Man in the Iron Mask by Dumas, Alexandre part two

Baisemeaux shut the door upon him, turned the key twice in the lock, and then returned to Aramis. “It is quite true,” he said in a low tone, “that he has a rather strong resemblance to the King, but still less so than you said.”

“So that,” said Aramis, “you would not have been deceived by the substitution of the one for the other.”

“What a question!” “You are a most valuable fellow, Baisemeaux,” said Aramis; “and now, set Seldon free!”

“Oh, yes; I was going to forget that. I will go and give orders at once.”

“Bah! to-morrow will be time enough.”

“To-morrow!- oh, no! This very minute!”

“Well, go off to your affairs! I shall go away to mine. But it is quite understood, is it not?”

“What is ‘quite understood’?”

“That no one is to enter the prisoner’s cell, except with an order from the King,- an order which I will myself bring.”

“That is understood. Adieu, Monseigneur!” Aramis returned to his companion. “Now, Porthos, my good fellow, back again to Vaux, and as fast as possible!”

“A man is light when he has faithfully served his King, and in serving him saved his country,” said Porthos. “The horses will have nothing to draw. Let us be off!” and the carriage, lightened of a prisoner who in fact seemed to Aramis very heavy, passed across the drawbridge of the Bastille, which was raised again immediately behind it.

Chapter XLVI: A Night in the Bastille

SUFFERING in human life is proportioned to human strength. We will not pretend to say that God always apportions to a man’s capability of endurance the anguish he permits him to suffer; such, indeed, would not be exact, since God permits the existence of death, which is sometimes the only refuge open to those who are too closely pressed,- too bitterly afflicted, so far as the body is concerned. Suffering is proportioned to strength in this sense,- that the weak suffer more, where the trial is the same, than the strong. And what are the elementary principles which compose human strength? Are they not- more than anything else- exercise, habit, experience? We shall not even take the trouble to demonstrate that; it is an axiom in morals as in physics.

When the young King, stupefied, crushed, found himself led to a cell in the Bastille, he fancied at first that death is like sleep, and has its dreams; that the bed had broken through the flooring of his room at Vaux; that death had resulted; and that, still carrying out his dream, Louis XIV, now dead, was dreaming of those horrors, impossible to realize in life, which are termed dethronement, imprisonment, and degradation of a King all-powerful but yesterday. To be a spectator, as palpable phantom, of his own wretched suffering; to float in an incomprehensible mystery between resemblance and reality; to hear everything, to see everything, without confusing the details of that agony,- “was it not,” said the King to himself, “a torture the more terrible since it might be eternal?”

“Is this what is termed eternity,- hell?” Louis murmured at the moment the door closed upon him, shut by Baisemeaux himself. He did not even look around him; and in that chamber, leaning 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. “How can I have died?” he said to himself, almost insensible. “Could that bed have been let down by some artificial means? But, no! I do not remember to have received any contusion or any shock. 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’s 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 skilful, lying nerveless by his side; those limbs stiffened by the icy grasp of death,- nothing there betokened a sleep disturbed by dreams. And yet what dreams God might have sent to him,- to 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 funereal couch, as upon a velvet arm-chair; he had not abdicated aught of his majesty. God, who had not punished him, cannot punish me, who have done nothing.”