The rapid clairvoyance which accompanies cataclysms spared him no detail.  He saw the invalidation of his election almost certain, now that Mora would no longer be there to plead his cause; then the consequences of the defeat—­bankruptcy, poverty, and still worse; for when these incalculable riches collapse they always bury a little of a man’s honour beneath their ruins.  But how many briers, how many thorns, how many cruel scratches and wounds before arriving at the end!  In a week there would be the Schwalbach bills—­that is to say, eight hundred thousand francs—­to pay; indemnity for Moessard, who wanted a hundred thousand francs, or as the alternative he would apply for the permission of the Chamber to prosecute him for a misdemeanour, a suit still more sinister instituted by the families of two little martyrs of Bethlehem against the founders of the Society; and, on top of all, the complications of the Territorial Bank.  There was one solitary hope, the mission of Paul de Gery to the Bey, but so vague, so chimerical, so remote!

“Ah, I am ruined!  I am ruined!”

In the immense entrance-hall no one noticed his distress.  The crowd of senators, of deputies, of councillors of state, all the high officials of the administration, came and went around him without seeing him, holding mysterious consultations with uneasy importance near the two fireplaces of white marble which faced one another.  So many ambitions disappointed, deceived, hurled down, met in this visit in extremis, that personal anxieties dominated every other preoccupation.

The faces, strangely enough, expressed neither pity nor grief, rather a sort of anger.  All these people seemed to have a grudge against the duke for dying, as though he had deserted them.  One heard remarks of this kind:  “It is not surprising, with such a life as he has lived!” And looking out of the high windows, these gentlemen pointed out to each other, amid the going and coming of the equipages in the court-yard, the drawing up of some little brougham from within which a well-gloved hand, with its lace sleeve brushing the sash of the door, would hold out a card with a corner turned back to the footman.

From time to time one of the habitues of the palace, one of those whom the dying man had summoned to his bedside, appeared in the medley, gave an order, then went away, leaving the scared expression of his face reflected on twenty others.  Jenkins showed himself thus for a moment, with his cravat untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his cuffs crumpled, in all the disorder of the battle in which he was engaged upstairs against a terrible opponent.  He was instantly surrounded, besieged with questions.

Certainly the monkeys flattening their short noses against the bars of their cage, excited by the unaccustomed tumult, and very attentive to all that passed about them as though they were occupied in making a methodical study of human hypocrisy, had a magnificent model in the Irish physician.  His grief was superb, a splendid grief, masculine and strong, which compressed his lips and made him pant.