Here, in this bed that Belloc and Molière had made together, Louis Quatorze died. From under the crimson and gold canopy which had witnessed the eternal _levers_ and _couchers_, Louis rebuked the violent grief of two young pages who stood within the balustrade, that sanctum sanctorum which none under a prince of the blood or a high chancellor dare pass at any other time; they were weeping bitterly. “What!” exclaimed the king, “did ye, then, think I was immortal?” There was a time when he himself seemed to have thought so; but viewed by that vivid light that breaks through the mists of death, things wore a different aspect in his eyes; and the adulation which would fain have treated him as immortal, and which was during life as the breath of his nostrils to Louis, showed now as the empty bubble that it was. No one ever again slept in the bed which had been honored by the last sigh of the Grand Monarque; the room remained henceforth unoccupied, and, with the exception of the pictures which have been removed, is still just as he left it. Louis carried his favorite pictures about with him wherever he went. “David,” by Domenichino, his best beloved of them all, is now to be seen at the Louvre; otherwise little has been altered in the _chambre du roi_; the bed and the _ruelle_ are in their old place, also the table, on which a cold collation was laid every night in case of the king’s awaking and feeling hungry; this precautionary little meal was called the _en cas_; and the name with the habit, which had given rise to it, is still perpetuated in many old‐fashioned French families. Louis Quinze, from some superstitious feeling, could never bring himself to sleep in the death‐ chamber of his illustrious great‐grandfather; he took possession of what was then the _salle de billiard_, a noble room opening into the _œil‐de‐ bœuf_ (bull’s eye), so called from its having an _œil‐de‐bœuf_ over the large window at the north end. In an alcove in this billiard hall, Louis XV. died. The adjoining _œil‐de‐bœuf_ was filled with the courtiers, who dare not venture within the polluted atmosphere of the royal chamber, but stood outside it, consulting together in “guilty whispers” as to what they ought to do; dreading on one hand the reward of their cowardice if the king should recover, and fearing on the other to fly too soon with their servile congratulations to his successor. In the great court below another crowd was assembled, watching in breathless silence for the signal which was to proclaim the king’s death. What a spectacle it was!—what a lesson for a king! The flatterers who yesterday had been his slaves, pandering to his vices, and helping to make him the abject creature that he was, abandoned him now that he was struggling with grim Death, and, all absorbed in selfish cares for their own interest, in speculations of the favor of the new king, they had no pity in their hearts for the master who could pay them no more.