Chapter 18. The Jenkins Pearls

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_ CHAPTER XVIII. THE JENKINS PEARLS

About a week after his adventure with Moessard, that new complication in the terrible muddle of his affairs, Jansoulet, on leaving the Chamber, one Thursday, ordered his coachman to drive him to Mora's house. He had not paid a visit there since the scuffle in the Rue Royale, and the idea of finding himself in the duke's presence gave him, through his thick skin, something of the panic that agitates a boy on his way upstairs to see the head-master after a fight in the schoolroom. However, the embarrassment of this first interview had to be gone through. They said in the committee-rooms that Le Merquier had completed his report, a masterpiece of logic and ferocity, that it meant an invalidation, and that he was bound to carry it with a high hand unless Mora, so powerful in the Assembly, should himself intervene and give him his word of command. A serious matter, and one that made the Nabob's cheeks flush, while in the curved mirrors of his brougham he studied his appearance, his courtier's smiles, trying to think out a way of effecting a brilliant entry, one of those strokes of good-natured effrontery which had brought him fortune with Ahmed, and which served him likewise in his relations with the French ambassador. All this accompanied by beatings of the heart and by those shudders between the shoulder-blades which precede decisive actions, even when these are settled within a gilded chariot.

When he arrived at the mansion by the river, he was much surprised to notice that the porter on the quay, as on the days of great receptions, was sending carriages up the Rue de Lille, in order to keep a door free for those leaving. Rather anxious, he wondered, "What is there going on?" Perhaps a concert given by the duchess, a charity bazaar, some festivity from which Mora might have excluded him on account of the scandal of his last adventure. And this anxiety was augmented still further when Jansoulet, after having passed across the principal court-yard amid a din of slamming doors and a dull and continuous rumble of wheels over the sand, found himself--after ascending the steps--in the immense entrance-hall filled by a crowd which did not extend beyond any of the doors leading to the rooms; centring its anxious going and coming around the porter's table, where all the famous names of fashionable Paris were being inscribed. It seemed as though a disastrous gust of wind had gone through the house, carrying off a little of its calm, and allowing disquiet and danger to filter into its comfort.

"What a misfortune!"

"Ah! it is terrible."

"And so suddenly!"

Such were the remarks that people were exchanging as they met.

An idea flashed into Jansoulet's mind:

"Is the duke ill?" he inquired of a servant.

"Ah, monsieur, he is dying! He will not live through the night!"

If the roof of the palace had fallen in upon his head he would not have been more utterly stunned. Red lights flashed before his eyes, he tottered, and let himself drop into a seat on a velvet-covered bench beside the great cage of monkeys. The animals, over-excited by all this bustle, suspended by their tails, by their little long-thumbed hands, were hanging to the bars in groups, and came, inquisitive and frightened, to make the most ludicrous grimaces at this big, stupefied man as he sat staring at the marble floor, repeating aloud to himself, "I am ruined! I am ruined!"

The duke was dying. He had been seized suddenly with illness on the Sunday after his return from the Bois. He had felt intolerable burnings in his bowels, which passed through his whole body, searing as with a red-hot iron, and alternating with a cold lethargy and long periods of coma. Jenkins, summoned at once, did not say much, but ordered certain sedatives. The next day the pains came on again with greater intensity and followed by the same icy torpor, also more accentuated, as if life, torn up by the roots, were departing in violent spasms. Among those around him, none was greatly concerned. "The day after a visit to Saint-James Villa," was muttered in the antechamber, and Jenkins's handsome face preserved its serenity. He had spoken to two or three people, in the course of his morning rounds, of the duke's indisposition, and that so lightly that nobody had paid much attention to the matter.

Mora himself, notwithstanding his extreme weakness, although he felt his head absolutely blank, and, as he said, "not an idea anywhere," was far from suspecting the gravity of his condition. It was only on the third day, on waking in the morning, that the sight of a tiny stream of blood, which had trickled from his mouth over his beard and the stained pillow, had frightened this fastidious man, who had a horror of all human ills, especially sickness, and now saw it arrive stealthily with its pollutions, its weaknesses, and the loss of physical self-control, the first concession made to death. Monpavon, entering the room behind Jenkins, surprised the anxious expression of the great seigneur faced by the terrible truth, and at the same time was horrified by the ravages made in a few hours upon Mora's emaciated face, in which all the wrinkles of age, suddenly evident, were mingled with lines of suffering, and those muscular depressions which tell of serious internal lesions. He took Jenkins aside, while the duke's toilet necessaries were carried to him--a whole apparatus of crystal and silver contrasting with the yellow pallor of the invalid.

"Look here, Jenkins, the duke is very ill."

"I am afraid so," said the Irishman, in a low voice.

"But what is the matter with him?"

"What he wanted, _parbleu_!" answered the other in a fury. "One cannot be young at his age with impunity. This intrigue will cost him dear."

Some evil passion was getting the better of him but he subdued it immediately, and, puffing out his cheeks as though his head were full of water, he sighed deeply as he pressed the old nobleman's hands.

"Poor duke! poor duke! Ah, my friend, I am most unhappy!"

"Take care, Jenkins," said Monpavon coldly, disengaging his hands, "you are assuming a terrible responsibility. What! is the duke as bad as that?--ps--ps--ps--Will you see nobody? You have arranged no consultation?"

The Irishman raised his hands as if to say, "What good can it do?"

The other insisted. It was absolutely necessary that Brisset, Jousseline, Bouchereau, all the great physicians should be called in.

"But you will frighten him."

De Monpavon expanded his chest, the one pride of the old broken-down charger.

"_Mon Cher_, if you had seen Mora and me in the trenches of Constantine--ps--ps. Never looked away. We don't know fear. Give notice to your colleagues. I undertake to inform him."

The consultation took place in the evening with great privacy, the duke having insisted on this from a singular sense of shame produced by his illness, by that suffering which discrowned him, making him the equal of other men. Like those African kings who hide themselves in the recesses of their palaces to die, he would have wished that men should believe him carried off, transfigured, become a god. Then, too, he dreaded above all things the expressions of pity, the condolences, the compassion with which he knew that his sick-bed would be surrounded; the tears because he suspected them to be hypocritical, and because, if sincere, they displeased him still more by their grimacing ugliness.

He had always detested scenes, exaggerated sentiments, everything that could move him to emotion or disturb the harmonious equilibrium of his life. Every one knew this, and the order was to keep away from him the distress, the misery, which from one end of France to the other flowed towards Mora as to one of those forest refuges lighted during the night at which all wanderers may knock. Not that he was hard to the unfortunate; perhaps he may have been too easily moved to the pity which he regarded as an inferior sentiment, a weakness unworthy of the strong, and, refusing it to others, he dreaded it for himself, for the integrity of his courage. Nobody in the palace, then, except Monpavon and Louis the _valet de chambre_, knew of the visit of those three personages introduced mysteriously into the Minister of State's apartments. The duchess herself was ignorant of it. Separated from her husband by the barriers frequently placed by the political and fashionable life of the great world between married people, she believed him slightly indisposed, nervous more than anything else; and had so little suspicion of a catastrophe that at the very hour when the doctors were mounting the great, dimly lit staircase at the other end of the palace, her private apartments were being lit up for a girls' dance, one of those _bals blancs_ which the ingenuity of the idle world had begun to make fashionable in Paris.

This consultation was like all others: solemn and sinister. Doctors no longer wear their great periwigs of the time of Moliere, but they still assume the same gravity of the priests of Isis, of astrologers bristling with cabalistic formulae pronounced with sage noddings of the head, to which, for comical effect, there is only wanting the high pointed cap of former days. In this case the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from its setting. In the vast bed-chamber, transformed, heightened, as it were, in dignity by the immobility of the owner, these grave figures came forward round the bed on which the light was concentrated, illuminating amid the whiteness of the linen and the purple of the hangings a face worn into hollows, pale from lips to eyes, but wrapped in serenity as in a veil, as in a shroud. The consultants spoke in low tones, cast furtive glances as each other, or exchanged some barbarous word, remaining impassive, without even a frown. But this mute and reticent expression of the doctor and magistrate, this solemnity with which science and justice hedge themselves about to hide their frailty or ignorance, had no power to move the duke.

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? _

Read next: Chapter 19. The Funeral

Read previous: Chapter 17. The Apparition

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