Spleen

I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch, one who escapes Fénelon's apologues, and kills the day in boredom with his dogs; nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry, his people dying by the balcony; the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite no longer gets him through a single night; his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb; even the ladies of the court, for whom all kings are beautiful, cannot put on shameful enough dresses for this skeleton; the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent washes to cleanse the poisoned element; even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy, our tyrants' solace in senility, we cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.