Scarcely had Anne of Austria conducted the young queen to her apartments and taken from her brow the head-dress of ceremony, when she went to see her son in his cabinet, where, alone, melancholy, and depressed, he was indulging, as if to exercise his will, in one of those terrible inward passions — king’s passions — which create events when they break out, and with Louis XIV., thanks to his astonishing command over himself, became such benign tempests, that his most violent, his only passion, that which Saint Simon mentions with astonishment, was that famous fit of anger which he exhibited fifty years later, on the occasion of a little concealment of the Duc de Maine’s, and which had for result a shower of blows inflicted with a cane upon the back of a poor valet who had stolen a biscuit.  The young king then was, as we have seen, a prey to a double excitement; and he said to himself as he looked in a glass, “O king! — king by name, and not in fact; — phantom, vain phantom art thou! — inert statue, which has no other power than that of provoking salutations from courtiers, when wilt thou be able to raise thy velvet arm, or clench thy silken hand? when wilt thou be able to open, for any purpose but to sigh, or smile, lips condemned to the motionless stupidity of the marbles in thy gallery?”

Then, passing his hand over his brow, and feeling the want of air, he approached a window, and looking down, saw below some horsemen talking together, and groups of timid observers.  These horsemen were a fraction of the watch:  the groups were busy portions of the people, to whom a king is always a curious thing, the same as a rhinoceros, a crocodile, or a serpent.  He struck his brow with his open hand, crying, — “King of France! what a title!  People of France! what a heap of creatures!  I have just returned to my Louvre; my horses, just unharnessed, are still smoking, and I have created interest enough to induce scarcely twenty persons to look at me as I passed.  Twenty! what do I say? no; there were not twenty anxious to see the king of France.  There are not even ten archers to guard my palace of residence:  archers, people, guards, all are at the Palais Royal!  Why, my good God! have not I, the king, the right to ask of you all that?”

“Because,” said a voice, replying to his, and which sounded from the other side of the door of the cabinet, “because at the Palais Royal lies all the gold, — that is to say, all the power of him who desires to reign.”

Louis turned round sharply.  The voice which had pronounced these words was that of Anne of Austria.  The king started, and advanced towards her.  “I hope,” said he, “your majesty has paid no attention to the vain declamations which the solitude and disgust familiar to kings suggest to the happiest dispositions?”

“I only paid attention to one thing, my son, and that was, that you were complaining.”

“Who!  I?  Not at all,” said Louis XIV.; “no, in truth, you err, madame.”