In the room about the bed of state, uncertain groups of watchers whispered noisily.  The five physicians, who had tried first one remedy and then another; the rustic physician whose nostrum had kept life within the king for some unexpected days; the ladies who had waited upon the relatives of the king; some of the relatives themselves; Villeroy, guardian of the young king soon to be; the bastard, and the wife of that bastard, who hoped for the king’s shoes; the mistress of his earlier years, for many years his wife—­Maintenon, that peerless hypocrite of all the years—­all these passed, and hesitated, and looked, waiting, as did the hungry crowds in Paris toward the Seine, until the double sun should set, and the crawling thumbs at last should find their shelter.  The Grand Monarque was losing the only time in all his life when he might have learned human wisdom.

“Madame!” whispered the dry lips, faintly.

She who was addressed as madame, this woman Maintenon, pious murderer, unrivaled hypocrite, unspeakably self-contained dissembler, the woman who lost for France an empire greater than all France, stepped now to the bed-side of the dying monarch, inclining her head to hear what he might have to say.  Was Maintenon, the outcast, the widow, the wife of the king, at last to be made ruler of the Church in France?  Was she to govern in the household of the king even after the king had departed?  The woman bent over the dying man, the covetousness of her soul showing in her eyes, struggle as she might to retain her habitual and unparalleled self-control.

The dying man muttered uneasily.  His mind was clouded, his eyes saw other things.  He turned back to earlier days, when life was bright, when he, Louis, as a young man, had lived and loved as any other.

“Louise,” he murmured.  “Louise!  Forgive!  Meet me—­Louise—­dear one.  Meet me yonder—­”

An icy pallor swept across the face of the arch hypocrite who bent over him.  Into her soul there sank like a knife this consciousness of the undying power of a real love.  La Valliere, the love of the youth of Louis, La Valliere, the beautiful, and sweet, and womanly, dead and gone these long years since, but still loved and now triumphant—­she it was whom Louis now remembered.

Maintenon turned from the bed-side.  She stood, an aged and unhappy woman, old, gray and haggard, not success but failure written upon every lineament.  For one instant she stood, her hands clenched, slow anger breaking through the mask which, for a quarter of a century, she had so successfully worn.

“Bah!” she cried.  “Bah!  ’Tis a pretty rendezvous this king would set for me!” And then she swept from the room, raged for a time apart, and so took leave of life and of ambition.

At length even the last energies of the once stubborn will gave way.  The last gasp of the failing breath was drawn.  The herald at the window announced to the waiting multitude that Louis the Fourteenth was no more.