell and was broken. Not only does the day tally, but the very minute."

"Yes," I answered, "that is so."

"You believe in the supernatural then?" cried Monsieur de Villenave.

"Why, of course I do."

"Oh! very well then, come one day, will you, one day when I am something less agitated, and I will tell you of something far more strange than this."

"Something that happened to you? "

"No, but of which I was an eye-witness."

"When was it? "

"Oh! a long time ago. It occurred in 1774, at the time I was tutor to the children of Monsieur de Chauvelin."

"And you say you will ..."

"Yes, I will tell you the story; in the meantime you understand. . . ."

"I understand you need to be alone,"—and with the word I got up and prepared to go.

"By the way," added Monsieur de Villenave, "tell the ladies as you pass not to be anxious about me; I shall not come down to night."

I nodded in sign of acquiescence.

Then Monsieur de Villenave wheeled round his armchair, so as to bring himself exactly face to face with the portrait, and as I was closing the door,

"Poor Sophie!" I heard him murmur softly to himself.

The story I am now going to reproduce is the same which later on Monsieur de Villenave told me. 



PRIL 25, 1774, King Louis XV. lay abed in the Blue Room of the Chateau of Versailles; by his bedside, on a truckle-bed, slept the surgeon Lamartiniėre.

The clock in the Great Court was striking five o'clock in the morning, and the Chateau was just beginning to get astir. Folks were moving to and fro like restless phantoms, stepping discreetly so as not to disturb the Monarch's slumbers. For some time now Louis XV., wearied with late hours and dissipation, could only win a brief repose by the abuse of protracted periods of sleeplessness, and by help of narcotics, when the former means failed to produce any effect.

The King was no longer young; he was entering his sixty-fifth year. After draining to the dregs every possible form of pleasure, diversion and flattery, he had nothing new left to experience, and he felt sick to death of everything. It was the worst of all his maladies, this fever of life-weariness; acute under Madame de Châteauroux, it had become intermittent under Madame de Pompadour, and chronic under Madame du Barry.

To those who have nothing left to know there sometimes remains something to love; it is a sovereign resource against the disease that had attacked Louis XV. Rendered indifferent towards individual affection by the attention he had inspired in a whole nation and which had been exaggerated to a sort of frenzy, this habit of the heart had seemed to him too commonplace for a King of France to yield to. Louis XV. had been loved by his People, his wife and his mistresses; but Louis XV. himself had never loved anyone.

There remains yet another rousing preoccupation for men grown blase with life,—to wit pain. But Louis XV., apart from the two or three illnesses he had suffered from, bad never felt pain; find 