It has been the wont of sculptors, ancient and modern, to set a tutelary genius with a lighted torch upon either side of a tomb.  Those torches that light up the paths of death throw light for dying eyes upon the spectacle of a life’s mistakes and sins; the carved stone figures express great ideas, they are symbols of a fact in human experience.  The agony of death has its own wisdom.  Not seldom a simple girl, scarcely more than a child, will grow wise with the experience of a hundred years, will gain prophetic vision, judge her family, and see clearly through all pretences, at the near approach of Death.  Herein lies Death’s poetry.  But, strange and worthy of remark it is, there are two manners of death.

The poetry of prophecy, the gift of seeing clearly into the future or the past, only belongs to those whose bodies are stricken, to those who die by the destruction of the organs of physical life.  Consumptive patients, for instance, or those who die of gangrene like Louis XIV., of fever like Pons, of a stomach complaint like Mme. de Mortsauf, or of wounds received in the full tide of life like soldiers on the battlefield—­all these may possess this supreme lucidity to the full; their deaths fill us with surprise and wonder.  But many, on the other hand, die of intelligential diseases, as they may be called; of maladies seated in the brain or in that nervous system which acts as a kind of purveyor of thought fuel—­and these die wholly, body and spirit are darkened together.  The former are spirits deserted by the body, realizing for us our ideas of the spirits of Scripture; the latter are bodies untenanted by a spirit.

Too late the virgin nature, the epicure-Cato, the righteous man almost without sin, was discovering the Presidente’s real character—­the sac of gall that did duty for her heart.  He knew the world now that he was about to leave it, and for the past few hours he had risen gaily to his part, like a joyous artist finding a pretext for caricature and laughter in everything.  The last links that bound him to life, the chains of admiration, the strong ties that bind the art lover to Art’s masterpieces, had been snapped that morning.  When Pons knew that La Cibot had robbed him, he bade farewell, like a Christian, to the pomps and vanities of Art, to his collection, to all his old friendships with the makers of so many fair things.  Our forefathers counted the day of death as a Christian festival, and in something of the same spirit Pons’ thoughts turned to the coming end.  In his tender love he tried to protect Schmucke when he should be low in the grave.  It was this father’s thought that led him to fix his choice upon the leading lady of the ballet.  Mlle. Brisetout should help him to baffle surrounding treachery, and those who in all probability would never forgive his innocent universal legatee.

Heloise Brisetout was one of the few natures that remain true in a false position.  She was an opera-girl of the school of Josepha and Jenny Cadine, capable of playing any trick on a paying adorer; yet she was a good comrade, dreading no power on earth, accustomed as she was to see the weak side of the strong and to hold her own with the police at the scarcely idyllic Bal de Mabille and the carnival.