And yet it is not to be inferred that Don Philip had been other than devoted in his way to the vigorous soul who through such long years had been his spirited coadjutor and support. To do him justice, he had purposed on the first warning note of tragedy to set out for Versailles--an intention for which the king his father-in-law, when he came to hear of it, had gently rebuked him. And, indeed, the journey would have been in vain. Short shrift and shift was the order in all cases where that dreaded scourge proved mortal; and scarce was the breath out of the august body before it was being hurried away by night to the royal mausoleum of Saint Denis, where it was lowered with scant ceremony into the vault from which, thirty years later, the ghouls of the Revolution were to tear it, with fifty others, to scatter its still impregnated dust to the winds. It was from Marly--whither the Court, after its custom, had already fled the terror--that Louis wrote his mild reproof, ending it with the words “mes yeux baignent de larmes.” So Don Philip, frustrated in his dutiful design, stayed on at home, and regarded and pitied himself with something of the stupefaction of the dreamer, who, thinking himself standing among company, discovers suddenly that he has forgotten to put on his clothes. Thus he felt as if delivered naked and aghast to a situation with which he was quite unable to cope. He had leaned so long on that imperious will that he seemed to have lost his capacity for standing alone. His prostration was even abject while it lasted; but the true quality of grief is to be measured more by endurance than collapse. Those who succumb easily revive easily, and it was not to be supposed but that that volatile brain would quickly rally from its depression under the stimulus of such local distractions as offered. Those were necessarily at first of a mortuary complexion, touching such matters as the depth and period of the court mourning, the fasts to be observed and the masses to be sung. The opportunities presented by obsequies are only fully appreciated by two classes--those standing at the opposite social extremes. A funeral is the poor man’s chance, and the prince’s, since each in his way borrows a relative distinction from the Majesty of Death. In the one case it is a brief affair, in the other a protracted; but at the bottom of both there is the same sentiment of reflected glory. Whether it be a lying-in-state, or a hearse with one poor coach to follow, it is the corpse which ennobles the relatives, and makes them greater than themselves by reason of their kinship with it.