Chapter XIII: Part 13

Sitting up in bed, he continued to talk quietly, with the upward glance of the eye in which it seems as if thought rises before it finally takes wing, and Monpavon coldly followed his cue, hardening himself against his own emotion, taking from his friend a last lesson in “form”; while Louis, in the background, stood leaning against the door leading to the duchess’s apartment, the spectre of a silent domestic in whom detached indifference is a duty.

The most agitated, nervous man present was Jenkins. Full of obsequious attentions for his “illustrious colleagues,” as he called them, with his lips pursed up, he hung round their consultation and attempted to take part in it; but the colleagues kept him at a distance and hardly answered him, as Fagon--the Fagon of Louis XIV--might have addressed some empiric summoned to the royal bedside. Old Bouchereau especially had black looks for the inventor of the Jenkins pearls. Finally, when they had thoroughly examined and questioned their patient, they retired to deliberate among themselves in a little room with lacquered ceilings and walls, filled by an assortment of _bric-a-brac_ the triviality of which contrasted strangely with the importance of the discussion.

Solemn moment! Anguish of the accused awaiting the decision of his judges--life, death, reprieve, or pardon!

With his long, white hand Mora continued to stroke his mustache with a favourite gesture, to talk with Monpavon of the club, of the foyer of the _Varietes_, asking news of the Chamber, how matters stood with regard to the Nabob’s election--all this coldly, without the least affectation. Then, tired, no doubt, or fearing lest his glance, constantly drawn to that curtain opposite him, from behind which the sentence was to come presently, should betray the emotion which he must have felt in the depths of his soul, he laid his head on the pillow, closed his eyes, and did not open them again until the return of the doctors. Still the same cold and sinister faces, veritable physiognomies of judges having on their lips the terrible decree of human fate, the final word which the courts pronounce fearlessly, but which the doctors, whose science it mocks, elude, and express in periphrases.

“Well, gentlemen, what says the faculty?” demanded the sick man.

There were sundry murmurs of hypocritical encouragement, vague recommendations; then the three learned physicians hastened to depart, eager to escape from the responsibility of this disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained at the bedside, overwhelmed by the cruel truths which he had just heard during the consultation. In vain had he laid his hand on his heart, quoted his famous motto; Bouchereau had not spared him. It was not the first of the Irishman’s clients whom he had seen thus suddenly collapse; but he fervently hoped that the death of Mora would act as a salutary warning to the world of fashion, and that the prefect of police, after this great calamity, would send the “dealer in cantharides” to retail his drugs on the other side of the Channel.

The duke understood immediately that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the true issue of the consultation. He abstained, therefore, from any insistence in his questionings of them, submitted to their pretended confidence, affected even to share it, to believe the most hopeful things they announced to him. But when Monpavon returned, he summoned him to his bedside, and, confronted by the lie visible even beneath the make-up of the decrepit old man, remarked:

“Oh, you know--no humbug! From you to me, truth. What do they say? I am in a very bad way, eh?”

Monpavon prefaced his reply with a significant silence; then brutally, cynically, for fear of breaking down as he spoke:

“Done for, my poor Augustus!”

The duke received the sentence full in the face without flinching.

“Ah!” he said simply.

He pulled his mustache with a mechanical gesture, but his features remained motionless. And immediately he made up his mind.

That the poor wretch who dies in a hospital, without home or family, without other name than the number of his bed, that he should accept death as a deliverance or bear it as his last trial; that the old peasant who passes away, bent double, worn out, in his dark and smoky cellar, that he should depart without regret, savouring in advance the taste of that fresh earth which he has so many times dug over and over--that is intelligible. And yet how many, even among such, cling to existence despite all their misery! how many there are who cry, holding on to their sordid furniture and to their rags, “I don’t want to die!” and depart with nails broken and bleeding from that supreme wrench. But here there was nothing of the kind.

To possess all, and to lose all. What a catastrophe!

In the first silence of that dreadful moment, while he heard the sound of the music coming faintly from the duchess’s ball at the other end of the palace, whatever attached this man to life, power, honour, wealth, all that splendour must have seemed to him already far away and in an irrevocable past. A courage of a quite exceptional temper must have been required to bear up under such a blow without any spur of personal vanity. No one was present save the friend, the doctor, the servant, three intimates acquainted with all his secrets; the lights moved back, left the bed in shadow, and the dying man might quite well have turned his face to the wall in lamentation of his own fate without being noticed. But not an instant of weakness, nor of useless demonstration. Without breaking a branch of the chestnut-trees in the garden, without withering a flower on the great staircase of the palace, his footsteps muffled on the thick pile of the carpets, Death had opened the door of this man of power and signed to him “Come!” And he answered simply, “I am ready.” The true exit of a man of the world, unforeseen, rapid, and discreet.

Man of the world! Mora was nothing if not that. Passing through life masked, gloved, breast-plated--breast-plate of white satin, such as the masters of fence wear on great days; preserving his fighting dress immaculate and clean; sacrificing everything to that irreproachable exterior which with him did duty for armour; he had determined on his _role_ as statesman in the passage from the drawing-room to a wider scene, and made, indeed, a statesman of the first rank on the strength alone of his qualities as a man about town, the art of listening and of smiling, knowledge of men, scepticism, and coolness. That coolness did not leave him at the supreme moment.

With eyes fixed on the time, so short, which still remained to him--for the dark visitor was in a hurry, and he could feel on his face the draught from the door which he had not closed behind him--his one thought now was to occupy the time well, to satisfy all the obligations of an end like his, which must leave no devotion unrecompensed nor compromise any friend. He gave a list of certain persons whom he wished to see and who were sent for immediately, summoned the head of his cabinet, and, as Jenkins ventured the opinion that it was a great fatigue for him, said:

“Can you guarantee that I shall wake to-morrow morning? I feel strong at this moment; let me take advantage of it.”

Louis inquired whether the duchess should be informed. The duke, before replying, listened to the sounds of music that reached his room through the open windows from the little ball, sounds that seemed prolonged in the night on an invisible bow, then answered:

“Let us wait a little. I have something to finish.”

They brought to his bedside the little lacquered table that he might himself sort out the letters which were to be destroyed; but feeling his strength give way, he called Monpavon.

“Burn everything,” said he to him in a faint voice; and seeing him move towards the fireplace, where a fire was burning despite the warmth of the season.

“No,” he added, “not here. There are too many of them. Some one might come.”

Monpavon took up the writing-table, which was not heavy, and signed to the _valet de chambre_ to go before him with a light. But Jenkins sprang forward:

“Stay here, Louis; the duke may want you.”

He took hold of the lamp; and moving carefully down the whole length of the great corridor, exploring the waiting-rooms, the galleries, in which the fireplaces proved to be filled with artificial plants and quite emptied of ashes, they wandered like spectres in the silence and darkness of the vast house, alive only over yonder on the right, were pleasure was singing like a bird on a roof which is about to fall in ruins.

“There is no fire anywhere. What is to be done with all this?” they asked each other in great embarrassment. They might have been two thieves dragging away a chest which they did not know how to open. At last Monpavon, out of patience, walked straight to a door, the only one which they had not yet opened.

“_Ma foi_, so much the worse! Since we cannot burn them, we will drown them. Hold the light, Jenkins.”

And they entered.

Where were they? Saint-Simon relating the downfall of one of those sovereign existences, the disarray of ceremonies, of dignities, of grandeurs, caused by death and especially by sudden death, only Saint-Simon might have found words to tell you. With his delicate, carefully kept hands, the Marquis de Monpavon did the pumping. The other passed to him the letters after tearing them into small pieces, packets of letters, on satin paper, tinted, perfumed, adorned with crests, coats of arms, small flags with devices, covered with handwritings, fine, hurried, scrawling, entwining, persuasive; and all those flimsy pages went whirling one over the other in eddying streams of water which crumpled them, soiled them, washed out their tender links before allowing them to disappear with a gurgle down the drain.

They were love-letters and of every kind, from the note of the adventuress, “_I saw you pass yesterday in the Bois, M. le Duc_,” to the aristocratic reproaches of the last mistress but one, and the complaints of ladies deserted, and the page, still fresh, of recent confidences. Monpavon was in the secret of all these mysteries--put a name on each of them: “That is Mme. Moor. Hallo! Mme. d’Athis!” A confusion of coronets and initials, of caprices and old habits, sullied by the promiscuity of this moment, all engulfed in the horrid closet by the light of a lamp, with the noise of an intermittent gush of water, departing into oblivion by a shameful road. Suddenly Jenkins paused in his work of destruction. Two satin-gray letters trembled as he held them in his fingers.

“Who is that?” asked Monpavon, noticing the unfamiliar handwriting and the Irishman’s nervous excitement. “Ah, doctor, if you want to read them all, we shall never have finished.”

Jenkins, his cheeks flushed, the two letters in his hand, was consumed by a desire to carry them away, to pore over them at his ease, to martyrize himself with delight by reading them, perhaps also to forge out of this correspondence a weapon for himself against the imprudent woman who had signed her name. But the rigorous correctness of the marquis made him afraid. How could he distract his attention--get him away? The opportunity occurred of its own accord. Among the letters, a tiny page written in a senile and shaky hand, caught the attention of the charlatan, who said with an ingenuous air: “Oh, oh! here is something that does not look much like a _billet-doux. ‘Mon Duc, to the rescue--I am sinking! The Court of Exchequer has once more stuck its nose into my affairs.’_”

“What are you reading there?” exclaimed Monpavon abruptly, snatching the letter from his hands. And immediately, thanks to Mora’s negligence in thus allowing such private letters to lie about, the terrible situation in which he would be left by the death of his protector returned to his mind. In his grief, he had not yet given it a thought. He told himself that in the midst of all his preparations for his departure, the duke might quite possibly overlook him; and, leaving Jenkins to complete the drowning of Don Juan’s casket by himself, he returned precipitately in the direction of the bed-chamber. Just as he was on the point of entering, the sound of a discussion held him back behind the lowered door-curtain. It was Louis’s voice, tearful like that of a beggar in a church-porch, trying to move the duke to pity for his distress, and asking permission to take certain bundles of bank-notes that lay in a drawer. Oh, how hoarse, utterly wearied, hardly intelligible the answer, in which there could be detected the effort of the sick man to turn over in his bed, to bring back his vision from a far-off distance already half in sight:

“Yes, yes; take them. But for God’s sake, let me sleep--let me sleep!”

Drawers opened, closed again, a short and panting breath. Monpavon heard no more of what was going on, and retraced his steps without entering. The ferocious rapacity of his servant had set his pride upon its guard. Anything rather than degradation to such a point as that.

The sleep which Mora craved for so insistently--the lethargy, to be more accurate--lasted a whole night, and through the next morning also, with uncertain wakings disturbed by terrible sufferings relieved each time by soporifics. No further attempt was made to nurse him to recovery; they tried only to soothe his last moments, to help him to slip painlessly over that terrible last step. His eyes had opened again during this time, but were already dimmed, fixed in the void on floating shadows, vague forms like those a diver sees quivering in the uncertain light under water.

In the afternoon of the Thursday, towards three o’clock, he regained complete consciousness, and recognising Monpavon, Cardailhac, and two or three other intimate friends, he smiled to them, and betrayed in a sentence his only anxiety:

“What do they say about it in Paris?”

They said many things about it, different and contradictory; but very certainly he was the only subject of conversation, and the news spread through the town since the morning, that Mora was at his last breath, agitated the streets, the drawing-rooms, the cafes, the workshops, revived the question of the political situation in newspaper offices and clubs, even in porters’ lodges and on the tops of omnibuses, in every place where the unfolded public newspapers commented on this startling rumour of the day.

Mora was the most brilliant incarnation of the Empire. One sees from a distance, not the solid or insecure base of the building, but the gilded and delicate spire, embellished, carved into hollow tracery, added for the satisfaction of the age. Mora was what was seen in France and throughout Europe of the Empire. If he fell, the monument would find itself bereft of all its elegance, split as by some long and irreparable crack. And how many lives would be dragged down by that sudden fall, how many fortunes undermined by the weakened reverberations of the catastrophe! None so completely as that of the big man sitting motionless downstairs, on the bench in the monkey-house.

For the Nabob, this death was his own death, the ruin, the end of all things. He was so deeply conscious of it that, when he entered the house, on learning the hopeless condition of the duke, no expression of pity, no regrets of any sort, had escaped him, only the ferocious word of human egoism, “I am ruined!” And this word kept recurring to his lips; he repeated it mechanically each time that he awoke suddenly afresh to all the horror of his situation, as in those dangerous mountain storms, when a sudden flash of lightning illumines the abyss to its depths, showing the wounding spurs and the bushes on its sides, ready to tear and scratch the man who should fall.

The rapid clairvoyance which accompanies cataclysms spared him no detail. He saw the invalidation of his election almost certain, now that Mora would no longer be there to plead his cause; then the consequences of the defeat--bankruptcy, poverty, and still worse; for when these incalculable riches collapse they always bury a little of a man’s honour beneath their ruins. But how many briers, how many thorns, how many cruel scratches and wounds before arriving at the end! In a week there would be the Schwalbach bills--that is to say, eight hundred thousand francs--to pay; indemnity for Moessard, who wanted a hundred thousand francs, or as the alternative he would apply for the permission of the Chamber to prosecute him for a misdemeanour, a suit still more sinister instituted by the families of two little martyrs of Bethlehem against the founders of the Society; and, on top of all, the complications of the Territorial Bank. There was one solitary hope, the mission of Paul de Gery to the Bey, but so vague, so chimerical, so remote!

“Ah, I am ruined! I am ruined!”

In the immense entrance-hall no one noticed his distress. The crowd of senators, of deputies, of councillors of state, all the high officials of the administration, came and went around him without seeing him, holding mysterious consultations with uneasy importance near the two fireplaces of white marble which faced one another. So many ambitions disappointed, deceived, hurled down, met in this visit _in extremis_, that personal anxieties dominated every other preoccupation.

The faces, strangely enough, expressed neither pity nor grief, rather a sort of anger. All these people seemed to have a grudge against the duke for dying, as though he had deserted them. One heard remarks of this kind: “It is not surprising, with such a life as he has lived!” And looking out of the high windows, these gentlemen pointed out to each other, amid the going and coming of the equipages in the court-yard, the drawing up of some little brougham from within which a well-gloved hand, with its lace sleeve brushing the sash of the door, would hold out a card with a corner turned back to the footman.

From time to time one of the _habitues_ of the palace, one of those whom the dying man had summoned to his bedside, appeared in the medley, gave an order, then went away, leaving the scared expression of his face reflected on twenty others. Jenkins showed himself thus for a moment, with his cravat untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his cuffs crumpled, in all the disorder of the battle in which he was engaged upstairs against a terrible opponent. He was instantly surrounded, besieged with questions.

Certainly the monkeys flattening their short noses against the bars of their cage, excited by the unaccustomed tumult, and very attentive to all that passed about them as though they were occupied in making a methodical study of human hypocrisy, had a magnificent model in the Irish physician. His grief was superb, a splendid grief, masculine and strong, which compressed his lips and made him pant.

“The agony has begun,” he said mournfully. “It is only a matter of hours.”

And as Jansoulet came towards him, he said to him emphatically:

“Ah, my friend, what a man! What courage! He has forgotten nobody. Only just now he was speaking to me of you.”

“Really?”

“‘The poor Nabob,’ said he, ‘how does the affair of his election stand?’”

And that was all. The duke had added no further word.

Jansoulet bowed his head. What had he been hoping? Was it not enough that at such a moment a man like Mora had given him a thought? He returned and sat down on his bench, falling back into the stupor which had been galvanized by one moment of mad hope, and remained until, without his noticing it, the hall had become nearly deserted. He did not remark that he was the only and last visitor left, until he heard the men-servants talking aloud in the waning light of the evening:

“For my part, I’ve had enough of it. I shall leave service.”

“I shall stay on with the duchess.”

And these projects, these arrangements some hours in advance of death, condemned the noble duke still more surely than the faculty.

The Nabob understood then that it was time for him to go, but, first, he wished to inscribe his name in the visitors’ book kept by the porter. He went up to the table, and leaned over it to see distinctly. The page was full. A blank space was pointed out to him below a signature in a very small, spidery hand, such as is frequently written by very fat fingers, and when he had signed, it proved to be the name of Hemerlingue dominating his own, crushing it, clasping it round with insidious flourish. Superstitious, like the true Latin he was, he was struck by this omen, and went away frightened by it.

Where should he dine? At the club? Place Vendome? To hear still more talk of this death that obsessed him! He preferred to go somewhere by chance, walking straight before him, like all those who are a prey to some fixed idea which they hope to conjure away by rapid movement. The evening was warm, the air full of sweet scents. He walked along the quays, and reached the trees of the Cours-la-Reine, then found himself breathing that air in which is mingled the freshness of watered roads and the odour of fine dust so characteristic of summer evenings in Paris. At that hour all was deserted. Here and there chandeliers were being lighted for the concerts, blazes of gaslight flared among the green trees. A sound of glasses and plates from a restaurant gave him the idea of going in.

The strong man was hungry despite all his troubles. He was served under a veranda with glazed walls backed by shrubs, and facing the great porch of the Palais de l’Industrie, where the duke, in the presence of a thousand people, had greeted him as a deputy. The refined, aristocratic face rose before his memory in the darkness of the sky, while he could see it also as it lay over yonder on the funereal whiteness of the pillow; and suddenly, as he ran his eye over the bill of fare presented to him by the waiter, he noticed with stupefaction that it bore the date of the 20th of May. So a month had not elapsed since the opening of the exhibition. It seemed to him like ten years ago. Gradually, however, the warmth of the meal cheered him. In the corridor he could hear waiters talking:

“Has anybody heard news of Mora? It appears he is very ill.”

“Nonsense! He will get over it, you will see. Men like him get all the luck.”

And so deeply is hope implanted in the human soul, that, despite what Jansoulet had himself seen and heard, these few words, helped by two bottles of burgundy and a few glasses of cognac, sufficed to restore his courage. After all, people had been known to recover from illnesses quite as desperate. Doctors often exaggerate the ill in order to get more credit afterward for curing it. “Suppose I called to inquire.” He made his way back towards the house, full of illusion, trusting to that chance which had served him so many times in his life. And indeed the aspect of the princely abode had something about it to fortify his hope. It presented the reassuring and tranquil appearance of ordinary evenings, from the avenue with its lights at long intervals, majestic and deserted, to the steps where stood waiting a huge carriage of old-fashioned shape.

In the antechamber, peaceful also, two enormous lamps were burning. A footman slept in a corner; the porter was reading before the fireplace. He looked at the new arrival over his spectacles, made no remark, and Jansoulet dared ask no question. Piles of newspapers lying on the table in their wrappers, addressed to the duke, seemed to have been thrown there as useless. The Nabob took up one of them, opened it, and tried to read, but quick and gliding steps, a muttered chanting, made him lift his eyes, and he saw a white-haired and bent old man, decked out in lace as though he had been an altar, who was praying aloud as he departed with a long priestly stride, his ample red cassock spreading in a train over the carpet. It was the Archbishop of Paris, accompanied by two assistants. The vision, with its murmur as of an icy north wind, passed quickly before Jansoulet, plunged into the great carriage and disappeared, carrying away with it his last hope.

“Doing the right thing, _mon cher_,” remarked Monpavon, appearing suddenly at his side. “Mora is an epicurean, brought up in the ideas of how do you say--you know--what is it you call it? Eighteenth century. Very bad for the masses, if a man in his position--ps--ps--ps--Ah, he is the master who sets us all an example--ps--ps--irreproachable manners!”

“Then, it is all over?” said Jansoulet, overwhelmed. “There is no longer any hope?”

Monpavon signed to him to listen. A carriage rolled heavily along the avenue on the quay. The visitors’ bell rang sharply several times in succession. The marquis counted aloud: “One, two, three, four.” At the fifth he rose:

“No more hope now. Here comes the other,” said he, alluding to the Parisian superstition that a visit from the sovereign was always fatal to dying persons. From every side the lackeys hastened up, opened the doors wide, ranged themselves in line, while the porter, his hat cocked forward and his staff resounding on the marble floor, announced the passage of two august shadows, of whom Jansoulet only caught a confused glimpse behind the liveried domestics, but whom he saw beyond a long perspective of open doors climbing the great staircase, preceded by a footman bearing a candelabrum. The woman ascended, erect and proud, enveloped in a black Spanish mantilla; the man supported himself by the baluster, slower in his movements and tired, the collar of his light overcoat turned up above a rather bent back, which was shaken by a convulsive sob.

“Let us be off, Nabob. Nothing more to be done here,” said the old beau, taking Jansoulet by the arm and drawing him outside. He paused on the threshold, with raised hand, making a little gesture of farewell in the direction of the man who lay dying upstairs. “Good-bye old fellow!” The gesture and the tone were polite, irreproachable, but the voice trembled a little.

The club in the Rue Royale, which was famous for its gambling parties, rarely saw one so desperate as the gaming of that night. It commenced at eleven o’clock and was still going on at five in the morning. Enormous sums were scattered over the green cloth, changing hands, moved now to one side, now to the other, heaped up, distributed, regained. Fortunes were engulfed in this monster play, at the end of which the Nabob, who had started it to forget his terrors in the hazards of chance, after singular alternations and runs of luck enough to turn the hair of a beginner white, retired with winnings amounting to five hundred thousand francs. On the boulevard the next day they said five millions, and everybody cried out on the scandal, especially the _Messenger_, three-quarters filled by an article against certain adventurers tolerated in the clubs, and who cause the ruin of the most honourable families.

Alas! what Jansoulet had won hardly represented enough to meet the first Schwalbach bills.

During this wild play, of which Mora was, however, the involuntary cause, and, as it were, the soul, his name was not once uttered. Neither Cardailhac nor Jenkins put in an appearance. Monpavon had taken to his bed, stricken more deeply than he wished it to be thought. Nobody had any news.

“Is he dead?” Jansoulet said to himself as he left the club; and he felt a desire to make a call to inquire before going home. It was no longer hope that urged him, but that sort of morbid and nervous curiosity which after a great fire leads the smitten unfortunate people, ruined and homeless, back to the wreck of their dwellings.

Although it was still very early, and a pink mist of dawn hung in the sky, the whole mansion stood open as if for a solemn departure. The lamps still smoked over the fire-places, dust floated about the rooms. The Nabob advanced amid an inexplicable solitude of desertion to the first floor, where at last he heard a voice he knew, that of Cardailhac, who was dictating names, and the scratching of pens over paper. The clever stage-manager of the festivities in honour of the Bey was organizing with the same ardour the funeral pomps of the Duc de Mora. What activity! His excellency had died during the evening; when morning came already ten thousand letters were being printed, and everybody in the house who could hold a pen was busy with the writing of the addresses. Without passing through these improvised offices, Jansoulet reached the waiting-room, ordinarily so crowded, to-day with all its arm-chairs empty. In the middle, on a table, lay the hat, cane, and gloves of M. le Duc, always ready in case he should go out unexpectedly, so as to save him even the trouble of giving an order. The objects that we always wear keep about them something of ourselves. The curve of the hat suggested that of the mustache; the light-coloured gloves were ready to grasp the supple and strong Chinese cane; the total effect was one of life and energy, as if the duke were about to appear, stretch out his hand while talking, take up those things, and go out.

Oh, no. M. le Duc was not going out. Jansoulet had but to approach the half-open door of the bed-chamber to see on the bed, raised three steps--always the platform even after death--a rigid, haughty form, a motionless and aged profile, metamorphosed by the beard’s growth of a night, quite gray; near the sloping pillow, kneeling and burying her head in the white drapery, was a woman, whose fair hair lay in rippled disorder, ready to fall beneath the shears of eternal widowhood; then a priest and a nun, gathered in this atmosphere of watch by the dead, in which are mingled the fatigue of sleepless nights and the murmurs of prayer.

The chamber in which so many ambitions had strengthened their wings, so many hopes and disappointments had throbbed, was wholly given over now to the peace of passing Death. Not a sound, not a sigh. Only, notwithstanding the early hour, away yonder, towards the Pont de la Concorde, a little clarinet, shrill and sharp, could be heard above the rumbling of the first vehicles; but its exasperating mockery was henceforth lost on him who lay there asleep, showing to the terrified Nabob an image of his own destiny, chilled, discoloured, ready for the tomb.

Others besides Jansoulet found that death-chamber lugubrious: the windows wide open, the night and the wind entering freely from the garden, making a strong draught; a human form on a table; the body, which had just been embalmed; the hollow skull filled with a sponge, the brain in a basin. The weight of this brain of a statesman was truly extraordinary. It weighed--it weighed--the newspapers of the period mentioned the figure. But who remembers it to-day?

THE FUNERAL

“Don’t weep, my fairy, you rob me of all my courage. Come, you will be a great deal happier when you no longer have your terrible demon. You will go back to Fontainebleau and look after your chickens. The ten thousand francs from Brahim will help to get you settled down. And then, don’t be afraid, once you are over there I shall send you money. Since this Bey wants to have sculpture done by me, he will have to pay for it, as you may imagine. I shall return rich, rich. Who knows? Perhaps a sultana.”

“Yes, you will be a sultana, but I--I shall be dead and I shall never see you again.” And the good Crenmitz in despair huddled herself into a corner of the cab so that she would not be seen weeping.

Felicia was leaving Paris. She was trying to escape the horrible sadness, the sinister disgust into which Mora’s death had thrown her. What a terrible blow for the proud girl! _Ennui_, pique, had thrown her into this man’s arms; she had given him pride--modesty--all; and now he had carried all away with him, leaving her tarnished for life, a tearless widow, without mourning and without dignity. Two or three visits to Saint-James Villa, a few evenings in the back of some box at some small theatre, behind the curtain that shelters forbidden and shameful pleasure, these were the only memories left to her by this liaison of a fortnight, this loveless intrigue wherein her pride had not found even the satisfaction of the commotion caused by a big scandal. The useless and indelible stain, the stupid fall of a woman who does not know how to walk and who is embarrassed in her rising by the ironical pity of the passers-by.

For a moment she thought of suicide, then the reflection that it would be set down to a broken heart arrested her. She saw in a glance the sentimental compassion of the drawing-rooms, the foolish figure that her sham passion would cut among the innumberable love affairs of the duke, and the Parma violets scattered by the pretty Moessards of journalism on her grave, dug so near the other. Travelling remained to her--one of those journeys so distant that they take even one’s thoughts into a new world. Unfortunately the money was wanting. Then she remembered that on the morrow of her great success at the Exhibition, old Brahim Bey had called to see her, to make her, in behalf of his master, magnificent proposals for certain great works to be executed in Tunis. She had said No at the time, without allowing herself to be tempted by Oriental remuneration, a splendid hospitality, the finest court in the Bardo for a studio, with its surrounding facades of stone in lacework carving. But now she was quite willing. She had to make but a sign, the agreement was immediately concluded, and after an exchange of telegrams, a hasty packing and shutting up of the house, she set out for the railway station as if for a week’s absence, astonished herself by her prompt decision, flattered on all the adventurous and artistic sides of her nature by the hope of a new life in an unknown country.

The Bey’s pleasure yacht was to await her at Genoa; and in anticipation, closing her eyes in the cab which was taking her to the station, she could see the white stone buildings of an Italian port embracing an iridescent sea where the sunshine was already Eastern, where everything sang, to the very swelling of the sails on the blue water. Paris, as it happened, was muddy that day, uniformly gray, flooded by one of those continuous rains of which it seems to have the special property, rains that seem to have risen in clouds from its river, from its smoke, from its monster’s breath, and to fall in torrents from its roofs, from its spouts, from the innumerable windows of its garrets. Felicia was impatient to get away from this gloomy Paris, and her feverish impatience found fault with the cabmen who made slow progress with the horses, two sorry creatures of the veritable cab-horse type, with an inexplicable block of carriages and omnibuses crowded together in the vicinity of the Pont de la Concorde.

“But go on, driver, go on, then.”

“I cannot, madame. It is the funeral procession.”

She put her head out of the window and drew it back again immediately, terrified. A line of soldiers marching with reversed arms, a confusion of caps and hats raised from the forehead at the passage of an endless cortege. It was Mora’s funeral procession defiling past.

“Don’t stop here. Go round,” she cried to the cabman.

The vehicle turned about with difficulty, dragging itself regretfully from the superb spectacle which Paris had been awaiting for four days; it remounted the avenues, took the Rue Montaigne, and, with its slow and surly little trot, came out at the Madeleine by the Boulevard Malesherbes. Here the crowd was greater, more compact.

In the misty rain, the illuminated stained-glass windows of the church, the dull echo of the funeral chants beneath the lavishly distributed black hangings under which the very outline of the Greek temple was lost, filled the whole square with a sense of the office in course of celebration, while the greater part of the immense procession was still squeezed up in the Rue Royale, and as far even as the bridges a long black line connecting the dead man with that gate of the Legislative Assembly through which he had so often passed. Beyond the Madeleine the highway of the boulevard stretched away empty, and looking bigger between two lines of soldiers with arms reversed, confining the curious to the pavements black with people, all the shops closed, and the balconies, in spite of the rain, overflowing with human beings all leaning forward in the direction of the church, as if to see a mid-Lent festival or the home-coming of victorious troops. Paris, hungry for the spectacular, constructs it indifferently out of anything, civil war as readily as the burial of a statesman.

It was necessary for the cab to retrace its course again and to make a new circuit; and it is easy to imagine the bad temper of the driver and his beasts, all three of them Parisian in soul and passions, at having to deprive themselves of so fine a show. Then, as all the life of Paris had been drawn into the great artery of the boulevard, there began through the deserted and silent streets--a capricious and irregular drive--the snail-like progress of a cab taken by the hour. First touching the extreme points of the Faubourg Saint-Martin and the Faubourg Saint-Denis, returning again towards the centre, and at the conclusion of circuits and dodges finding always the same obstacle in ambush, the same crowd, some fragment of the black defile perceived for a moment at the branching of a street, unfolding itself in the rain to the sound of muffled drums--a dull and heavy sound, like that of earth falling on a coffin-lid.

What torture for Felicia! It was her weakness and her remorse crossing Paris in this solemn pomp, this funeral train, this public mourning reflected by the very clouds; and the proud girl revolted against this affront done her by fate, and tried to escape from it to the back of the carriage, where she remained exhausted with eyes closed, while old Crenmitz, believing her nervousness to be grief, did her best to comfort her, herself wept over their separation, and hiding also, left the entire window of the cab to the big Algerian hound with his finely modelled head scenting the wind, and his two paws resting in the sash with an heraldic stiffness of pose. Finally, after a thousand interminable windings, the cab suddenly came to a halt, jolted on again with difficulty amid cries and abuse, then, tossed about, the luggage on top threatening its equilibrium, it ended by coming to a full stop, held prisoner, as it were, at anchor.

“_Bon Dieu!_ what a mass of people!” murmured the Crenmitz, terrified.

Felicia came out of her stupor.

“Where are we?”

Under a colourless, smoky sky, blotted out by a fine network of rain and stretched like gauze over everything, there lay an immense space filled by an ocean of humanity surging from all the streets that led to it, and motionless around a lofty column of bronze, which dominated this sea like the gigantic mast of a sunken vessel. Cavalry in squadrons, with swords drawn, guns in batteries stood at intervals along an open passage, awaiting him who was to come by, perhaps in order to try to retake him, to carry him off by force from the formidable enemy who was bearing him away. Alas! all the cavalry charges, all the guns could be of no avail here. The prisoner was departing, firmly guarded, defended by a triple wall of hardwood, metal, and velvet, impervious to grape-shot; and it was not from those soldiers that he could hope for his deliverance.

“Get away from this. I will not stay here,” said Felicia, furious, plucking at the wet box-coat of the driver, and seized by a wild dread at the thought of the nightmare which was pursuing her, of _that_ which she could hear coming in a frightful rumbling, still distant, but growing nearer from minute to minute. At the first movement of the wheels, however, the cries and shouts broke out anew. Thinking that he would be allowed to cross the square, the driver had penetrated with great difficulty to the front ranks of the crowd; it now closed behind him and refused to allow him to go forward. There they had to remain, to endure those odours of common people and of alcohol, those curious glances, already fired by the prospect of an exceptional spectacle. They stared rudely at the beautiful traveller who was starting off with so many trunks, and a dog of such size for her defender. Crenmitz was horribly afraid; Felicia, for her part, could think of only one thing, and that was that _he_ was about to pass before her eyes, that she would be in the front rank to see him.

Suddenly a great shout “Here it comes!” Then silence fell on the whole square at last at the end of three weary hours of waiting.

It came.

Felicia’s first impulse was to lower the blind on her side, on the side past which the procession was about to pass. But at the rolling of the drums close at hand, seized by the nervous wrath at her inability to escape the obsession of the thing, perhaps also infected by the morbid curiosity around her, she suddenly let the blind fly up, and her pale and passionate little face showed itself at the window, supported by her two clinched hands.

“There! since you will have it: I am watching you.”

As a funeral it was as fine a thing as can be seen, the supreme honours rendered in all their vain splendour, as sonorous, as hollow as the rhythmic accompaniment on the muffled drums. First the white surplices of the clergy, amid the mourning drapery of the first five carriages; next, drawn by six black horses, veritable horses of Erebus, there advanced the funeral car, all beplumed, fringed and embroidered in silver, with big tears, heraldic coronets surmounting gigantic M’s, prophetic initials which seemed those of Death himself, _La Mort_ made a duchess decorated with the eight waving plumes. So many canopies and massive hangings hid the vulgar body of the hearse, as it trembled and quivered at each step from top to bottom as though crushed beneath the majesty of its dead burden. On the coffin, the sword, the coat, the embroidered hat, parade undress--which had never been worn--shone with gold and mother-of-pearl in the darkened little tent formed by the hangings and among the bright tints of fresh flowers telling of spring in spite of the sullenness of the sky. At a distance of ten paces came the household servants of the duke; then, behind, in majestic isolation, the cloaked officer bearing the emblems of honour--a veritable display of all the orders of the whole world--crosses, multicoloured ribbons, which covered to overflowing the cushion of black velvet with silver fringe.

The master of ceremonies came next, in front of the representatives of the Legislative Assembly--a dozen deputies chosen by lot, among them the tall figure of the Nabob, wearing the official costume for the first time, as if ironical Fortune had desired to give to the representative on probation a foretaste of all parliamentary joys. The friends of the dead man, who followed, formed a rather small group, singularly well chosen to exhibit in its crudity the superficiality and the void of that existence of a great personage reduced to the intimacy of a theatrical manager thrice bankrupt, of a picture-dealer grown wealthy through usuary, of a nobleman of tarnished reputation, and of a few men about town without distinction. Up to this point everybody was walking on foot and bareheaded; among the parliamentary representatives there were only a few black skull-caps, which had been put on timidly as they approached the populous districts. After them the carriages began.

At the death of a great warrior it is the custom for the funeral convoy to be followed by the favourite horse of the hero, his battle charger, regulating to the slow step of the procession that dancing step excited by the smell of powder and the pageantry of standards. In this case, Mora’s great brougham, that “C-spring” which used to bear him to fashionable or political gatherings, took the place of that companion in victory, its panels draped with black, its lamps veiled in long streamers of light crape, floating to the ground with undulating feminine grace. These veiled lamps constituted a new fashion for funerals--the supreme “chic” of mourning; and it well became this dandy to give a last lesson in elegance to the Parisians, who flocked to his obsequies as to a “Longchamps” of death.

Three more masters of ceremony; then came the impassive official procession, always the same for marriages, deaths, baptisms, openings of Parliament, or receptions of sovereigns, the interminable cortege of glittering carriages, with large windows and showy liveries bedizened with gilt, which passed through the midst of the dazzled people, to whom they recalled fairy-tales, Cinderella chariots, while evoking those “Oh’s!” of admiration that mount and die away with the rockets on the evenings of firework displays. And in the crowd there was always to be found some good-natured policeman, some learned little grocer sauntering round on the lookout for public ceremonies, ready to name in a loud voice all the people in the carriages, as they defiled past, with their regulation escorts of dragoons, cuirassiers, or Paris guards.

First the representatives of the Emperor, the Empress and all the Imperial family; after these, in the hierarchic order, cunningly elaborated, and the least infraction of which might have been the cause of grave conflicts between the various departments of the State--the members of the Privy Council, the Marshals, the Admirals, the High Chancellor of the Legion of Honour; then the Senate, the Legislative Assembly, the Council of State, the whole organization of the law and of the university, the costumes, the ermine, the headgear of which took you back to the days of old Paris--an air of something stately and antiquated, out of date in our sceptical epoch of the workman’s blouse and the dress-coat.

Felicia, to avoid her thoughts, voluntarily fixed her eyes upon this monotonous defile, exasperating in its length; and little by little a torpor stole over her, as if on a rainy day she had been turning over the leaves of an album of engravings, a history of official costumes from the most remote times down to our own day. All these people, seen in profile, still and upright, behind the large glass panes of the carriage windows, had indeed the appearance of personages in coloured plates, sitting well forward on the edge of the seats in order that the spectators should miss nothing of their golden embroideries, their palm-leaves, their galloons, their braids--puppets given over to the curiosity of the crowd--and exposing themselves to it with an air of indifference and detachment.

Indifference! That was the most special characteristic of this funeral. It was to be felt everywhere, on people’s faces and in their hearts, as well among these functionaries of whom the greater part had only known the duke by sight, as in the ranks on foot between his hearse and his brougham, his closest friends, or those who had been in daily attendance upon him. The fat minister, Vice-President of the Council, seemed indifferent, and even glad, as he held in his powerful fist the strings of the pall and seemed to draw it forward, in more haste than the horses and the hearse to conduct to his six feet of earth the enemy of twenty years’ standing, the eternal rival, the obstacle to all his ambitions. The other three dignitaries did not advance with the same vigour, and the long cords floated loosely in their weary or careless hands with significant slackness. The priests were indifferent by profession. Indifferent were the servants of his household, whom he never called anything but “_chose_,” and whom he treated really like “things.” Indifferent was M. Louis, for whom it was the last day of servitude, a slave become emancipated, rich enough to enjoy his ransom. Even among the intimate friends of the dead man this glacial cold had penetrated. Yet some of them had been deeply attached to him. But Cardailhac was too busy superintending the order and the progress of the procession to give way to the least emotion, which would, besides, have been foreign to his nature. Old Monpavon, stricken to the heart, would have considered the least bending of his linen cuirass and of his tall figure a piece of deplorably bad taste, totally unworthy of his illustrious friend. His eyes remained as dry and glittering as ever, since the undertakers provide the tears for great mournings, embroidered in silver on black cloth. Some one was weeping, however, away yonder among the members of the committee; but he was expending his compassion very naively upon himself. Poor Nabob! softened by that music and splendour, it seemed to him that he was burying all his ambitions of glory and dignity. And his was but one more variety of indifference.

Among the public, the enjoyment of a fine spectacle, the pleasure of turning a week-day into a Sunday, dominated every other sentiment. Along the line of the boulevards, the spectators on the balconies almost seemed disposed to applaud; here, in the populous districts, irreverence was still more frankly manifest. Jests, blackguardly wit at the expense of the dead man and his doings, known to all Paris, laughter raised by the tall hats of the rabbis, the pass-word of the council experts, all were heard in the air between two rolls of the drum. Poverty, forced labour, with its feet in the wet, wearing its blouse, its apron, its cap raised from habit, with sneering chuckle watched this inhabitant of another sphere pass by, this brilliant duke, severed now from all his honours, who perhaps while living had never paid a visit to that end of the town. But there it is. To arrive up yonder, where everybody has to go, the common route must be taken, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Rue de la Roquette as far as that great gate where the _octroi_ is collected and the infinite begins. And well! it does one good to see that lordly persons like Mora, dukes, ministers, follow the same road towards the same destination. This equality in death consoles for many of the injustices of life. To-morrow bread will seem less dear, wine better, the workman’s tool less heavy, when he will be able to say to himself as he rises in the morning, “That old Mora, he has come to it like the rest!”

The procession still went on, more fatiguing even than lugubrious. Now it consisted of choral societies, deputations from the army and the navy, officers of all descriptions, pressing on in a troop in advance of a long file of empty vehicles--mourning-coaches, private carriages--present for reasons of etiquette. Then the troops followed in their turn, and into the sordid suburb, that long Rue de la Roquette, already swarming with people as far as eye could reach, there plunged a whole army, foot-soldiers, dragoons, lancers, carabineers, heavy guns with their great mouths in the air, ready to bark, making pavement and windows tremble, but not able to drown the rolling of the drums--a sinister and savage rolling which suggested to Felicia’s imagination some funeral of an African chief, at which thousands of sacrificed victims accompany the soul of a prince so that it shall not pass alone into the kingdom of spirits, and made her fancy that perhaps this pompous and interminable retinue was about to descend and disappear in the superhuman grave large enough to receive the whole of it.

“_Now and in the hour of our death. Amen_,” Crenmitz murmured, while the cab swayed from side to side in the lighted square, and high in space the golden statue of Liberty seemed to be taking a magic flight; and the old dancer’s prayer was perhaps the one note of sincere feeling called forth on the immense line of the funeral procession.