A king who had profaned the public liberties, who for twenty years had slaked his thirst in the blood of heretics; awaiting the quiet peace of the hangman in his declining days; decrepit, surfeited with adulterous amours; this king, this haughty monster of whom they had made a great man,--Louis the Fourteenth, in short, if I must name him,--was one day airing under the leafy arches of his vast gardens his Scarron, his infamy and his troubles. The noble band of court flunkeys came along. Each one at once lost at least six inches of his height. Pages, counts, marquises, dukes, princes, marshals, ministers, bowed low before insulting rivals, the creatures of the king. Grave magistrates made their deep reverences, each humbler than a suitor asking for audience. 'Twas pleasant to see how the ribbons, crosses and decorations on their embroidered coats went ever backwards. Always and always that ignoble bowing and scraping and cringing. I should like to wake up some morning an emperor, that I might sting with my whip the backbone of a flatterer. But see! alone, confronting the despot, yet without abasing his head, forging along with slow steps on his own way, modest, clad in coarse homespun garments, comes one who seems a peasant, perhaps a philosopher, and passes by the groups of insolent courtiers. "Oh," cries the king, in great surprise, "why do you alone confront me without bending the knee?" "Sire," said the unknown, "must I be frank? It is because I alone here expect nothing from you." If we stop to think how these sentences and phrases and different bits of literature were produced, letter by letter, rap by rap, following the alphabet as it was read out, we shall appreciate the difficulty of the thing. The rappings are made either in the interior of the wood of the table (the vibrations of which are perceptible) or in some other piece of furniture, or even in the air. The table, as I have already said, is alive, pregnant with a kind of momentary vitality. Melodies of well-known airs, sounds of sawing and of the workshop, and the report of fusillades can be drawn from it. Sometimes it becomes so light that it floats for a moment in the air, then so heavy that two men can scarcely lift it from the floor or budge it in any way. You must have a distinct picture in your mind of all these manifestations,--often puerile, no doubt, sometimes vulgar and grotesque, yet striking in their method of operation,--if you would accurately understand the phenomena, and realize that you are in the presence of an unknown element which jugglery and prestidigitation cannot explain.