"Louis, it is too late!" came from Yvon in a solemn voice. "You are about to die ... barely twenty years old, Oh, King of the Franks!"
"What says that idiot? What is the Calf doing here?"
"You are about to die as died last year your father Lothaire, poisoned by his wife! You have been poisoned by Queen Blanche!"
Fear drew a long cry from Louis; his hair stood on end over his icy forehead, his lips, now purple, moved convulsively without producing a sound; his eyes, fixed upon Yvon, became troubled and glassy, but still retaining a last glimmer of intelligence, while the rest of his body remained inert.
"This morning," said Yvon, "the Count of Paris, Hugh the Capet, met your wife by appointment in the forest. Hugh is a cunning and unscrupulous man. Last year he caused the poisoning of your father by Queen Imma and her accomplice the bishop of Laon; to-day he caused you to be poisoned by Blanche, your wife, and to-morrow the Count of Paris will be King!" Louis understood what Yvon was saying, although his mind was beclouded by the approach of death. A smile of hatred contracted his lips. "You believed yourself safe from danger," Yvon proceeded, "by compelling your wife to eat of the dishes that she served you. All poison has its antidote. Blanche could with impunity moisten her lips in the wine she had poisoned--" Louis seemed hardly to hear these last words of Yvon; his limbs stiffened, his head dropped and thumped against the floor; his eyes rolled for a last time in their depths; a slight froth gathered on his now blackened lips; he uttered a slight moan, and the last crowned scion of the Carlovingian stock had passed away.
"Thus end the royal races! Thus, sooner or later, do they expiate their original crime!" thought Yvon contemplating the corpse of the last Carlovingian king lying at his feet. "My ancestor Amæl, the descendant of Joel and of Genevieve, declined to be the jailor of little Childeric, in whom the stock of Clovis was extinguished, and now I witness the crime by which is extinguished, in the person of Louis the Do-nothing, the stock of Charles the Great--the second dynasty of the conquerers of Gaul. Perchance some descendant of my own will in the ages to come witness the punishment of this third dynasty of kings, now raised by Hugh the Capet through an act of cowardly perfidy!"