[Illustration: CHARLES II. OF SPAIN, "The Bewitched." (_From a painting by Claudio Coelle._)] {291} [Illustration: Headpiece] _THE EXORCISM OF CHARLES THE BEWITCHED._[1] The pallid little milksop in black velvet, with his lank, tow-coloured hair and his great underhung chin, who will simper for ever on the canvas of Carreño, had grown to be a man--a poor feeble anæmic old man of thirty-seven,[2] the last of his race, to whom fastings and feastings, the ceremonies of the Church, and the nostrums of the empirics had been equally powerless in providing a successor for the crumbling empire of his fathers. The {292} strong spirits upon whom he had leant in his youth and early manhood had passed away. His imperious mother, who reigned so long and unworthily in his name, had died of cancer only a year or two ago. His virile brother, Don Juan José of Austria, in whom the worn-out blood of the imperial race had been quickened by the brighter but baser blood of his actress mother, had been poisoned. His beloved first wife, the beautiful Marie Louise of Orleans, had faded away in the sepulchral gloom of that dreary Court, and his new German wife, Marie Anne of Neuberg, with her imperious violence, frightened him out of what little wit he had left by her advocacy of new ideas. For new ideas to that poor brain were the inventions of the very Devil himself. He had been drilled for years into the knowledge that the claims of his French kinsmen to his inheritance were just; and, though for years past all the diplomatists of Europe had been plotting and planning for one or the other claimant with varying success, all that poor Charles the Bewitched himself wanted was to be left alone in peace whilst he lived, and that one of his French cousins should succeed him when he died. There was not much chance of either wish being fulfilled from the time that England and the Austrian faction juggled Marie Anne of Neuberg into the palace as Charles' second wife. She made short work of all the courtiers and ministers who favoured the French succession--they had one after the other either to come round to her side or go. Most of the best of them--not that any of them were very good--sulked in their own provinces awaiting events, whilst others still plotted in the capital. {293}