CHAPTER 1.1.III.
Viaticum.
For the present, however, the grand question with the Governors of France is: Shall extreme unction, or other ghostly viaticum (to Louis, not to France), be administered?
It is a deep question.

For, if administered, if so much as spoken of, must not, on the very threshold of the business, Witch Dubarry vanish; hardly to return should Louis even recover?
With her vanishes Duke d'Aiguillon and Company, and all their Armida-Palace, as was said; Chaos swallows the whole again, and there is left nothing but a smell of brimstone.

But then, on the other hand, what will the Dauphinists and Choiseulists say?
Nay what may the royal martyr himself say, should he happen to get deadly worse, without getting delirious?
For the present, he still kisses the Dubarry hand; so we, from the ante-room, can note: but afterwards?
Doctors' bulletins may run as they are ordered, but it is 'confluent small-pox,'-- of which, as is whispered too, the Gatekeepers's once so buxom Daughter lies ill: and Louis XV.

is not a man to be trifled with in his viaticum.

Was he not wont to catechise his very girls in the Parc-aux-cerfs, and pray with and for them, that they might preserve their--orthodoxy?
(Dulaure, viii.