“Oh! my lord, you are much more than that. How long did the Fronde last?”

“For what purpose do you put such a question to me?”

“For a medical calculation, monseigneur.”

“Well, some ten years — off and on.”

“Very well; be kind enough to reckon every year of the Fronde as three years — that makes thirty; now twenty and fifty-two makes seventy-two years. You are seventy-two, my lord; and that is a great age.”

Whilst saying this, he felt the pulse of his patient. This pulse was full of such fatal indications, that the physician continued, notwithstanding the interruptions of the patient: “Put down the years of the Fronde at four each, and you have lived eighty-two years.”