Chapter 18

Chapter XVIII
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