and I fell into a light sleep, while Charles and Hohenfels pervaded
the darkness merely by their perfumes--the former with whiffs at a
concealed bottle of Farina, the latter with a pastille counterfeiting
the incense of the cathedral. In a couple of hours from the Hôtel de
Hollande we reached Aachen, as the fond natives call the burgh so dear
to Charlemagne. Deprived of that magnificent mirror, the Rhine, the
pretty towns throughout this part of Germany seem but like country
belles. We should hardly have paused at Aix but for the sake of
affording a rest to Charles, who grew worse whenever lunch-time
competed with railway-time. As for the dull little city, for us it was
a wilderness, with the blank cleanliness of the desert, except in so
far as it was informed and populated by the memory of Charlemagne.

[Illustration: THE THRONED CORPSE.]

Here he died, and entered his tomb in the church himself had founded.
Into this sepulchre the emperor Otho III. dared to penetrate in the
year 997, impelled by a motive of vile and varlet-like curiosity. They
say the dead monarch confronted his living visitor in the great marble
chair in which he had been seated at his own command, haughty and
inflexible as in life, the ivory sceptre in his ivory fingers, his
white skull crowned with the diadem of gold. The peeping emperor
looked upon him with awe, half afraid of the mysterious and
penetrating shadows that reached forth out of his rayless eyes. Before
he left, however, he peered about, touched the sceptre and the throne,
fingered this and that, and having, as it were, trimmed the nails and
combed the beard of the great spectre, retired with a valet's bow.
Observing that Charlemagne had lost most of his nose, he caused it
to be replaced in gold very delicately chiseled and enchased. The
sacrilege was repeated by Frederick Barbarossa in 1165, who went