Page:The drama of three hundred and sixty-five days.djvu/58

THE DRAMA OF 365 DAYS certainly have shaken the credit of monarchy for centuries.

Nobody who ever met the late King Leopold could have had any doubt that he was a great man, if greatness can be separated from goodness and measured solely by energy of intellect and character. I see him now as I saw him in the garden of a house on the Riviera, the huge, unwieldy creature, with the eyes of an eagle, the voice of a bull and the flat tread of an elephant, and I recall the thought with which I came away:

"Thank God that man is only the King of a little country! If he had been the sovereign of a great State he would have become the scourge of the world." After King Leopold's death, accident brought me knowledge of astounding facts of his last days which were shortly to be exposed in Court—of the measure of his unnatural hatred of his children; of his schemes to deprive them of their rightful inheritance; of his relations with certain of his favourites and his death-bed marriage to one of them; of the circumstances attending the surgical operation which immediately preceded the extinction of his life; of the burning of endless documents of doubtful credit during the night before the knife was used; of the intrigues of women of questionable character over the dying man's body to share the ill-got gold he had accumulated in the Congo, and finally of his end, not in 54