About a week after his adventure with MoËssard,—a new complication in his sadly muddled affairs,—Jansoulet, on leaving the Chamber one Thursday, ordered his coachman to drive him to the hÔtel de Mora. He had not been there since the fracas on Rue Royale, and the idea of appearing before the duke caused something of the same panicky sensation beneath his tough epidermis that a schoolboy feels on being summoned before the master after a scuffle in the class-room. However, it was necessary to submit to the embarrassment of that first interview. It was currently reported in the committee rooms that Le Merquier had completed his report, a masterpiece of logic and ferocity, recommending that Jansoulet be unseated, and that he was certain to carry his point off-hand unless Mora, whose power in the Assembly was so great, should himself issue contrary orders. A serious crisis, as will be seen, and one that caused his cheeks to burn with fever as he studied the expression of his features and his courtier-like smiles in the bevelled mirrors of his coupÉ, striving to prepare an adroit entry into the presence,—one of his masterstrokes of amiable impudence which had served him so well with Ahmed and thus far with the French statesman,—the whole accompanied by a rapid beating of the heart and the shivering sensation between the shoulders which precedes decisive steps, even when taken in a carriage with gilded panels.

When he reached the mansion on the river bank, he was greatly surprised to see that the footman on the quay, as on the days of great receptions, ordered the carriages to turn into Rue de Lille in order to leave one gateway free for exit. He said to himself, a little disturbed in mind: "What is going on?" Perhaps a concert given by the duchess, a charity bazaar, or some festivity from which Mora had left him out because of the scandal caused by his last adventure. And his anxiety augmented when, after crossing the court of honor amid the tumult of slamming carriage-doors and a constant, dull rumbling on the gravel, he had ascended the steps and found himself in the vast reception-room filled to overflowing with a great throng who were allowed to pass none of the inner doors, but whose anxious steps centred about the table of the servant in attendance, where all the famous names of aristocratic Paris were being inscribed. It seemed as if a sudden blast of disaster had passed through the house, swept away something of its superb tranquillity and allowed unrest and danger to creep into its well-being.

"What a misfortune!"

"Ah! yes, it is terrible."

"And so sudden!"

The people around him exchanged such phrases as they met. A thought passed swiftly through Jansoulet's mind.

"Is the duke ill?" he asked a servant.

"Ah! monsieur. He is dying. He cannot live through the night."

If the roof of the palace had fallen in upon his head, it would not have crushed him more completely. He saw red butterflies whirling around before his eyes, then staggered and fell upon the velvet-covered bench beside the great cage of monkeys, who, over-excited by all the turmoil, clung in a bunch to the bars, hanging by their tails or by their little long-thumbed hands, and in their frightened inquisitiveness assailed with the most extravagant grimaces of their race the stout bewildered man, who sat staring at the floor and repeating to himself aloud: "I am lost! I am lost!"

The duke was dying. He had been taken suddenly ill on Sunday while returning from the Bois. He had felt an intolerable burning sensation which seemed to outline, as with a red-hot iron, the whole internal structure of his body, alternating with chills and numbness and long periods of drowsiness. Jenkins, being summoned at once, prescribed some sedative remedies. The next day the pains returned, more intense than before, and followed by the same icy torpor, also intensified, as if life were leaving him by fierce leaps and bounds, uprooted. No one in the household was at all disturbed. "The day after Saint-James," callers whispered to one another in the reception-room, and Jenkins' handsome face retained its serenity. He mentioned the duke's indisposition to but two or three persons in his morning round of visits, and so lightly that no one thought anything of it.

Mora himself, despite his extreme weakness, and although he felt as if his head were absolutely empty, "not an idea behind his forehead," as he expressed it, was very far from suspecting the gravity of his condition. Not until the third day, when, upon waking in the morning, he saw a slender thread of blood that had flowed from his mouth over his beard and reddened his pillow, did that refined dandy shudder, that fastidious creature who held in horror all forms of human misery, especially disease, and who saw it creeping upon him stealthily with its defilement, its weaknesses and with the self-abandonment which is the first concession to death. Monpavon, entering the room in Jenkins' wake, caught the suddenly perturbed expression of the great nobleman brought face to face with the terrible truth, and was at the same time horrified by the ravages made in a few hours on Mora's emaciated face, where all the wrinkles belonging to his age, appearing suddenly, mingled with the wrinkles caused by suffering, with the depression of muscles which indicates serious internal lesions. He took Jenkins aside while the fine gentleman's servants were supplying him with what he required to make his toilet in bed, a whole outfit of silver and crystal in striking contrast with the yellow pallor of the invalid.

"Look you, Jenkins—the duke is very ill."

"I am afraid so," said the Irishman, in an undertone.

"What's the matter with him?"

"What he apparently wanted, parbleu!" exclaimed the other, in a sort of frenzy. "A man can't be young with impunity at his age. This passion of his will cost him dear."

Some evil thought triumphed in him for the moment, but he instantly imposed silence upon it, and, completely transformed, puffing out his cheeks as if his head were filled with water, he sighed profoundly as he pressed the old nobleman's hands:

"Poor duke! Poor duke! Ah! my friend, I am in despair."

"Have a care, Jenkins," said Monpavon coldly, withdrawing his hands. "You are assuming a terrible responsibility. What! the duke is as ill as you say, ps—ps—ps. See no one? No consultation?"

The Irishman threw up his arms as if to say: "What's the use?"

The other insisted. It was absolutely essential that Brisset, Jousselin, Bouchereau, all the great men should be called in.

"But you will frighten him to death."

Monpavon inflated his breast, the old foundered charger's only pride.

"My dear fellow, if you had seen Mora and myself in the trenches at Constantine—ps—ps—Never lowered our eyes—Don't know what fear means. Send word to your confrÈres, I will undertake to prepare him."

The consultation took place that evening behind closed doors, the duke having demanded that it be kept secret through a curious feeling of shame because of his illness, because of the suffering that dethroned him and reduced him to the level of other men. Like those African kings who conceal themselves in the depths of their palaces to die, he would have liked the world to believe that he had been taken away, transfigured, had become a god. Then, too, above all, he dreaded the compassion, the condolence, the emotion with which he knew that his pillow would be surrounded, the tears that would be shed, because he would suspect that they were insincere, and because, if sincere, they would offend him even more by their grimacing ugliness.

He had always detested scenes, exaggerated sentiments, whatever was likely to move him, to disturb the harmonious equilibrium of his life. Everybody about him was aware of it and the orders were to keep at a distance all the cases of distress, all the despairing appeals that were made to Mora from one end of France to the other, as to one of those houses of refuge in the forest in which a light shines at night and at which all those who have lost their way apply for shelter. Not that he was hard to the unfortunate, perhaps indeed he felt that he was too readily susceptible to pity, which he regarded as an inferior sentiment, a weakness unworthy of the strong, and for the same reason that he denied it to others, dreaded it for himself, lest it impair his courage. So that no one in the palace, save Monpavon and Louis the valet, knew the purpose of the visit of those three persons who were mysteriously ushered into the presence of the Minister of State. Even the duchess herself was in ignorance. Separated from her husband by all the barriers that life in the most exalted political and social circles places between the husband and wife in such exceptional establishments, she supposed that he was slightly indisposed, ill mainly in his imagination, and had so little suspicion of an impending catastrophe that, at the very hour when the physicians were ascending the half-darkened grand staircase, her private apartments at the other end of the palace were brilliantly illuminated for an informal dancing-party, one of those white balls which the ingenuity of idle Paris was just beginning to introduce.

That consultation was, like all consultations, grim and solemn. Doctors no longer wear the huge wigs of MoliÈre's day, but they still assume the same portentous gravity of priests of Isis or astrologers, bristling with cabalistic formulÆ accompanied by movements of the head which lack only the pointed cap of an earlier age to produce a laughable effect. On this occasion the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from the surroundings. In the vast room, transformed, magnified as it were, by the master's immobility, those solemn faces approached the bed upon which the light was concentrated, revealing amid the white linen and the purple curtains a shrivelled face, pale from the lips to the eyes, but enveloped with serenity as with a veil, as with a winding-sheet. The consulting physicians talked in low tones, exchanged a furtive glance, an outlandish word or two, remained perfectly impassive without moving an eyebrow. But that mute, unmeaning expression characteristic of the doctor and the magistrate, that solemnity with which science and justice encompass themselves in order to conceal their weakness or their ignorance, had no power to move the duke.

Sitting on his bed, he continued to talk tranquilly, with that slightly exalted expression in which the thought seems to soar upward as if to escape, and Monpavon coolly replied to him, hardening himself against his emotion, taking a last lesson in breeding from his friend, while Louis, in the background, leaned against the door leading to the duchess's apartments, the type of the silent servitor, in whom heedless indifference is a duty.

The agitated, the feverish member of the party was Jenkins.

Overflowing with obsequious respect for "his illustrious confrÈres," as he unctuously called them, he prowled about their conference and tried to take part in it; but his confrÈres kept him at a distance, hardly answered him, or answered him haughtily, as Fagon—Louis the Fourteenth's Fagon—might have answered some charlatan who had been summoned to the royal bedside. Old Bouchereau especially looked askance at the inventor of the Jenkins Pearls. At last, when they had thoroughly examined and questioned their patient, they withdrew for deliberation to a small salon, all in lacquer-work, with gleaming highly-colored walls and ceiling, filled with an assortment of pretty trifles, whose uselessness contrasted strangely with the importance of the discussion.

A solemn moment, the agony of the accused man awaiting the decision of his judges, life, death, reprieve or pardon!

With his long white hand Mora continued to caress his moustache, his favorite gesture, to talk with Monpavon about the club and the green-room at the VariÉtÉs, asking for news of the proceedings in the Chamber and what progress had been made in the matter of the Nabob's election—all with perfect coolness and without the slightest affectation. Then, fatigued doubtless, or fearing that his glance, which constantly returned to the portiÈre opposite through which the decree of fate was presently to come forth, should betray the emotion that lurked at the bottom of his heart, he leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and did not open them again until the doctors returned. Still the same cold, ominous faces, veritable faces of judges with the terrible word of human destiny on their lips, the Final word, which the courts pronounce without emotion, but which the doctors, all of whose skill and learning it baffles, evade and seek to convey by circumlocution.

"Well, messieurs, what says the Faculty?" inquired the sick man.

There were a few hypocritical, stammered words of encouragement, vague recommendations; then the three learned men hastily took their leave, eager to be gone, to avoid any responsibility for the impending disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained by the bedside, overwhelmed by the brutal truths he had heard during the consultation. In vain had he put his hand upon his heart, quoted his famous motto. Bouchereau had not spared him. This was not the first of the Irishman's patients whom he had seen fall suddenly to pieces thus; but he trusted that Mora's death would be a salutary warning to people in society, and that the prefect of police, as the result of this great calamity, would send the "dealer in cantharides," to advertise his aphrodisiacs on the other side of the Channel.

The duke realized that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the real result of the consultation. He did not press them, therefore, but submitted to their assumed confidence, even pretended to share it and to believe all that they told him. But when Monpavon returned, he called him to his bedside, and, undaunted by the falsehood that was visible even under the paint of that wreck, he said:

"Oh! no wry faces, I beg. Between you and me, let us have the truth. What do they say?—I am in a bad way, am I not?"

Monpavon prefaced his reply by a significant pause; then roughly, cynically, for fear of showing emotion at the words:

"Damnation, my poor Auguste!"

The duke received it between the eyes without winking.

"Ah!" he said, simply.

He twisted his moustache mechanically; but his features did not change. And in an instant his resolution was formed.

That the poor wretch who dies in the hospital, without home or kindred, with no other name than the number of his bed, should accept death as a deliverance or submit to it as a last trial, that the old peasant who falls asleep, bent double, worn out and stiff-jointed, in his dark, smoke-begrimed mole-hole, should go thence without regret, that he should relish in anticipation the taste of the cool earth he has turned and returned so many times, one can understand. And yet how many of them are attached to existence by their very misery, how many exclaim as they cling to their wretched furniture, to their rags: "I do not want to die," and go with their nails broken and bleeding from that last wrench! But there was nothing of the sort here.

To have everything and to lose everything. What an upheaval!

In the first silence of that awful moment, while he listened to the muffled music of the duchess's ball at the other end of the palace, the things that still bound that man to life—power, honors, wealth, all the magnificence that surrounded him—must have seemed to him to be already far away in an irrevocable past. It required courage of a very exceptional temper to resist such a blow without the slightest outburst of self-love. No one was present save the friend, the physician, the servant, three intimate acquaintances, who were familiar with all his secrets; the lights being turned low left the bed in shadow, and the dying man could have turned his face to the wall and given vent to his emotion unseen. But no. Not a second of weakness, of fruitless demonstrations. Without breaking a branch of the chestnut trees in the garden, without withering a flower in the great hall of the palace, Death, muffling his footsteps in the heavy carpets, had opened that great man's door and motioned to him: "Come!" And he replied, simply, "I am ready." A fit exit for a man of the world, unforeseen, swift and noiseless.

A man of the world! Mora was nothing else. Passing smoothly through life, arrayed in mask and gloves and breastplate, the breastplate of white satin worn by fencing-masters on days of great exhibitions, keeping his fighting costume ever clean and spotless, sacrificing everything to that irreproachable exterior which served him instead of a coat of mail, he had metamorphosed himself into a statesman, passing from the salon to a vaster stage, and made in truth a statesman of the first order simply by virtue of his qualities as a leader of society, the art of listening and smiling, knowledge of men, scepticism and sang-froid. That sang-froid did not leave him at the supreme moment.

With his eyes upon the brief, limited time which still remained to him, for his dark-browed visitor was in haste and he could feel on his face the wind from the door which he had not closed, he thought of nothing but making good use of that time and fulfilling all the obligations of an end like his own, which should leave no devotion unrewarded, should compromise no friend. He made a list of the few persons whom he wished to see and to whom messengers were sent at once; then he asked for his chief clerk, and when Jenkins suggested that he was overtiring himself, "Will you promise me that I shall wake to-morrow morning? I have a spasm of strength at this moment. Let me make the most of it."

Louis asked if he should warn the duchess. The duke, before replying, listened to the strains from the ball that came floating in through the opened windows, prolonged in the darkness by an invisible bow; then he said:

"Let us wait a little. I have something to do first."

He bade them move to his bedside the little lacquer table, intending himself to sort out the letters to be destroyed; but, finding that his strength was failing, he called Monpavon: "Burn everything," he said to him in a feeble voice, and added, when he saw him going toward the fireplace, where a bright fire was burning, notwithstanding the fine weather:

"No—not here. There are too many of them. Some one might come."

Monpavon lifted the light desk and motioned to the valet to carry a light for him. But Jenkins darted forward:

"Stay, Louis, the duke may need you."

He took possession of the lamp; and they stole cautiously along the long corridor, exploring the reception-rooms, the galleries, where the fireplaces were filled with artificial plants with no trace of ashes, wandering like ghosts in the silence and darkness of the vast dwelling, alive only over yonder at the right where pleasure sang like a bird on a roof that is about to fall.

"There's no fire anywhere. What are we to do with all this stuff?" they asked each other, sorely perplexed. One would have said they were two thieves dragging away a safe which they were unable to open. At last Monpavon, out of patience, walked with an air of resolution to a certain door, the only one they had not yet opened.

"Faith, we'll do the best we can! As we can't burn them, we'll drown them. Show me a light, Jenkins."

And they entered.

Where were they? Saint-Simon, describing the downfall of one of these sovereign existences, the utter confusion of ceremonials, of dignities, of grandeurs caused by death, especially by sudden death, Saint-Simon alone could have told you. With his delicate, carefully-kept hands the Marquis de Monpavon pumped. The other passed him torn letters, bundles of letters, soft as satin, many-hued, perfumed, adorned with ciphers, crests, banderoles with mottoes, covered with fine, close, scrawling, enlaced, persuasive chirography; and all those delicate pages whirled round and round in the eddying stream of water which crumpled and soiled them and washed away the pale ink before allowing them to disappear with a gurgling hiccough at the bottom of the filthy sink.

There were love-letters and love-letters of all sorts, from the note of the adventuress—"I saw you pass at the Bois yesterday, Monsieur le Duc,"—to the aristocratic reproaches of the mistress before the last, the wailing of the abandoned, and the page still fresh with recent confidences. Monpavon was familiar with all these mysteries, gave a name to each of them: "That's from Madame Moor"—"Ah! Madame d'Athis." A confused mass of coronets and initials, passing whims and old habits, sullied at that moment by being thrown together promiscuously, all swallowed up in that ghastly place, by lamplight, with a noise as of an intermittent deluge, going to oblivion by a shameful road. Suddenly Jenkins paused in his work of destruction. Two letters on pearl-gray satin paper trembled in his fingers.

"Who's that?" queried Monpavon, at sight of the unfamiliar hand and the Irishman's nervous excitement. "Ah! doctor, if you mean to read everything we shall never finish."

Jenkins, with burning cheeks, his two letters in his hand, was consumed by a fierce longing to carry them away in order to gloat over them at his leisure, to torture himself with delicious pain by reading them, perhaps also to use that correspondence as a weapon against the imprudent creature who had signed it. But the marquis's rigid demeanor frightened him. How could he divert his attention, get rid of him? An opportunity presented itself unsought. A tiny sheet, written in a senile, tremulous hand, had found its way between those same letters, and attracted the attention of the charlatan, who said with an artless expression:

"Oho! here's something that doesn't look like a billet-doux. 'My dear duke, help, I am drowning! The Cour des Comptes has stuck its nose into my affairs again'—"

"What the devil's that you're reading?" exclaimed Monpavon abruptly, snatching the letter from his hands. And in an instant, thanks to Mora's negligence in allowing such private letters to lie around, the terrible plight in which he would be left by his protector's death came to his mind. In his grief he had not as yet thought of it. He said to himself that, amid his preparations for leaving the world, the duke might very well forget him; and, leaving Jenkins to finish alone the drowning of Don Juan's casket, he returned hurriedly to the bedroom. As he was about to enter, the sound of voices detained him behind the lowered portiÈre. It was Louis's voice, as whining as that of a pauper under a porch, trying to move the duke to pity for his distress and asking his permission to take a few rolls of gold that were lying in a drawer. Oh! what a hoarse, wearied, hardly audible reply, in which one could feel the effort of the sick man compelled to turn in his bed, to remove his eyes from a distant point already clearly distinguished:

"Yes, yes—take them. But for God's sake let me sleep! let me sleep!"

Drawers opened and closed, a hurried, panting breath. Monpavon heard no more, but retraced his steps without entering the room. The servant's ferocious greed had given his pride the alarm. Anything rather than degrade himself to that point.

The slumber for which Mora begged so persistently, the lethargy, to speak more accurately, lasted a whole night and morning, with partial awakenings caused by excruciating pain which yielded each time to soporifics. They did nothing for him except to try to make his last moments comfortable, to help him over that last step which it requires such a painful effort to pass. His eyes had opened during that time, but they were already dim, staring into emptiness at wavering shadows, indistinct forms, like those which a diver sees quivering in the vague depths of the water. On Thursday afternoon, about three o'clock, he recovered consciousness completely, and, recognizing Monpavon, Cardailhac and two or three other close friends, smiled at them and betrayed in a word his sole preoccupation:

"What do people say of this in Paris?"

People said many things, diverse and contradictory; but one thing was certain, that they talked of nothing else, and the report which had been circulated through the city that morning, that Mora was at death's door, had put the streets, the salons, the cafÉs, the studios in a ferment, revived political questions in the newspaper offices, in the clubs, and even in porters' lodges and on the omnibuses, wherever open newspapers furnished a pretext for comment on that startling item of news.

This Mora was the most brilliant incarnation of the Empire. The part of a building that we see from afar is not its foundation, be it solid or tottering, not its architectural features, but the slender, gilded arrow, fancifully carved and perforated, added for the gratification of the eye. What people saw of the Empire in France and throughout Europe was Mora. When he fell, the structure was stripped of all its elegance, marred by a long irreparable crack. And how many existences were involved in that sudden fall, how many fortunes shattered by the after effects of the catastrophe! Not one so completely as that of the stout man sitting motionless on the monkeys' bench in the reception-room below.

To the Nabob that man's death meant his own death, his ruin, the end of everything. He was so thoroughly conscious of it that when he was informed, on entering the house, of the Duke's desperate condition, he indulged in no whining or wry faces of any sort, simply the savage ejaculation of human selfishness: "I am lost!" And the words came constantly to his lips, he repeated them instinctively each time that all the horror of his position came over him in sudden flashes,—as in those dangerous mountain storms, when a sharp flash of lightning illumines the abyss to the very bottom, with the jagged projections of the walls and the clumps of bushes scattered here and there to supply the rents and bruises of the fall.

The rapid keenness of vision that accompanies cataclysms spared him no detail. He saw that he was almost certain to be unseated now that Mora would not be at hand to plead his cause; and the consequences of defeat, bankruptcy, poverty and something worse, for these incalculable fortunes, when they crumble away, always keep a little of a man's honor under the ruins. But what thorns, what brambles, what bruises, what cruel wounds before reaching the end! In a week the Schwalbach notes to be paid, that is to say eight hundred thousand francs, MoËssard's claim for damages—he demanded a hundred thousand francs or would apply to the Chamber for authority to institute criminal process against him—another more dangerous suit begun by the families of two little martyrs of Bethlehem against the founders of the establishment; and, in addition to all the rest, the complications of the Caisse Territoriale. A single ray of hope, Paul de GÉry's negotiations with the bey, but so vague, so problematical, so far away!

"Ah! I am lost! I am lost!"

In the vast apartment no one noticed his trouble. That crowd of senators, deputies, councillors of state, all the leading men in the government, went and came around him without seeing him, held mysterious conferences and rested their elbows in anxious importance on the two white marble mantels that faced each other. So many disappointed, betrayed, over-hasty ambitions met in that visit in extremis, that selfish anxiety predominated over every other form of preoccupation.

The faces, strangely enough, expressed neither pity nor grief, rather a sort of wrath. All those people seemed to bear the duke a grudge for dying, as if for turning his back upon them. Such remarks as this were heard: "It's not at all strange after such a life!" And, standing at the long windows, the gentlemen called one another's attention to some dainty coupÉ drawing up amid the constant stream of carriages going and coming outside, while a gloved hand, its lace sleeve brushing against the door, handed a folded card to the footman who brought her information of the invalid's condition.

From time to time one of the intimates of the palace, one of those whom the dying man had sent for, appeared for a moment in the throng, gave an order, then vanished, leaving the terrified expression of his face reflected upon a score of others. Jenkins showed himself in that way for a moment, cravat untied, waistcoat open, cuffs soiled and rumpled, in all the disarray of the battle he was waging upstairs against a terrible opponent. He was at once surrounded, pressed with questions. Certainly the monkeys flattening their short noses against the bars of the cage, awed by the unusual uproar and very attentive to what was taking place, as if they were making a careful study of human expression, had a magnificent model in the Irish doctor. His grief was superb, the noble grief of a strong man, which compressed his lips and made his breast heave.

"The death-agony has begun," he said dolefully. "It is only a matter of hours now."

And, as Jansoulet drew near, he said to him in an emphatic tone:

"Ah! my friend, what a man! What courage! He has forgotten nobody. Only a little while ago he spoke to me about you."

"Really?"

"'Poor Nabob!'" he said, "'how is his election coming on?'"

And that was all. He had said nothing more.

Jansoulet hung his head. What had he expected, in heaven's name? Was it not enough that a man like Mora should have thought of him at such a moment? He returned to his seat on the bench, relapsed into his former state of prostration, galvanized by a moment of wild hope, sat there heedless of the fact that the vast apartment was becoming almost entirely deserted, and did not notice that he was the last and only visitor remaining until he heard the servants talking aloud in the fading light.

"I have had enough—my service here is done."

"For my part I shall stay with the duchess."

And those plans, those decisions anticipating the master's death by some hours, doomed the noble duke even more surely than the Faculty had done.

The Nabob realized then that it was time for him to withdraw, but he determined first to write his name on the register. He went to the table and leaned far over in order to see clearly. The page was full. A blank space was pointed out to him, below a name written in small, threadlike characters, as if by fingers too stout for the pen, and, when he had signed, Hemerlingue's name overshadowed his, crushed it, entangled it in an insidious flourish. Superstitious like the true Latin that he was, he was impressed by the omen and carried the terror of it away with him.

Where should he dine? At the club? On Place VendÔme? And hear nothing talked of but this death which engrossed his thoughts! He preferred to trust to chance, to go straight ahead like all those who are beset by a persistent idea which they try to escape by walking. It was a warm, balmy evening. He walked on and on along the quays till he reached the tree-lined paths of the Cours-la-Reine, then returned to the combination of freshly-watered streets and odor of fine dust which characterizes fine evenings in Paris. At that uncertain hour everything was deserted. Here and there girandoles were lighted for concerts, gas-jets flared among the foliage. The rattle of plates and glasses from a restaurant suggested to him the idea of entering.

The robust creature was hungry notwithstanding his anxiety. His dinner was served under a verandah with walls of glass, lined with foliage and facing the great porch of the Palais de l'Industrie, where the duke, in presence of a thousand persons, had saluted him as deputy. The refined and aristocratic face appeared to his mind's eye in the dark archway, while at the same time he saw him lying yonder on his white pillow; and, suddenly, as he stared at the bill of fare the waiter handed him, he noticed with a sort of stupefaction that it was dated May 20th. So not a month had passed since the opening of the Salon. It seemed to him as if it were ten years since that day. Gradually, however, the excellent repast warmed and comforted his heart. In the passage he heard some of the waiters talking:

"Is there any news of Mora? It seems he's very sick."

"Nonsense! He'll pull through. Such fellows as he are the only ones who have any luck."

Hope is anchored so firmly to the human entrails that, despite what Jansoulet had seen and heard, those few words, assisted by two bottles of burgundy and divers petits verres sufficed to restore his courage. After all, people had been known to recover when they were as far gone. Doctors often exaggerate the danger in order to gain more credit for averting it. "Suppose I go and see?" He returned to the hÔtel de Mora, full of illusions, appealing to the luck that had stood him in good stead so many times in his life. And in truth there was something in the appearance of the princely abode to justify his hope. It wore the tranquil, reassuring aspect of ordinary evenings, from the avenue with lights burning at equal intervals, to the main doorway, at which an enormous carriage of antique shape was waiting.

In the reception-room, where there were no signs of excitement, two great lamps were burning. A footman was asleep in a corner, the usher was reading in front of the fire. He glanced at the new arrival over his spectacles, but said nothing to him, and Jansoulet dared ask no questions. Piles of newspapers lay on the table in wrappers addressed to the duke, apparently tossed there as useless. The Nabob opened one and tried to read; but a rapid, gliding step, a sing-song murmuring made him raise his eyes, and he saw a white-haired, stooping old man, decked out with finery like an altar, who was praying as he walked with long priest-like strides, his red cassock spread out like a train over the carpet. It was the Archbishop of Paris, accompanied by two assistants. The vision with its murmur as of an icy wind passed swiftly before Jansoulet, was engulfed by the great chariot and disappeared, carrying away his last hope.

"A question of propriety, my dear fellow," said Monpavon, suddenly appearing at his side. "Mora is an epicurean, brought up in the ideas of What's-his-name—Thingamy—you know whom I mean! Eighteenth century. But it's very bad for the masses, if a man in his position—ps—ps—ps—Ah! he was head and shoulders above all of us—ps—ps—irreproachable breeding."

"So, it's all over, is it?" said Jansoulet desperately. "There's no more hope?"

Monpavon motioned to him to listen. A carriage rumbled heavily along the avenue on the quay. The bell rang several times in quick succession. The marquis counted aloud: "One, two, three, four—" At the fifth he rose.

"There's no hope now. There comes the other," he said, alluding to the Parisian superstition to the effect that a visit from the sovereign was always fatal to the dying. The servants hurried from all directions, threw the folding-doors wide open and formed a lane, while the usher, his hat en bataille announced with a resounding blow of his pike upon the floor the passage of two august personages, of whom Jansoulet caught only a confused glimpse behind the servants, but whom he saw through a long vista of open doors ascending the grand staircase, preceded by a valet carrying a candelabrum. The woman was erect and haughty, enveloped in her black Spanish mantilla; the man clung to the stair-rail, walked more slowly and as if fatigued, the collar of his light top-coat standing up from a back slightly bent, which was shaken by convulsive sobs.

"Let us be off, Nabob. Nothing more to be done here," said the old beau, taking Jansoulet by the arm and leading him out. He stopped on the threshold, raised his hand, and waved a little salute with the tips of his gloves toward him who lay dying above. "Bojou, dea' boy." The tone and gesture were worldly, irreproachable; but the voice trembled a little.

The club on Rue Royale, renowned for its card-playing, had rarely seen so terrible a game as it saw that night. It began at eleven o'clock and was still in progress at five in the morning. Enormous sums lay on the green cloth, changed hands and direction, heaped up, scattered, reunited; fortunes were swallowed up in that colossal game, and at its close the Nabob, who had started it to forget his fears in the caprices of luck, after extraordinary alternations, somersaults of fortune calculated to make a neophyte's hair turn white, withdrew with winnings of five hundred thousand francs. They said five millions on the boulevard the next day, and every one cried shame, especially the Messager, which gave up three-quarters of its space to an article against certain adventurers who are tolerated in clubs, and who cause the ruin of the most respectable families.

Alas! Jansoulet's winnings hardly represented the amount of the first Schwalbach notes.

During that insane game, although Mora was its involuntary cause, and, as it were, its soul, his name was not once mentioned. Neither Cardailhac nor Jenkins appeared. Monpavon had taken to his bed, more affected than he chose to have people think. They were without news from the sick-room.

"Is he dead?" Jansoulet wondered as he left the club, and he was conscious of an impulse to go and see before returning home. It was no longer hope that impelled him, but that unhealthy, nervous sort of curiosity which attracts the poor, ruined, shelterless victims of a conflagration to the dÉbris of their home.

Although it was still very early, the pink flush of dawn still lingering in the air, the whole mansion was open as if for a solemn departure. The lamps were still smoking on the mantels, the air was filled with dust. The Nabob walked on through inexplicable solitude as far as the first floor, where he at last heard a familiar voice, Cardailhac's, dictating names, and the scratching of pens on paper. The skilful organizer of the fÊtes for the bey was arranging with the same zeal the funeral ceremonial of the Duc de Mora. Such activity! His Excellency had died during the evening; in the morning ten thousand letters were already printed, and everybody in the house who knew how to hold a pen was busy with the addresses. Without passing through those extemporized offices, Jansoulet made his way to the reception-room, usually so thronged, to-day all the chairs empty. In the centre of the room, on a table, lay Monsieur le Duc's hat and gloves and cane, always ready in the event of his going out unexpectedly, to save him the trouble of an order. The articles that we wear retain something of ourselves. The curve of the hat-rim recalled the curl of the moustaches, the light gloves were ready to grasp the flexible, strong Chinese bamboo, everything seemed to quiver and live, as if the duke were about to appear, to put out his hand as he talked, take them up and go out.

Oh! no, Monsieur le Duc was not going out. Jansoulet had only to walk to the bedroom door, which stood ajar, to see lying on the bed, three steps above the floor—the same platform even after death—a rigid, haughty form, a motionless, aged profile, transformed by the gray beard that had grown in a night; kneeling against the sloping pillow, her face buried in the white sheets, was a woman whose fair hair fell neglected about her shoulders, ready to fall under the shears of eternal widowhood; a priest, too, and a nun stood absorbed in meditation in that atmosphere of the death vigil, wherein the weariness of sleepless nights is blended with the mumbling of prayers and whispering in the shadow.

That room, in which so many ambitions had felt their wings expand, in which so many hopes and disappointments had had their day, was given over to the tranquillity of death. Not a sound, not a sigh. But, early as it was, over in the direction of Pont de la Concorde, a shrill, piercing little clarinet soared above the rumbling of the first carriages; but its vigorous mockery was wasted thenceforth upon the man who lay sleeping there, revealing to the terrified Nabob the image of his own destiny, cold, discolored, ready for the grave.

Others than Jansoulet saw that death-chamber under even more dismal circumstances. The windows thrown wide open. The night air from the garden entering freely in a brisk current. A form upon trestles; that form, the body just embalmed. The head hollowed out, filled with a sponge, the brain in a bucket. The weight of that statesman's brain was really extraordinary. It weighed—it weighed—The newspapers of the day gave the figures. But who remembers them to-day?