the lake of fire. Then with his own hands he would take the holy water, and lifting sheets and blankets, drench himself from head to foot with the blessed liquid, uttering groans of terror the while. Next he would ask for the crucifix, and seizing it with both hands, kiss it again and again, crying: "Lord! Lord! intercede for me, for me the chiefest of all sinners that have ever lived."
In these terrible accesses of despairing anguish the King passed the 9th day of the month. All day long,—and all day was one agonized confession,—neither the Priest nor his daughters ever left his side. His body was a prey to the most hideous corruption and the living corpse of the doomed King exhaled so fearful a stench that two lackeys fell down stifled, one of whom died.
By the morning of the 10th the bones of the thighs could be seen through the gaping rents in the flesh. Three more lackeys fainted. Terror seized the Palace, and all its inhabitants took to flight, not a living soul was left in the vast pile save the three devoted women and the good Priest.
The whole day of the 10th was one long death struggle; the King would not die, though he lay practically a dead man already in his bed, which was virtually a tomb. At last, at five minutes to three, he sprang up, stretched out his arms, fixed his eyes on a corner of the bedchamber, and cried:
"Chauvelin! Chauvelin! but I tell you it is not two months yet . . ., "—and fell back a corpse.
God had granted courage to the three Princesses and the devoted Priest to nurse the living King, but the Monarch once dead, their task no less than his was ended. Moreover all three were already stricken with the disease that had just killed their father.
The funeral arrangements were left to the Grand Master, who completed all his preparations without setting foot inside the Palace. The nightsoilmen of Versailles were the only persons to be found to undertake the risk of putting the King's body in the leaden coffin destined for its reception. In this he was laid without balms or aromatics, simply wrapped in the sheets of the bed whereon he had died. Then the leaden coffin was placed inside an oak shell, and the whole carried into the Chapel Royal.
On the 12th, what had once been Louis XV. was carried to Saint-Denis. The coffin was in a great hunting coach; a second carriage was occupied by the Due d'Ayen and the Duc d'Aumont; in a third rode the Grand Almoner and the Cure of Versailles. A score of pages and fifty grooms, mounted and bearing torches, formed the funeral cortége.
The procession, starting from Versailles at eight in the evening, reached Saint-Denis at eleven. The body was lowered into the Royal vault, which it was not to quit till the day when the Basilica was profaned by the Revolutionary mob; this done, the entrance was immediately closed, the door walled up and every chink stopped, that no emanation from this: human dung-heap might filter through from the lodging of the dead to pollute the homes of the living.
We have described elsewhere the delight of the Parisians at the death of Louis XIV. Their satisfaction was equally great when they found themselves rid of him whom thirty years before they had surnamed The well-beloved.
The Cure of Sainte-Geneviève was rallied on the small effect produced by the wonder-working shrine of the Patron Saint of Paris. "Why, what have you to complain of," was his sardonic answer, "is not the King dead?"
Next day Madame du Barry received at Rueil a letter banishing her the country.
Sophie Arnould heard the news simultaneously of the King's death and Madame du Barry's banishment. " Alas! " she exclaimed, "behold us orphaned of father and mother both!"
It was the only funeral oration pronounced over the tomb of the grandson of Louis XIV.
