they liked, openly, insolently, scorning this weak and withered figure on the silken bed.  The cordon of the white and blue guards of the Household still swept about the vast pleasure grounds of this fairy temple; yet the officers left their posts and conversed one with the other.  Musicians and guards, spectators and populace, all were waiting, waiting until the end should come.  Farther out and beyond, where the peaked roofs of Paris rose, back of that line which this imperious mind had decreed should not be passed by the dwellings of Paris, which must not come too near this temple of luxury, nor disturb the king while he enjoyed himself—­back of the perfunctorily loyal guards of the Household, there reached the ragged, shapeless masses of the people of Paris and of France, waiting, smiling, as some animal licking its chops in expectation of some satisfying thing.  They were waiting for news of the death of this shrunken man, this creature once so full of arrogant lust, then so full of somber repentance, now so full of the very taste of death.

On the great tapestry that hung above the head of the curtained bed shone the double sun of Louis the Grand, which had meant death and devastation to so much of Europe.  It blazed, mimicking the glory that was gone; but toward it there was raised no sword nor scepter more in vow or exaltation.  The race was run, the sun was sinking to its setting.  Nothing but a man—­a weary, worn-out, dying man—­was Louis, the Grand Monarque, king for seventy-two years of France, almost king of Europe.  This death-bed lay in the center of a land oppressed, ground down, impoverished.  The hearts and lives of thousands were in these colonnades.  The people had paid for their king.  They had fed him fat and kept him full of loves.  In return, he had trampled the people into the very dust.  He had robbed even their ancient nobles of honors and consideration.  Blackened, ruined, a vast graveyard, a monumental starving-ground, France lay about his death-bed, and its people were but waiting with grim impatience for their king to die.  What France might do in the future was unknown; yet it was unthinkable that aught could be worse than this glorious reign of Louis, the Grand Monarque, this crumbling clod, this resolving excrescence, this phosphorescent, disintegrating fungus of a diseased life and time.

Seventy-two years a king; thirty years a libertine; twenty years a repentant.  Son, grandson, great-grandson, all gone, as though to leave not one of that once haughty breed.  For France no hope at all; and for the house of Bourbon, all the hope there might be in the life of a little boy, sullen, tiny, timid.  Far over in Paris, busy about his games and his loves, a jesting, long-curled gallant, the Duke of Orleans, nephew of this king, was holding a court of his own.  And from this court which might be, back to the court which was, but which might not be long, swung back and forth the fawning creatures of the former court.  This was the central picture of France, and Paris, and of the New World on this day of the year 1715.