“Elise, embrace our mother and thank her.
She has come to live with her children.”
There she is, caught in all these caressing arms,
pressed against four little feminine hearts which
have missed the shelter of a mother’s love for
so long; there she is introduced, and so gently, into
the luminous circle of the family lamp, widened to
allow her to take her place there, to dry her eyes,
to warm and brighten her spirit at this steady flame,
even in this little studio near the roof, where just
now the terrible storm blew so wildly.
He who breathes his last over there, lying in his
blood-stained bath, has never known this sacred flame.
Egoistical and hard, he has lived up to the last for
show, throwing out his chest in a bubble of vanity.
And this vanity was what was best in him. It
alone had held him firm and upright so long; it alone
clinched his teeth on the groans of his last agony.
In the damp garden the water drips sadly. The
bugle of the firemen sounds the curfew. “Go
and look at No. 7,” says the mistress, “he
will never have done with his bath.” The
attendant goes, and utters a cry of fright, of horror:
“Oh, madame, he is dead! But it is not the
same man.” They go, but nobody can recognise
the fine gentleman who entered a short time ago, in
this death’s-head puppet, the head leaning on
the edge of the bath, a face where the blood mingles
with paint and powder, all the limbs lying in the
supreme lassitude of a part played to the end—to
the death of the actor. Two cuts of the razor
across the magnificent chest, and all the factitious
majesty has burst and resolved itself into this nameless
horror, this heap of mud, of blood, of spoiled and
dead flesh, where, unrecognisable, lies the man of
appearances, the Marquis Louis-Marie-Agenor de Monpavon.
I put down in haste and with an agitated pen the terrible
events of which I have been the plaything for the
last few days. This time it is all up with the
Territorial and with my ambitious dreams. Disputed
bills, men in possession, visits of the police, all
our books in the hands of the courts, the governor
fled, Bois l’Hery, the director, in prison,
another—Monpavon—disappeared.
My brain reels in the midst of these catastrophes.
And if I had obeyed the warnings of reason, I should
have been quietly six months ago at Montbars cultivating
my vineyard, with no other care than that of seeing
the clusters grow round and golden in the good Burgundian
sun, and to gather from the leaves, after the dew,
the little gray snails, so excellent when they are
fried. I should have built for myself with my
savings, at the end of the vineyard, on the height—I
can see the place at this moment—a tower
in rough stone, like M. Chalmette’s, so convenient
for an afternoon nap, while the quails are chirping
round the place. But always misled by deceiving
illusions, I wished to enrich myself, speculate, meddle
