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?