de Horn, Baron d’Erensward, and Colonel Lilienhorn.  Lilienhorn, commandant of the guards, drawn from misery and obscurity by the king’s favour, promoted to the first rank in the army, and admitted to closest intimacy in the palace, confessed his ingratitude and his crime; seduced, he declared, by the ambition of commanding, during the trouble, the national guard of Stockholm.  The part played by La Fayette in Paris seemed to him the ideal of the citizen and the soldier.  He could not resist the fascination of the perspective; half-way in the conspiracy, he had endeavoured to render it impossible, even whilst he meditated it.  It was he who had written the anonymous letter to the king, in which the king was warned of the failure in the attempt at Haga, and that which threatened him at this fete; with one hand he thrust forward the assassin—­with the other he held back the victim, as though he had thus prepared for himself an excuse for his remorse after the deed was done.

On the fatal day he had passed the evening in the king’s apartments—­had seen him read the letter—­had followed him to the ball.  Enigma of crime—­a pitying assassin! the mind thus divided between the thirst for, and horror of, his benefactor’s blood.

VIII.

Gustavus died slowly:  he saw death approach and recede with the same indifference, or the same resignation; received his court, conversed with his friends, even reconciled himself to the opponents of his government, who did not conceal their opposition, but did not push their aristocratic resentment to assassination.  “I am consoled,” he said, to the Count de Brahe, one of the greatest of the nobility and chief of the malcontents, “since death enables me to recover an old friend in you.”

He watched to the very last over his kingdom; nominated the Duke of Sudermania regent, instituted a council of regency, made his friend Armsfeld military governor of Stockholm, surrounded the young king, only thirteen years of age, with all that could strengthen his position during his minority.  He prepared his passage from one world to another, awaiting his death, so that it should be an event to himself alone.  “My son,” he wrote, a few hours before he died, “will not come of age before he is eighteen, but I hope he will be king at sixteen;” thus predicting for his successor that precocity of courage and genius which had enabled him to reign and govern before the time.  He said to his grand almoner, in confessing himself, “I do not think I shall take with me great merits before God, but at least I shall have the consciousness of never having willingly done harm to any person.”  Then, having requested a moment’s repose to acquire strength, in order to embrace his family for the last time, he bid adieu, with a smile, to his friend Bergenstiern, and, falling asleep, never waked again.

The prince royal, proclaimed king, mounted the throne the same day.  The people, whom Gustavus had emancipated from the yoke of the senate, swore spontaneously to defend his institutions in his son.  He had so well employed the day, which God had allowed him between assassination and death, that nothing perished but himself, and his shade seemed to continue to reign over Sweden.