It was in the lake of Starnberg, near the lordly
pleasure-house that he had built for himself in that fair vale, that
poor mad Ludwig, the late King of Bavaria, drowned himself. Poor
King! Fate gave him everything calculated to make a man happy,
excepting one thing, and that was the power of being happy. Fate
has a mania for striking balances. I knew a little shoeblack once
who used to follow his profession at the corner of Westminster
Bridge. Fate gave him an average of sixpence a day to live upon and
provide himself with luxuries; but she also gave him a power of
enjoying that kept him jolly all day long. He could buy as much
enjoyment for a penny as the average man could for a ten-pound note-
-more, I almost think. He did not know he was badly off, any more
than King Ludwig knew he was well off; and all day long he laughed
and played, and worked a little - not more than he could help - and
ate and drank, and gambled. The last time I saw him was in St.
Thomas's Hospital, into which he had got himself owing to his fatal
passion for walking along outside the stone coping of Westminster
Bridge. He thought it was "prime," being in the hospital, and told
me that he was living like a fighting-cock, and that he did not mean
to go out sooner than he could help. I asked him if he were not in
pain, and he said "Yes," when he "thought about it."
Poor little chap! he only managed to live like a "fighting-cock" for
three days more. Then he died, cheerful up to the last, so they
told me, like the plucky little English game-cock he was. He could
not have been more than twelve years old when he crowed his last.
It had been a short life for him, but a very merry one.
Now, if only this little beggar and poor old Ludwig could have gone
into partnership, and so have shared between them the shoeblack's
power of enjoying and the king's stock of enjoyments, what a good
thing it would have been for both of them - especially for King
Ludwig. He would never have thought of drowning himself then - life
would have been too delightful.
But that would not have suited Fate. She loves to laugh at men, and
to make of life a paradox. To the one, she played ravishing
strains, having first taken the precaution to make him stone-deaf.
To the other, she piped a few poor notes on a cracked tin-whistle,
and he thought it was music, and danced!
A few years later on, at the very same spot where King Ludwig threw
back to the gods their gift of life, a pair of somewhat foolish
young lovers ended their disappointments, and, finding they could
not be wedded together in life, wedded themselves together in death.
The story, duly reported in the newspapers as an item of foreign
intelligence, read more like some old Rhine-legend than the record
of a real occurrence in this prosaic nineteenth century.
