...He sees the dead body of the great Emperor upon a splendid bier. The corpse is painted; and the head adorned by the deftest of barbers with an ingenious dress of false hair. Julian, brought thither to kiss the hand of his uncle for the last time, is afraid. The purple, the diadem, with its stones glittering under the flame of torches, dazzle him. Through the heavy Arabian perfumes, for the first time in his life he comes into contact with the odour of a corpse. But bishops, eunuchs, generals, acclaim the Emperor as if he were alive; and the ambassadors bow down before him and return thanks, observing all the punctilious ceremony of diplomatic etiquette. Scribes read out the edicts, the laws, the decrees of the senate, and implore the approval of the dead man; a flattering murmur surges to and fro among the multitudes; they declare that he, the Emperor, is so great that by a special mercy of Providence he reigns after death. The child knows that he whom all glorify has killed his own son, a brave young man, whose only fault lay in the people's too great love of him. This son had been slandered by his stepmother, who loved him with an unholy love, and had taken her revenge upon him thus as Phædra upon Hippolytus. Afterwards the wife of Constantine had been surprised in adulterous intimacy with a slave of the Imperial stables and had been stifled in a bath heated to a white heat. And so on, corpse, upon corpse, victim after victim. Finally, tormented by conscience, Constantine the Great had implored priests to shrive his soul from guilt. He was refused. Thereupon the Bishop Ozius succeeded in convincing him that one religion only possessed the power of purifying from sins like his. And therefore it had come to pass that now the sumptuous _Labarum_, the standard bearing wrought in precious stones the monogram of Christ, glittered above the catafalque of the parricide. Julian strove to awake, to open his eyes, and could not. Ringing drops fell continually, like heavy tears, and the wind blew on: but it seemed to him that it was Labda, the old Fate, babbling near him with her toothless gums the terrible tales of the Flavii. Julian dreamed again. He was in the subterranean vaults of Constantius Chlorus, surrounded by porphyry sarcophagi containing the ashes of kings. Labda is hiding him in one of the darkest corners and has wrapped in her cloak the sickly Gallus, who is shivering with fever. Suddenly, above their heads in the palace, groanings resound from room to room.