‘Yes,’ cried the king to his astonished counsellor.  ’For the first time in my life I am going to be a king.  I am going to lead, and lead by my own authority.  For a dozen generations my family has been a set of dummies in the hands of their advisers.  Advisers!  Now I am going to be a real king—­and I am going to—­to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crown to which I have been a slave.  But what a world of paralysing shams this roaring stuff has ended!  The rigid old world is in the melting-pot again, and I, who seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regal robe, I am a king among kings.  I have to play my part at the head of things and put an end to blood and fire and idiot disorder.’

‘But, sir,’ protested Firmin.

’This man Leblanc is right.  The whole world has got to be a Republic, one and indivisible.  You know that, and my duty is to make that easy.  A king should lead his people; you want me to stick on their backs like some Old Man of the Sea.  To-day must be a sacrament of kings.  Our trust for mankind is done with and ended.  We must part our robes among them, we must part our kingship among them, and say to them all, now the king in every one must rule the world....  Have you no sense of the magnificence of this occasion?  You want me, Firmin, you want me to go up there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some price, some compensation, some qualification....’

Firmin shrugged his shoulders and assumed an expression of despair.  Meanwhile, he conveyed, one must eat.

For a time neither spoke, and the king ate and turned over in his mind the phrases of the speech he intended to make to the conference.  By virtue of the antiquity of his crown he was to preside, and he intended to make his presidency memorable.  Reassured of his eloquence, he considered the despondent and sulky Firmin for a space.

‘Firmin,’ he said, ‘you have idealised kingship.’  ’It has been my dream, sir,’ said Firmin sorrowfully, ‘to serve.’

‘At the levers, Firmin,’ said the king.

‘You are pleased to be unjust,’ said Firmin, deeply hurt.

‘I am pleased to be getting out of it,’ said the king.

‘Oh, Firmin,’ he went on, ’have you no thought for me?  Will you never realise that I am not only flesh and blood but an imagination—­with its rights.  I am a king in revolt against that fetter they put upon my head.  I am a king awake.  My reverend grandparents never in all their august lives had a waking moment.  They loved the job that you, you advisers, gave them; they never had a doubt of it.  It was like giving a doll to a woman who ought to have a child.  They delighted in processions and opening things and being read addresses to, and visiting triplets and nonagenarians and all that sort of thing.  Incredibly.  They used to keep albums of cuttings from all the illustrated papers showing them at it, and if the press-cutting parcels grew thin they were worried.  It was all