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.