On "good days" the arrangement afforded the sufferer relative repose; but on "bad days," when he approached a crisis, the etiquette of the Court was torment. The courtiers hurried over to the new château to witness the death-agony. They crowded the sick-room and whispered with the celebrities who travelled daily from Paris to Saint Germain to visit the dying King. In the courtyard of the château the travellers' horses neighed and pawed the ground. Confused sounds and tormenting light entered by the windows; the air of the room was stifling and Louis begged his guests, in the name of mercy, to withdraw from his bed and let him breathe. The crowds assembled in the courtyard hissed or applauded as the politicians entered or drove away. On the highway before the château the idle people stood waiting to receive the last sigh of the King, to be in at the death, or to make merry at the expense of celebrated men. While the masters visited the dying King the coachmen, footmen, on-hangers, and other tributaries sat upon the carriage boxes, declared their politics, and issued their manifestos, and their voices rose above the neighing of the horses and ascended to the sick-room. When the tantalising periodically recurrent crises which kept the Court and country on foot were past, the celebrities and men of Parliament, with many of the courtiers, fled to Paris, where they forgot the sights and the sounds of the sick-room in the perfumed air of the Parisian salons. Mademoiselle wrote of that time: "There never were as many balls as there were that year; and I went to them all." The final crisis came the thirteenth day of May. Immediately after the King gave up the ghost, the Queen and all the Court retired from the death-chamber and made ready to depart from Saint Germain early in the morning. The moving was like breaking camp. At daybreak long files of baggage wagons laden with furniture and with luggage began to descend the hill of Saint Germain, and soon afterward crowded chariots, drawn by six horses, and groups of cavaliers, joined the lumbering wains. The suppressed droning of many voices accompanied the procession. At eleven o'clock silence fell upon the long, writhing line, and an army corps surrounding the royal mourners passed, escorted by the Marshals of France, dukes and peers, and the gentlemen of the Court,--all mounted. The last of the battalions filed by the van of the procession, and the chariots and the wains moved on, mingling with the servitors and men of all trades, who in that day followed in the train of all the great. * * * * * Saint Germain was vacant. The last errand boy vanished, the murmur of the moving throng died in the distance; the shroud of silence wrapped the new château, and the curtain fell upon the fifth act of the reign of Louis XIII. There remained upon the stage only a corpse, light as a plume, watched by a lieutenant and his guard. FOOTNOTES: