So that no one in the palace, save Monpavon and Louis the valet, knew the purpose of the visit of those three persons who were mysteriously ushered into the presence of the Minister of State. Even the d.u.c.h.ess herself was in ignorance. Separated from her husband by all the barriers that life in the most exalted political and social circles places between the husband and wife in such exceptional establishments, she supposed that he was slightly indisposed, ill mainly in his imagination, and had so little suspicion of an impending catastrophe that, at the very hour when the physicians were ascending the half-darkened grand staircase, her private apartments at the other end of the palace were brilliantly illuminated for an informal dancing-party, one of those _white b.a.l.l.s_ which the ingenuity of idle Paris was just beginning to introduce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were a few hypocritical, stammered words of encouragement, vague recommendations; then the three learned men hastily took their leave, eager to be gone, to avoid any responsibility for the impending disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained by the bedside, overwhelmed by the brutal truths he had heard during the consultation.

In vain had he put his hand upon his heart, quoted his famous motto.

Bouchereau had not spared him. This was not the first of the Irishman's patients whom he had seen fall suddenly to pieces thus; but he trusted that Mora's death would be a salutary warning to people in society, and that the prefect of police, as the result of this great calamity, would send the "dealer in cantharides," to advertise his aphrodisiacs on the other side of the Channel.

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

"Oh! no wry faces, I beg. Between you and me, let us have the truth.

What do they say?--I am in a bad way, am I not?"

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

"d.a.m.nation, my poor Auguste!"

The duke received it between the eyes without winking.

"Ah!" he said, simply.

He twisted his moustache mechanically; but his features did not change.

And in an instant his resolution was formed.

That the poor wretch who dies in the hospital, without home or kindred, with no other name than the number of his bed, should accept death as a deliverance or submit to it as a last trial, that the old peasant who falls asleep, bent double, worn out and stiff-jointed, in his dark, smoke-begrimed mole-hole, should go thence without regret, that he should relish in antic.i.p.ation the taste of the cool earth he has turned and returned so many times, one can understand. And yet how many of them are attached to existence by their very misery, how many exclaim as they cling to their wretched furniture, to their rags: "I do not want to die," and go with their nails broken and bleeding from that last wrench!

But there was nothing of the sort here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they entered.

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

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

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

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

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

"What the devil's that you're reading?" exclaimed Monpavon abruptly, s.n.a.t.c.hing the letter from his hands. And in an instant, thanks to Mora's negligence in allowing such private letters to lie around, the terrible plight in which he would be left by his protector's death came to his mind. In his grief he had not as yet thought of it. He said to himself that, amid his preparations for leaving the world, the duke might very well forget him; and, leaving Jenkins to finish alone the drowning of Don Juan's casket, he returned hurriedly to the bedroom. As he was about to enter, the sound of voices detained him behind the lowered portiere.

It was Louis's voice, as whining as that of a pauper under a porch, trying to move the duke to pity for his distress and asking his permission to take a few rolls of gold that were lying in a drawer. Oh!

what a hoa.r.s.e, wearied, hardly audible reply, in which one could feel the effort of the sick man compelled to turn in his bed, to remove his eyes from a distant point already clearly distinguished:

"Yes, yes--take them. But for G.o.d's sake let me sleep! let me sleep!"

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

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

"What do people say of this in Paris?"

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

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

To the Nabob that man's death meant his own death, his ruin, the end of everything. He was so thoroughly conscious of it that when he was informed, on entering the house, of the Duke's desperate condition, he indulged in no whining or wry faces of any sort, simply the savage e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of human selfishness: "I am lost!" And the words came constantly to his lips, he repeated them instinctively each time that all the horror of his position came over him in sudden flashes,--as in those dangerous mountain storms, when a sharp flash of lightning illumines the abyss to the very bottom, with the jagged projections of the walls and the clumps of bushes scattered here and there to supply the rents and bruises of the fall.

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

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

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