The old king had never been at all brave. He feared discomfort in this life almost as much as he dreaded hell in the next; so he had fled the disease instead of courting it, and in time it came to have special terrors for him. He had been riding through the April woods with a hunting party and had come upon a sad little funeral procession--a very [Pg 20]humble one. Always curious, he stopped the bearers and asked who they were carrying to the grave. "A young girl, your Majesty." The king's watery old eyes gleamed. "Of what did she die?" "Smallpox, Sire." In terrified anger the monarch bade them begone and bury the corpse deep; then he dismissed the hunt and returned to the palace. Two days later he was stricken. The disease ran its course with amazing virulence, as though taking revenge for his misspent life. Some of the courtiers fled from Versailles. Others, to whom the king's displeasure seemed a worse menace than smallpox, remained. His favorites tried to keep the truth from the public. Daily bulletins announced that he was getting better. When it was learned that he might die the people crowded the church of Ste.-Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, kissing the reliquary and raising sobs and prayers for his recovery. When he died, on the 10th of May, his body was hastily covered with quicklime and conveyed, by a little handful of attendants who remained faithful, to St.-Denis, where the kings of France lie buried. It was done without ceremony in the dead of night. Forty days later his bones were laid in the tomb of his ancestors with all possible funeral pomp. There was decorous official mourning for the customary length of time; but the old king had never been an inspiring figure and most of his subjects were secretly glad he was out of the way. During July and August of that year Lafayette was "in service" with the Black Mousquetaires. In September, when his period of active duty [Pg 21]was over and he could do as he chose, he had himself exposed to smallpox, and he and his wife and mother-in-law shut themselves up in a house at Chaillon, hired for the occasion, where during his illness and convalescence Madame d'Ayen devoted herself to her new son night and day.