Edward VII. King of England, the illustrious victim of a whim of fate,
lay pitifully hovering between the crown and death. This fate, with one
hand, held to his brow one of the most magnificent diadems that the
revolutions have spared; and, with the other, it forced that same brow,
moist with the sweat of the death-agony, to bend down towards a
wide-open tomb. In sinister fashion, it prolonged this game for more
than two months.
If we contemplate the event from a point a little higher than the
elevation of the humble hills on which life's numberless anecdotes
unfold themselves, it is here not only a question of the tragedy of an
opulent monarch stricken by nature at the very moment when thousands of
men are aspiring to place some small portion of their hopes and of their
fairest dreams in his person, beyond the reach of destiny and above
humanity. Neither is it a question of appreciating the irony of that
moment in which they would assert and establish something supernatural
that declined upon something most normally natural; something that
should be contradictory to the pitiless levelling laws of the
indifferent planet which we all inhabit with a sort of heedless
tolerance; something that should reassure them and console them as an
admirable exception to their misery and frailty. No, it is here a
question of the essential tragedy of man, of the universal and perpetual
drama enacted between his feeble will and the enormous unknown force
that encompasses him, between the little flame of his mind or soul, that
inexplicable phenomenon of nature, and vast matter, that other, equally
inexplicable, phenomenon of the same nature. This drama, with its
thousand undetermined catastrophes, has not ceased to unfold itself for
a single day since a portion of blind and colossal life conceived the
somewhat strange idea of taking in us a sort of consciousness of
itself. This time, a more resplendent accident than the others came to
display the drama on a loftier height, which was illumined for an
instant by all the longings, all the wishes, all the fears, all the
uncertainties, all the prayers, all the doubts, all the illusions, all
the wills, all the looks, lastly, of the inhabitants of our globe
hastening in thought to the foot of the solemn mountain.