The bell for closing the garden rang.  Night had come, and a thick and damp mist had covered the city.  The count, chilled to the bones, left his seat.

“To the station again,” muttered he.

It was a horrible idea to him now—­this of shooting himself in the silence and obscurity of the forest.  He pictured to himself his disfigured body, bleeding, lying on the edge of some ditch.  Beggars or robbers would despoil him.  And then?  The police would come and take up this unknown body, and doubtless would carry it, to be identified, to the Morgue.  “Never!” cried he, at this thought, “no, never!”

How die, then?  He reflected, and it struck him that he would kill himself in some second-class hotel on the left bank of the Seine.

“Yes, that’s it,” said he to himself.

Leaving the garden with the last of the visitors, he wended his way toward the Latin Quarter.  The carelessness which he had assumed in the morning gave way to a sad resignation.  He was suffering; his head was heavy, and he was cold.

“If I shouldn’t die to-night,” he thought, “I shall have a terrible cold in the morning.”

This mental sally did not make him smile, but it gave him the consciousness of being firm and determined.  He went into the Rue Dauphine and looked about for a hotel.  Then it occurred to him that it was not yet seven o’clock, and it might arouse suspicions if he asked for a room at that early hour.  He reflected that he still had over one hundred francs, and resolved to dine.  It should be his last meal.  He went into a restaurant and ordered it.  But he in vain tried to throw off the anxious sadness which filled him.  He drank, and consumed three bottles of wine without changing the current of his thoughts.

The waiters were surprised to see him scarcely touch the dishes set before him, and growing more gloomy after each potation.  His dinner cost ninety francs; he threw his last hundred-franc note on the table, and went out.  As it was not yet late, he went into another restaurant where some students were drinking, and sat down at a table in the farther corner of the room.  He ordered coffee and rapidly drank three or four cups.  He wished to excite himself, to screw up his courage to do what he had resolved upon; but he could not; the drink seemed only to make him more and more irresolute.

A waiter, seeing him alone at the table, offered him a newspaper.  He took it mechanically, opened it, and read: 

“Just as we are going to press, we learn that a well-known person has disappeared, after announcing his intention to commit suicide.  The statements made to us are so strange, that we defer details till to-morrow, not having time to send for fuller information now.”

These lines startled Hector.  They were his death sentence, not to be recalled, signed by the tyrant whose obsequious courtier he had always been—­public opinion.