Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas

Author:Alexandre Dumas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Barnes&Noble
Published: 2010-09-10T07:00:00+00:00

46

A Night at the Bastille

PAIN, ANGUISH, AND SUFFERING in human life are always in proportion to the strength with which a man is endowed. We will not pretend to say that Heaven always apportions to a man’s capability of endurance the anguish with which he af flicts him; such, indeed, would not be exact, since Heaven permits the existence of death, which is, sometimes, the only refuge open to those who are too closely pressed—too bitterly afflicted, as far as the body is concerned. Suffering is in proportion to the strength which has been accorded to a person; in other words, the weak suffer more, where the trial is the same, than the strong. And, what are the elementary principles, we may ask, which compose human strength? Is it not—more than anything else—exercise, habit, experience? We shall not even take the trouble to demonstrate that, for it is an axiom in morals, as in physics. When the young King, stupefied and crushed in every sense and feeling, found himself led to a cell in the Bastille, 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 dreaming one of those horrors, impossible to realise in life, which is termed dethronement, imprisonment, and insult towards a sovereign, who formerly wielded unlimited power. To be present at—an actual witness, too—of this bitterness of death; to float indecisively, in an incomprehensible mystery, between resemblance and reality; to hear everything, to see everything, without interfering with a single detail of agonising suffering, was—so the King thought within himself—a torture far more terrible, since it might last for ever. “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, 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 still. “How can I have died?” he said to himself, sick with terror. “The bed might have been let down by some artificial 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?”18 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 peopled with dreams.

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