The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary, prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz, and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son, and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death, postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much silk in a period of such political embezzlement. "But," replied Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs, like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children, the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies, we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means, to announce."