Page:The Man in the Iron Mask.djvu/149

 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. 135

in every sense and feeling, found himself led to a cell in the Bastile, he fancied that death itself is but a sleep; that it, too, has its dreams as well; that the bed had broken through the flooring of his room at Vaux; that death had resulted from the occurrence; and that, still carrying out his dream, as the king, Louis XIV., now no longer living, was dream- ing one of those horrors, impossible to realize in life, which is termed dethronement, imprisonment, and insult toward a sovereign who formerly wielded unlimited power. To be present at — an actual witness, too — of this bitterness of death; to float, undecisively, in an incomprehensible mys- tery, between resemblance and reality; to hear everything, to see everything, without interfering with a single detail of agonizing suffering, was — so the king thought within him- self — a torture far more terrible, since it might last forever.

'^Is this what is termed eternity — hell?'' he murmured, at the moment the door closed upon him, which Baisemeaux had himself shut.

He did not even look round him; and in the room, lean- ing with his back against the wall, he allowed himself to be carried away by the terrible supposition that he was already dead, as he closed his eyes, in order to avoid looking upon something even worse still.

How can I have died? he said to himself, sick with terror. "The bed might have been let down by some arti- ficial means. But no! I do not remember to have received any contusion, nor any shock either. Would they not rather have poisoned me at one of my meals, or with the fumes of wax, as they did my ancestress, Jeanne d'Albret?"

Suddenly, the chill of the dungeon seemed to fall like a cloak upon Louis' shoulders.

"I have seen," he said, ''my father lying dead upon his funeral couch, in his regal robes. That pale face, so calm and worn; those hands, once so skillful, lying nerveless by his side; those limbs stiffened by the icy grasp of death; nothing there betokened a sleep peopled with dreams. And yet how numerous were the dreams which Heaven might have sent that royal corpse — him, whom so many others had preceded, hurried away by him into eternal death! No, that king was still the king; he was enthroned still upon that funeral couch, as upon a velvet armchair; he had not abdicated aught of his majesty. God, who had not pun- ished him, cannot, will not punish me who have done nothing."

A strange sound attracted the young man's attention.