Berenger I's fear of death

Berenger the First's fear of death is a growing crisis in which royal authority proves unable to command the one outcome he cannot accept. When he is told that he will die, he first treats the news as a lie and insists that he is healthy and will choose his own time. That resistance broadens into pleading, fantasies of permanent remembrance, and attempts to find comfort in the living, the dead, and the natural world. Each strategy exposes a different limit: he cannot control death, make memory last, or draw from others the certainty he needs.

Denial and the Lost Power to Choose

Berenger the First initially answers the declaration of his approaching death by asserting the privileges of a ruler. He rejects the diagnosis, accuses Queen Marguerite of wanting him dead, and insists that he will die only when he decides. The claim is both political and personal: he assumes that being king means retaining authority over his own ending. The Doctor directly dismantles that assumption, telling him that he has lost the power to decide for himself; Queen Marguerite adds that he can no longer prevent himself from falling ill. His fear begins in the discovery that command has become irrelevant to the body's decline.

The King’s insistence gives way to open terror. He says that he does not want to die and begs those around him to be kind and keep him alive. Queen Marie cannot give him the strength to resist and recognizes that her own strength is failing, while Queen Marguerite warns her not to confuse him with further hope. The scene makes his fear relational as well as physical: he appeals to other people for rescue, but their presence cannot grant the power he has lost.

His belief that he had been promised a choice of when to die turns that loss into a sense of betrayal. Queen Marguerite explains that the promise rested on the expectation that he would have chosen long ago; instead, his appetite for authority kept him attached to life. She describes him as having become stuck in its mud, comfortable and warm, and says that now he must be made to choose and will freeze. Berenger the First answers that he has been trapped and should have been warned. His appeal to royal choice is thus reversed: the authority he treated as permanent has delayed the decision until it can no longer protect him from it.

The Scepter and the Reach for Remembrance

Even as his power fails, Berenger the First wants to retain a visible emblem of sovereignty. When he asks to keep the Scepter of sovereignty, Queen Marie tells Juliette to leave it with him. Juliette looks to Queen Marguerite for instructions, and Queen Marguerite permits its return. The small exchange preserves the object in his hands, but not the control it signifies. He can keep the scepter; he cannot make it restore his command over life.

The prospect of being forgotten gives his fear another direction. Berenger the First imagines people laughing, feasting, and dancing on his tomb as though he had never existed. He begs for a memory of himself so encompassing that history, education, government, religion, public spaces, transport, and ordinary reading would all be reorganized around his name. He wants his life and exploits taught by heart, other books and statues destroyed, his portrait displayed in ministries and town halls, and his likeness placed in churches. The scale of the demand converts a private terror into a fantasy of public rule after death: if he cannot remain alive, he would make the world continually reproduce him.

That imagined memorial immediately meets the question of duration. Berenger the First wonders how long anyone could remember him and stretches the prospect toward twenty thousand years and then two hundred and fifty-five thousand million. Yet he concedes that there will eventually be no one left to remember anyone. Human beings, he complains, care for their own brief lives rather than his; even the wearing out of the earth or the explosion of every universe would make no difference to the ultimate end. Queen Marguerite compresses this collapse of future time into the statement that everything is already yesterday, and Juliette adds that even today will become yesterday. The vastness of the memorial he has imagined cannot overcome the eventual disappearance of its audience.

Appeals to the Sun and the Dead

When human help seems insufficient, Berenger the First turns to the sun as if its light might still reach into the darkness approaching within him. He asks it to drive away shadows, shine into tombs and hidden corners, enter his body, warm his cold feet, and restore his failing sight. The appeal grows into a bargain: he would accept the destruction of every other human life if he himself could live forever, even alone in a limitless wasteland. He says he could endure solitude and remember those who were gone, preferring to miss friends rather than be missed. The plea reveals how completely survival has displaced reciprocity: remembrance is tolerable when he controls who remains to remember whom.

The play then places this plea beside Berenger the First's recognition that nobody can help him and that he cannot help himself. He asks the dead to teach him how they accepted death, seeking instruction both from those who were frightened and from those who met it with serenity. He wants their example to support him like crutches or a brother's arms and help him cross the threshold they have crossed. The passage is framed as ritual: the actors are directed to speak and move solemnly, almost chanting, with gestures that include kneeling and outstretched arms. This formal shift makes his request more than another individual outburst; it stages an appeal to the dead as a collective source of knowledge, while leaving unresolved whether such knowledge can console him.

Existence, Consolation, and the Limits of Legacy

Berenger the First's fear is finally expressed as a claim to existence itself. He observes that even a small ant fights when faced with death and imagines the universe flickering out within the isolated creature. Death seems unnatural to him precisely because no one wants it; his conclusion is simple and absolute: he wants to exist. Juliette recognizes that he wants to exist forever. His terror is not merely concern about a particular ending but resistance to the disappearance of the self that experiences the world.

Literature and collective memory offer another proposed consolation, but Berenger the First says that consolation wells up only to drain away. He calls on the countless dead to explain how they managed to accept death, asking what it was like and who held, dragged, or pushed them across the threshold. The questions do not receive a practical answer in the evidence of the scene; instead, his longing to learn from the dead exposes the distance between imagining their experience and undergoing his own. The ceremony can give shape to his appeal, not mastery over its object.

The Doctor reduces the promised afterlife of reputation to a material prospect: Berenger the First will be a page in a book of ten thousand pages, kept in one of a million libraries containing a million books. Juliette observes how difficult that page will be to find. The Doctor replies that it can be catalogued by subject and alphabet, but only until the paper turns to dust or a fire destroys it. Against Berenger the First's earlier vision of a world filled with his likeness, the image of an obscure, perishable page supplies a sharply diminished measure of survival. His fear drives him toward commands, pleas, and grand memorial schemes, but the play repeatedly brings those schemes back to the same limit: neither royal power, public remembrance, nor the records that preserve a name can make a finite life last forever.