Nobody replied. She rang wildly at the bell-cord beside the writing-table. You could hear a remote tinkling, but nothing else. The shaking woman lifted fat Orléans, and propped him against the chair in which she had just been sitting. Philippe of Orléans sprawled thus, more drunken looking than Florian had ever seen him in life: the corpse was wholly undignified. The head of him whom people had called Philippe the Débonnaire had fallen sideways, so that his black peruke was pushed around and hid a third of his face. The left eye, the eye with which Philippe had for years seen nothing, yet leered at the woman before him. She began again to scream. She ran from the room, and Florian could now just hear her as she ran, still screaming, about the corridors in which she could find nobody. It sounded like the squeaking of a frightened rat. Florian came forward without hurry, for there was no pressing need of haste. Florian quite understood that Orléans had dismissed all his attendants, so that Madame de Phalaris might come to him unobserved: her husband was a notionary man. After a little amorous diversion with the lady, Orléans had meant to go up that narrow staircase yonder, for an hour’s work with the young King. It was odd to reflect that poor Philippe would never go to the King nor to any woman’s bed, not ever any more; odd, too, that anyone could be thus private in this enormous château wherein lived several thousand persons. At all events, this privacy was uncommonly convenient. So Florian reflected for an instant, after his usual fashion of fond lingering upon what life afforded of the quaint. It was certainly very quaint that history should be so plastic. He had, with no especial effort or discomfort, with no real straining of his powers, changed the history of all Europe when he transferred this famous kingdom of France and the future of France from the keeping of Philippe to guardians more staid. Probably Monsieur de Bourbon would be the next minister. But whoever might be minister in name, the Bishop of Fréjus, the young King’s preceptor, would now be the actual master of everything. Well, to have taken France from a debauchee like this poor staring gaping Philippe here,—Florian abstractedly straightened the thing’s peruke,—to give control of France to such an admirable prelate as André de Fleury was in all a praiseworthy action. It was a logical action.