However great might be his joy, whatever the unimaginable greatness to which he had arrived, he was not tranquil.  Like those tyrants who have usurped by their crimes the sovereign power, and who fear as so many conspiring enemies all their fallen citizens they have enslaved—­he felt as though seated under that sword that Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, suspended by a hair over his table, above the head of a man whom he placed there because he believed him happy, and in this manner wished to make him feel what passed unceasingly in himself.  M. du Maine, who willingly expressed in pleasantry the most serious things, frankly said to his familiars, that he was “like a louse between two fingernails” (the Princes of the blood and the peers), by which he could not fail to be cracked if he did not take care!  This reflection troubled the excess of his pleasure, and that of the greatness and the power to which so many artifices had elevated him.  He feared the Princes of the blood as soon as they should be of age to feel the infamy and the danger of the wound he had given them; he feared the Parliament, which even under his eyes had not been able to dissimulate its indignation at the violence he had committed against the most holy and the most inviolable laws; he even feared the Dukes so timid are injustice and tyranny!

CHAPTER LXIX

Let me return to Maisons.  Five days after the King’s will had been walled up, in the manner I have described, he came to me and made a pathetic discourse upon the injustice done to M. le Duc d’Orleans by this testament, and did all he could to excite me by railing in good set terms against dispositions intended to add to the power and grandeur of the bastards.

When he had well harangued, I said he had told me nothing new; that I saw the same truths as he with the same evidence; that the worst thing I found was that there was no remedy.

“No remedy!” he exclaimed, interrupting me, with his sly and cunning laugh; “courage and ability can always find one for everything, and I am astonished that you, who have both, should have nothing to suggest while everybody is going to confusion.”

I asked him how it was possible to suppress a will registered by edict; a document solemn and public deposited with ceremony in the very depths of the palace, with precautions known to everybody—­nature and art combining to keep it in safety?

“You are at a loss to know!” replied Maisons to me.  “Have ready at the instant of the King’s death sure troops and sensible officers, all ready and well instructed; and with them, masons and lock-smiths—­march to the palace, break open the doors and the wall, carry off the will, and let it never be seen.”