And while they moralised upon the nothingness of his life, his corpse, the remains of nothing, was receiving the honours of death. Carriage after carriage drew up at the church; liveries brown and liveries blue came and disappeared; long-frocked footmen bowed to the pavement with a pompous banging of doors and steps; the groups of journalists respectfully made way, now for the Duchess Padovani, stately and proud, now for Madame Ancelin, blooming in her crape, now for Madame Eviza, whose Jewish eyes shone through her veil with blaze enough to attract a constable—all the ladies of the Academie, assembled in full congregation to practise their worship, not so much by a service to the memory of Loisillon, as by contemplation of their living idols, the 'deities' made and fashioned by the cunning of their little hands, the work upon which, as women, they had employed the superabundance of their energy, artfulness, ambition, and pride. Some actresses had come too, on the pretext that the deceased had been the president of some sort of Actors' Orphanage, but moved in reality by the frantic determination 'not to be out of it,' which belongs to their class. Their expressions of woe were such that they might have been taken for near relations. A carriage suddenly drawing up set down a distracted group of black veils, whose sorrow was distressing to witness. The widow, at last? No, it is Marguerite Oger, the great sensational actress, whose appearance excites all round the square a prolonged stir and much pushing about. From the porch a journalist ran forward to meet her, and taking her hands besought her to bear up. 'Yes,' she said, 'I ought to be calm; I will,' Whereupon, drying her tears and forcing them back with her handkerchief, she entered, or it should rather be said 'went on,' into the darkness of the nave, with its background of glimmering tapers, fell down before a desk on the ladies' side in a prostration of self-abandonment, and rising with a sorrowful air said to another actress at her side, 'How much did they take at the Vaudeville last night?' '168L. 18s.,' answered her friend, with the same accent of grief.

Lost in the crowd at the edge of the square, Abel de Freydet heard the people round him say, 'It's Marguerite. How well she did it!' But being a small man, he was trying in vain to make his way, when a hand was laid upon his shoulder. 'What, still in Paris? It must be a trial for your poor sister,' said Vedrine, as he carried him along. Working his way with his strong elbows through the stream of people who only came up to his shoulder, and saying occasionally, 'Excuse me, gentlemen—members of the family,' he brought to the front with him his country friend, who, though delighted at the meeting, felt some embarrassment, as the sculptor talked after his fashion, freely and audibly. 'Bless me, what luck Loisillon has! Why there weren't more people for Beranger. This is the sort of thing to keep a young man's pecker up.' Here Freydet, seeing the hearse approaching, took off his hat. 'Good gracious, what have you done to your head? Turn round. Why you look like Louis Philippe!' The poet's moustache was turned down, his hair brushed forward, and his pleasant face showed its complexion of ruddy brown between whiskers touched with grey. He drew up his short figure with a stiff dignity, whereat Vedrine laughing said, 'Ah, I see. Made up for the grandees at Chantilly? So you are still bent upon the Academie! Why, just look at the exhibition yonder.'

In the sunlight and on the broad enclosure the official attendants immediately behind the hearse made a shocking show. Chance might seem to have chosen them for a wager among the most ridiculous seniors in the Institute, and they looked especially-ugly in the uniform designed by David, the coat embroidered with green, the hat, the Court sword, beating against legs for which the designer was certainly not responsible. First came Gazan; his hat was tilted awry by the bumps of his skull, and the vegetable green of the coat threw into relief the earthy colour and scaly texture of his elephantine visage. At his side was the grim tall Laniboire with purple apoplectic veins and a crooked mouth. His uniform was covered by an overcoat whose insufficient length left visible the end of his sword and the tails of the frock, and gave him an appearance certainly much less dignified than that of the marshal with his black rod, who walked before. Those that followed, such as Astier-Rehu and Desminieres, were all embarrassed and uncomfortable, all acknowledged by their apologetic and self-conscious bearing the absurdity of their disguise, which, though it might pass in the chastened light of their historic dome, seemed amid the real life of the street not less laughable than a show of monkeys. 'I declare one would like to throw some nuts to see if they would go after them on all fours,' said Freydet's undesirable companion. But Freydet did not catch the impertinent remark. He slipped away, mixed with the procession, and entered the church between two files of soldiers with arms reversed. He was in his heart profoundly glad that Loisillon was dead. He had never seen or known him; he could not love him for his work's sake, as he had done no work; and the only thing for which he could thank him was that he had left his chair empty at such a convenient moment. But he was impressed notwithstanding. The funeral pomp to which custom makes the old Parisian indifferent, the long line of knapsacks, the muskets that fell on the flags with a single blow (at the command of a boyish little martinet, with a stock under-his chin, who was probably performing on this occasion his first military duty), and, above all, the funeral music and the muffled drums, filled him with respectful emotion: and as always happened when he felt keenly, rimes began to rise. He had actually got a good beginning, presenting a grand picture of the storm and electric agitation and mental eclipse produced in the atmosphere of a nation when one of its great men disappears. But he broke off his thoughts to make room for Danjou, who, having arrived very late, pushed on amid the looks and whispers of the ladies, gazing about him coldly and haughtily and passing his hand over his head as he habitually does, doubtless to ascertain the safety of his back hair.

'He did not recognise me,' thought Freydet, hurt by the crushing glance with which the Academician relegated to the ranks the nobody who had ventured to greet him; 'it's my whiskers, I suppose.' The interruption turned the thoughts of the candidate from his verses, and he began to consider his plan of operations, his calls, his official announcement to the Permanent Secretary. But what was he thinking of? The Permanent Secretary was dead! Would Astier-Rehu be appointed before the vacation? And when would the election be? He proceeded to consider all the 'details, down to his coat. Should he go to Astier's tailor now? And did the tailor supply also the hat and sword?

Pie Jesu, Domine, sang a voice behind the altar, the swelling notes of an opera singer, asking repose for Loisillon, whom it might be thought the Divine Mercy had destined to special torment, for all through the church, loud and soft, in every variety of voice, solo and in unison, came the supplication for 'repose, repose.' Ah, let him sleep quietly after his many years of turmoil and intrigue! The solemn stirring chant was answered in the nave by women's sobbing, above which rose the tragic convulsive gasp of Marguerite Oger, the gasp so impressive in the fourth act of 'Musidora.' All this lamentation touched the kind-hearted candidate and linked itself in his feelings to other lamentations and other sorrows. He thought of relatives who had died, and of his sister who had been a mother to him, and who was now given up by all the doctors, and knew it, and spoke of it in every letter. Ah! would she live even to see the day of his success? Tears blinded him, and he was obliged to wipe his eyes.

'Don't come it too strong, it won't seem genuine,' said the sneering voice of fat Lavaux, grinning close at his ear. He turned round angrily; but here the young officer gave at stentorian pitch the command 'Carry—arms!' and the bayonets rattled on the muskets while the muffled tones of the organ rolled out the 'Dead March.' The procession began to form for leaving the church, headed as before by Gazan, Laniboire, Desminieres, and Freydet's old master, Astier-Rehu. They all looked superb now, the parrot green of their laced coats being subdued by the dim religious light of the lofty building as they walked down the central aisle, two and two, slowly, as if loth to reach the great square of daylight seen through the open doors. Behind came the whole Society, headed by its senior member, the wonderful old Jean Rehu, looking taller than ever in a long coat, and holding up the little brown head, carved, one might fancy, out of a cocoa-nut, with an air of contemptuous indifference telling that 'this was a thing he had seen' any number of times before. Indeed in the course of the sixty years during which he had been in receipt of the tallies of the Academie, he must have heard many such funeral chants, and sprinkled much holy water on illustrious biers.

But if Jean Rehu was a 'deity,' whose miraculous immortality justified the name, it could only be applied in mockery to the band of patriarchs who followed him. Decrepit, bent double, gnarled as old apple trees, with feet of lead, limp legs, and blinking owlish eyes, they stumbled along, either supported on an arm or feeling their way with outstretched hands; and their names whispered by the crowd recalled works long dead and forgotten. Beside such ghosts as these, 'on furlough from the cemetery,' as was remarked by a smart young soldier in the guard of honour, the rest of the Academicians seemed young. They posed and strutted before the delighted eyes of the ladies, whose bright gleams reached them through the black veils, the ranks of the crowd, and the cloaks and knapsacks of the bewildered soldiers. On this occasion again Freydet, bowing to two or three 'future colleagues,' encountered cold or contemptuous smiles, like those which a man sees when he dreams that his dearest friends have forgotten him. But he had not time to be depressed, being caught and turned about by the double stream which moved up the church and towards the door.

'Well, my lord, you will have to be stirring now,' was the advice of friendly Picheral, whispered in the midst of the hubbub and the scraping of chairs. It sent the candidate's blood tingling through his veins. But just as he passed before the bier Danjou muttered, without looking at him, as he handed him the holy-water brush, 'Whatever you do, be quiet, and let things slide.' His knees shook beneath him. Bestir yourself! Be quiet! Which advice was he to take? Which was the best? Doubtless his master, Astier, would tell him, and he tried to reach him outside the church. It was no easy task in the confusion of the court, where they were forming the procession, and lifting the coffin under its heap of countless wreaths. Never was a scene more lively than this coming out from the funeral into the brilliant daylight; everywhere people were bowing and talking gossip quite unconnected with the ceremony, while the bright expression on every face showed the reaction after a long hour's sitting still and listening to melancholy music. Plans were made, meetings arranged; the hurrying stream of life, stopped for a brief while, impatiently resumed its course, and poor Loisillon was left far behind in the past to which he belonged.

'At the Francais to-night, don't forget; it's the last Tuesday,' simpered Madame Ancelin, while Paul said to Lavaux, 'Are you going to see it through?'

'No; I'm taking Madame Eviza home.'

'Then come to Keyser's at six. We shall want freshening after the speeches.'

The mourning coaches were drawing up one after the other, while the private carriages set off at a trot. People were leaning out of all the windows in the square, and over towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain men standing on the stationary tramcars showed tier after tier of heads rising in dark relief against the blue sky. Freydet, dazzled by the sun, tilted his hat over his eyes and looked at the crowd, which reached as far as he could see. He felt proud, transferring to the Academie the posthumous glory which certainly could not be ascribed to the author of the 'Journey in Val d'Andorre,' though at the same time he was distressed at noticing that his dear 'future colleagues' obviously kept him at a distance, became meditative when he drew near, or turned away, making little groups to keep out the intruder. And these were the very men who only two days ago at Voisin's had said to him, 'When are you going to join us?' But the heaviest blow was the desertion of Astier-Rehu.

'What a calamity, sir!' said Freydet, coming up to him and putting on a doleful expression for the purpose of saying something sympathetic. Astier-Rehu, standing by the hearse, made no answer, but went on turning over the leaves of the oration he would shortly have to deliver. 'What a calamity!' repeated Freydet.

'My dear Freydet, you are indecent,' said his master, roughly, in a loud voice. And with one harsh snap of the jaw he betook himself again to his reading.

Indecent! What did he mean? The poor man looked himself over, but could find no explanation of the reproach. What was the matter? What had he done?

For some minutes he was quite dazed. Vaguely he saw the hearse start under its shaking pyramid of flowers, with green coats at the four corners, more green coats behind, then all the Society, and immediately following, but at a respectful distance, another group, in which he found himself involved and carried along he knew not how. Young men, old men, all terribly gloomy and depressed, all marked on the brow with the same deep furrow, set there by one fixed idea, all expressing with their eyes the same hatred and distrust of their neighbours. When he had got over his discomfiture, and was able to identify these persons, he recognised the faded, hopeless face of old Moser, the candidate everlasting; the honest expression of Dalzon, the author of 'that book,' who had failed at the last election; and de Saleles!—and Guerineau!—Why, they were the 'fish in tow'! They were the men about whom the Academie 'does not trouble itself,' whom it leaves, hanging on to a strong hook, to be drawn along in the wake of the ship of fame. There they all were—all of them, poor drowned fish!—some dead and under the water; others still struggling, turning up sad and greedy eyes full of an eager craving, never to be appeased. And while he vowed to himself to avoid a similar fate, Abel de Freydet followed the bait and dragged at the line, too firmly struck already to get himself free.

Far away, along the line cleared for the procession, muffled drums alternated with the blast of trumpets, bringing crowds of bystanders on the pavement and heads to every window. Then the music again took up the long-drawn strains of the Hero's March. In the presence of so impressive a tribute as this national funeral, this proud protest on the part of humanity, crushed and overcome by death but decking defeat in magnificence, it was hard to realise that all this pomp was for Loisillon, Permanent Secretary of the Academie Francaise—for nothing, servant to nothing.



CHAPTER IX.

EVERY day between four and six, earlier or later according to the time of year, Paul Astier came to take his douche at Keyser's hydropathic establishment at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Honore Twenty minutes' fencing, boxing, or single-stick followed by a bath and a cold douche; then a little halt at the flower-shop, as he came out, to have a carnation stitched in his buttonhole; then a constitutional as far as the Arc de l'Etoile, Stenne and the phaeton following close to the footway. Finally came a turn in the Bois, where Paul, thanks to his observance of fashionable hygiene, displayed a feminine delicacy of colouring and a complexion rivalling any lady's. By this visit to Keyser's he also saved himself the trouble of reading the papers. Gossip went on between one dressing-room and another, or on the lounges of the fencing-room, where the visitors sat in fencing dress or flannel dressing-gowns, or even outside the doctor's door while awaiting the douche. From clubs, drawing-rooms, the Chamber, the Bourse, or the Palais de Justice came in the news of the day, and there it was proclaimed freely in loud tones, to the accompaniment of the clashing of swords and sticks, shouts for the waiter, resounding slaps on bare backs, creaking of wheel-chairs for rheumatic patients, heavy plunges re-echoing under the reverberating roof of the swimming-bath, while above the various sounds of splashing and spurting water rose the voice of worthy Dr. Keyser, standing on his platform, and the ever-recurring burden, 'Turn round.'

On this occasion Paul Astier was 'turning round' under the refreshing shower with great enjoyment; he was getting rid of the dust and fatigue of his wearisome afternoon, as well as of the lugubrious sonorities of Astier-Rehu's Academic regret 'His hour sounded upon the bell'... 'the hand of Loisillon was cold'... 'he had drained the cup of happiness'... &c, &c. Oh Master! Master! oh, respected papa! It took a good deal of water, showers, streams, floods of it, to wash off all that grimy rubbish.



As he went away with the water running off him, he passed a tall figure bent double, coming up from the swimming bath, which gave him a shivering nod from under a huge gutta-percha cap covering the head and half the face. The man's lean pallor and stiff stooping walk made Paul take him for one of the poor invalids who attend the establishment regularly, and whose apparition, silent as night-birds in the fencing-room where they come to be weighed, contrasts so strangely with the healthy laughter and superabundant vigour of the rest of the company. But the contemptuous curve of the large nose and the weary lines round the mouth vaguely recalled some face he knew in society. In his dressing-room he asked the man who was shampooing him, 'Who was that, Raymond, who bowed to me just now?'

'Why, that's the Prince d'Athis, sir,' replied Raymond, with a plebeian's satisfaction in uttering the word 'prince.' 'He has been taking douches for some time past, and generally comes in the morning. But he is later to-day, on account of a burial, so he told Joseph.'

The door of Paul's dressing-room was partly open during this dialogue, and in the room on the opposite side of the passage was visible La vaux. As he pulled on and buckled his long clerical hose, he said, 'I say, Paul, did you see Sammy coming to freshen himself up a bit?'

'Freshen himself up?' said Paul. 'What for?'

'He's going to be married in a fortnight, you know.'

'Oh! And when does he go to his Embassy?'

'Why, now, at once. The Princess has started. They are to be married out there.'

Paul had a horrid presentiment. 'The Princess?' he asked. 'Whom is he going to marry?'

'Where have you been? It's been the talk of Paris for the last two days! Colette, of course; Colette the inconsolable. I should like to see what the Duchess looks like. At the Loisillon affair she carried herself well, but never lifted her veil or spoke a word. It's a tough bit to swallow, eh? When you think that only yesterday I was helping her to choose materials for the room he was to have at St. Petersburg!'

The ill-natured unctuous voice of the fashionable scandalmonger went on with the story as he finished buckling his garters, accompanied by the sound of a douche two boxes off, and the Prince's voice saying, 'Harder, Joseph, harder, don't be afraid.' Freshening himself up, was he?

Paul had crossed the passage as soon as Lavaux began to talk, that he might hear better. He was seized with a wild desire to kick in the door of the Prince's room, spring on him, and have an explanation face to face with the scoundrel who was stealing the fortune almost in his grasp. Suddenly he perceived that he had nothing on, reflected that his wrath was ill-timed, and went back to his room, where he calmed down a little as he realised that the first thing to do was to have a talk with his mother and find out exactly how matters stood.

That afternoon, for once, he had no flower in his buttonhole, and while, as the stream of carriages went past, the ladies looked languidly for the charming young man in the usual row, he was driving rapidly to the Rue de Beaune. There he was greeted by Corentine with bare arms and a dirty apron. She had taken the opportunity of her mistress's absence to have a great clean-up.

'Do you know where my mother is dining?'

No, her mistress had not told her. But the master was upstairs, rummaging in his papers. The little staircase leading to the paper-room creaked under Leonard Astier's heavy tread.

'Is that you, Paul?' he asked.

The dim light of the passage and his own agitation prevented the young man from noticing his father's extraordinary appearance and the dazed sound of his voice when he answered.

'How's the Master?' said the son—'So mamma's not in?'

'No, she is dining with Madame Ancelin and going on to the Francais; I am to join them in the evening.'

After this the father and son had nothing further to say to each other. They met like two strangers, like two men of hostile races. On this occasion, indeed, Paul in his impatience was half inclined to ask Leonard whether he knew anything about the marriage; but he thought the next minute, 'No, he is too stupid; mother would never say a word to him.' His father, who was also strongly tempted to put a question, called him back with an air of embarrassment.

'Paul,' he said, 'I have lost—I can't find——'

'Can't find what?' asked the son.

Astier-Rehu hesitated a moment; but after looking closely at the pretty face, whose expression, on account of the bend in the nose, was never perfectly straightforward, he added in a gloomy, surly tone—

'No, nothing; it does not matter. I won't keep you.'

There was nothing for it but to meet his mother at the theatre in Madame Ancelin's box. That meant two or three hours to be got through first. Paul dismissed his carriage and ordered Stenne to bring him his dress things at his club. Then he started for a stroll through the city in a faint twilight, while the clipped shrubs of the Tuileries Gardens assumed brighter colours as the sky grew dark around them. It was the mystic hour so precious to people pursuing dreams or making plans. The carriages grow fewer, the shadowy figures hurry by and touch the stroller lightly. There is no interruption to the flow of a man's thoughts. So the ambitious young fellow, who had quite recovered his presence of mind, carried on his reflections clearly. His thoughts were like those of Napoleon at the last hour of the battle of Waterloo: after a long day of success defeat had come with night. What was the reason? What mistake had he made? He replaced the pieces on the chessboard, and looked for the explanation of failure, but in vain. It had perhaps been rash of him to let two days pass without seeing her. But it was the most elementary rule that after such a scene as that in the cemetery a woman should be left to herself to recover. How was he to foresee this sudden flight? Suddenly a hope flashed upon him. He knew that the Princess changed her plan as often as a bird its perch. Perhaps she might not yet have gone; perhaps he should find her in the midst of preparations, unhappy, undecided, asking Herbert's portrait for advice, and should win her back by one embrace. He understood and could follow now all the capricious turns of the romance which had been going on in her little head.

He took a cab to the Rue de Courcelles. Nobody there. The Princess had gone abroad, they told him, that very morning. A terrible fit of despair came over him, and he went home instead of to the club, so as not to have to talk and answer questions. His spirits sank even lower at the sight of his great mediaeval erection and its front, in the style of the Tour de la Faim, all covered with bills; it suggested the piles of overdue accounts. As he felt his way in, he was greeted by a smell of fried onions filling the whole place; for his spruce little valet on nights when his master dined at the club would cook himself a tasty dish. A gleam of daylight still lingered in the studio, and Paul flung himself down on a sofa. There, as he was trying to think by what ill-luck his artfullest, cleverest designs had been upset, he fell asleep for a couple of hours and woke up another man. Just as memory gains in sharpness during the sleep of the body, so had his determination and talent for intrigue gone on acting during his short rest. He had found a new plan, and moreover a calm fixity of resolution, such as among the modern youth of France is very much more rarely met with than courage under arms.

He dressed rapidly and took a couple of eggs and a cup of tea; and when, with a faint odour of the warm curling-iron about his beard and moustaches, he entered the Theatre Francais and gave Madame Ancelin's name at the box-office, the keenest observer would have failed to detect any absorbing preoccupation in the perfect gentleman of fashion, and would never have guessed the contents of this pretty drawing-room article, black-and-white lacquered, and well locked.

Madame Ancelin's worship of official literature had two temples, the Academie Francaise and the Comedie Francaise. But the first of these places being open to the pious believer only at uncertain periods, she made the most of the second, and attended its services with great regularity. She never missed a 'first night,' whether important or unimportant, nor any of the Subscribers' Tuesdays. And as she read no books but those stamped with the hall-mark of the Academie, so the actors at the Comedie were the only players to whom she listened with enthusiasm, with excited ejaculations and rapturous amazement. Her exclamations began at the box-office, at the sight of the two great marble fonts, which the good lady's fancy had set up before the statues of Rachel and Talma in the entrance to the 'House of Moliere.'

'Don't they look after it well? Just look at the door-keepers! What a theatre it is!'

The jerky movements of her short arms and the puffing of her fat little body diffused through the passage a sense of noisy gleefulness which made people say in every box, 'Here's Madame Ancelin!' On Tuesdays especially, the fashionable indifference of the house contrasted oddly with the seat where, in supreme content, leaning half out of the box, sat and cooed this good plump pink-eyed pigeon, piping away audibly, 'Look at Coquelin! Look at De-launay! What perennial youth! What an admirable theatre!' She never allowed her friends to talk of anything else, and in the entr'actes greeted her visitors with exclamations of rapture over the genius of the Academic playwright and the grace of the Actress-Associate.

At Paul Astier's entrance the curtain was up; and knowing that the ritual of Madame Ancelin required absolute silence at such a time, he waited quietly in the little room, separated by a step from the front of the box, where Madame Ancelin was seated in bliss between Madame Astier and Madame Eviza, while behind were Danjou and De Freydet looking like prisoners. The click, which the box-door made and must make in shutting, was followed by a 'Hush!' calculated to appal the intruder who was disturbing the service. Madame Astier half turned round, and felt a shiver at the sight of her son. What was the matter? What had Paul to say to her of such pressing importance as to bring him to that haunt of boredom—Paul, who never let himself be bored without a reason? Money again, no doubt, horrid money! Well, fortunately she would soon have plenty; Sammy's marriage would make them all rich. Much as she longed to go up to Paul and reassure him with the good news, which perhaps he had not heard, she was obliged to stay in her seat, look on at the play, and join as chorus in her hostess's exclamations, 'Look at Coquelin! Look at De-launay! Oh! Oh!' It was a hard trial to her to have to wait So it was to Paul, who could see nothing but the glaring heat of the footlights, and in the looking-glass at the side the reflection of part of the house, stalls, dress-circle, boxes, rows of faces, pretty dresses, bonnets, all as it were drowned in a blue haze, and presenting the colourless ghostly appearance of things dimly seen under water. During the entr'acte came the usual infliction of indiscriminate praise.

'Monsieur Paul! Di' y' see Reichemberg's dress? Di' y' see the pink-bead apron? and the ribbon ruching? Di' y' see? This is the only place where they know how to dress, that it is!'

Visitors began to come, and the mother was able to get hold of her son and carry him off to the sofa. There, in the midst of wraps and the bustle of people going out, they spoke in low voices with their heads close together.

'Answer me quickly and clearly,' began Paul 'Is Sammy going to be married?'

'Yes, the Duchess heard yesterday. But she has come here to-night all the same. Corsican pride!'

'And whom has he caught? Can you tell me now?'

'Why, Colette, of course! You must have had a suspicion.'

'Not the least,' said Paul. 'And what shall you get for it?'

She murmured triumphantly, 'Eight thousand pounds!'



'Well, by your schemes I have lost a million!—a million, and a wife!' He grasped her by the wrists in his anger, and hissed into her face, 'You selfish marplot!'

The news took away her breath and her senses. It was Paul then, Paul, from whom proceeded the force which acted, as she had occasionally perceived, against her influence; it was Paul whom the little fool was thinking of when she said, sobbing in her arms, 'If you only knew!' And now, just at the end of the mines which with so much cunning and skilful patience they had each been driving towards the treasure, one last stroke of the axe had brought them face to face, empty-handed! They sat silent, looking at each other, with corresponding crooks in their noses and the same fierce gleam in both pairs of grey eyes, while all around them were the stir of people coming and going and the buzz of conversation. Rigid indeed is the discipline of society, seeing that it could repress in these two creatures all the cries and groans, all the desire to roar and slay, which filled and shook their hearts. Madame Astier was the first to express her thoughts aloud:

'If only the Princess were not gone!'

And she writhed her lips with rage at the thought that the sudden departure had been her own suggestion.

'We will get her back,' said Paul.

'How?'

Without answering her question, he asked, 'Is Sammy here to-night?'

'Oh, I don't think so, as she is—— Where are you going? what do you mean to do?'

'Keep quiet, won't you? Don't interfere. You are too unlucky for me.'

He left with a crowd of visitors who were driven away by the end of the entr'acte, and she went back to her seat on Madame Ancelin's left. Her hostess worshipped with the same ecstasy as before, and it was one perpetual giving of thanks.

'Oh, look at Coquelin! What humour he has! My dear, do look at him!'

'My dear' was indeed not attending; her eyes wandered, and on her lips was the painful smile of a dancer hissed off the boards. With the excuse that the footlights dazzled her, she was turning every moment towards the audience to look for her son. Perhaps there would be a duel with the Prince, if he was there. And all her fault—all through her stupid bungling.

'Ah, there's Delaunay! Di' y' see him? Di' y' see?'

No, she had seen nothing but the Duchess's box, where some one had just come in, with a youthful elegant figure, like her Paul. But it was the little Count Adriani, who had heard of the rupture like the rest of Paris and was already tracking the game. Through the rest of the play the mother ate her heart out in misery, turning over innumerable confused plans for the future, mixed in her thoughts with past events and scenes which ought to have forewarned her. Stupid, how stupid of her! How had she failed to guess?

At last came the departure, but oh how long it took! She had to stop every moment, to bow or smile to her friends, to say good-bye. 'What are you going to do this summer? Do come and see us at Deauville.' All down the narrow passage crammed with people, where ladies finish putting on their wraps with a pretty movement to make sure of their ear-rings, all down the white marble staircase to the men-servants waiting at the foot, the mother, as she talks, still watches, listens, tries to catch in the hum of the great fashionable swarm dispersing for some months a word or hint of a scene that evening in a box. Here comes the Duchess, haughty and erect in her long white and gold mantle, taking the arm of the young officer of the Papal Guard. She knows the shabby trick her friend has played her, and as the two women pass they exchange a cold expressionless glance more to be dreaded than the most violent expletive of a fishwoman. They know now what to think of each other; they know that in the poisoned warfare, which is to succeed their sisterly intimacy, every blow will tell, will be directed to the right spot by practised hands. But they discharge the task imposed by society, and both wear the same mask of indifference, so that the masterful hate of the one can meet and strike against the spiteful hate of the other without producing a spark.

Downstairs, in the press of valets and young clubmen, Leonard Astier was waiting, as he had promised, for his wife. 'Ah, there is the great man!' exclaimed Madame Ancelin; and with a final dip of her fingers into the holy water she scattered it around her broadcast, over the great Astier-Rehu, the great Danjou, and Coquelin, you know! and Delaunay, you know! Oh! Oh! Oh!—Astier did not reply, but followed with his wife on his arm and his collar turned up against the draught. It was raining. Madame Ancelin offered to take them home; but it was only with the conventional politeness of a 'carriage' lady afraid of tiring her horses and still more afraid of her coachman's temper (she has invariably the best coachman in Paris). Besides, 'the great man' had a cab; and without waiting for the lady's benediction—'Ah, well, we know you two like to be alone. Ah! what a happy household!'—he dragged off Madame Astier along the wet and dirty colonnade.

When, at the end of a ball or evening party, a fashionable couple drive off in their carriage, the question always suggests itself, 'Now what will they say?' Not much usually, for the man generally comes away from this kind of festivity weary and knocked up, while the lady continues the party in the darkness of the carriage by inward comparisons of her dress and her looks with those she has just seen, and makes plans for the arrangement of her drawing-room or a new costume. Still the restraint of feature required by society is so excessive, and fashionable hypocrisy has reached such a height, that it would be interesting to be present at the moment when the conventional attitude is relaxed, to hear the real natural tone of voice, and to realise the actual relations of the beings thus suddenly released from trammels and sent rolling home in the light of their brougham lamps through the empty streets of Paris. In the case of the Astiers the return home was very characteristic. The moment they were alone the wife laid aside the deference and pretended interest exhibited towards the Master in society, and spoke her mind, compensating herself in so doing for the attention with which she had listened for the hundredth time to old stories which bored her to death. The husband, kindly by disposition and accustomed to think well of himself and everyone else, invariably came home in a state of bliss, and was horrified at the malicious comments of his wife on their hosts and the guests they had met. Madame Astier would utter calmly the most shocking accusations, exaggerating gossip in the light unconscious way which is characteristic of Parisian society. Rather than stimulate her he would hold his tongue and turn round in his corner to take a little doze. But on this evening Leonard sat down straight, regardless of the sharp 'Do mind my dress!' which showed that somebody's skirts were being crumpled. What did he care about her dress? 'I've been robbed!' he said, in such a tone that the windows rattled.

Oh dear, the autographs! She had not been thinking of them, least of all just now, when tormented by very different anxieties, and there was nothing feigned in her surprise.

Robbed—yes, robbed of his 'Charles-the-Fifths,' the three best things in his collection! But the assurance which made his attack so violent died out of his voice, and his suspicion hesitated, at the sight of Adelaide's surprise. Meanwhile she recovered her self-possession. 'But whom do you suspect?' Corentine, she thought, was trustworthy. Teyssedre? It was hardly likely that an ignorant——

Teyssedre! He exclaimed at it, the thing seemed so obvious. Helped by his hatred for the man of polish, he soon began to see how the crime had come about, and traced it step by step from a chance allusion at dinner to the value of his documents, heard by Corentine and repeated in all innocence. Ah, the scoundrel! Why, he had the skull of a criminal! Foolish to struggle against the intimations of instinct! There must be something out of the common, when a floor-polisher could arouse so strange an antipathy in a member of the Institute! Ah, well, the dolt was done for now! He should catch it! 'My three Charleses! Only fancy!' He wanted to inform the police at once, before going home. His wife tried to prevent him. 'Are you out of your mind? Go to the police-station after midnight?' But he insisted, and thrust his great numskull out into the rain to give orders to the driver. She was obliged to pull him back with an effort, and feeling too much exhausted to carry on the lie, to let him say his say and bring him round gradually, she came out with the whole truth.

'It's not Teyssedre—it's I! There!' At one breath she poured out the story of her visit to Bos, the money she had got, the 800L., and the necessity for it. The silence which ensued was so long that at first she thought he had had a fit of apoplexy. It was not that; but like a child that falls or hits itself, poor Crocodilus had opened his mouth so wide to let out his anger, and taken so deep a breath, that he could not utter a sound. At last came a roar that filled the Carrousel, where their cab was at that minute splashing through the pools.

'Robbed, robbed! Robbed by my wife for the sake of her son!' In his insane fury he jumbled together indiscriminately the abusive patois of his native hillside, 'Ah la garso! Ah li bongri!' with the classical exclamations of Harpagon bewailing his casket, Justice, justice du ciel!' and other select extracts often recited to his pupils. It was as light as day in the bright rays of the tall electric lamps standing round the great square, over which, as the theatres were emptying, omnibuses and carriages were now passing in all directions.

'Do be quiet,' said Madame Astier; 'everyone knows you.'

'Except you, Madame!'

She thought he was going to beat her, and in the strained condition of her nerves it might perhaps have been a relief. But under the terror of a scandal he suddenly quieted down, swearing finally by his mother's ashes that as soon as he got home he would pack up his trunk and go straight off to Sauvagnat, leaving his wife to depart with her scoundrelly prodigal and live on their spoils.

Once more the deep old box with its big nails was brought hastily from the anteroom into the study. A few billets of wood were still left in it from the winter's supply, but the 'deity' did not change his purpose for that. For an hour the house resounded with the rolling of logs and the banging of cupboard doors, as he flung among the sawdust and bits of dry bark linen, clothes, boots, and even the green coat and embroidered waistcoat of the Academic full dress, carefully put away in napkins. His wrath was relieved by this operation, and diminished as he filled his trunk, till his last resentful grumblings died away when it occurred to him that, fixed as he was to his place, to uproot himself was utterly impossible. Meanwhile Madame Astier, sitting on the edge of an armchair in her dressing-gown, with a lace wrap round her head, watched his proceedings and murmured between yawn and yawn with placid irony, 'Really, Leonard, really!'



CHAPTER X.

'My notion is that people, like things, have a right and a wrong way up, and there's always a place to get hold of, if you want to have a good control and grasp of them. I know where the place is, and that's my power! Driver, to the Tete Noire.' At Paul Astier's order the open carriage, in which the three tall hats belonging to Freydet, Vedrine, and himself rose in funereal outline against the brightness of the afternoon landscape, drew up on the right-hand side of the bridge at St. Cloud, in front of the inn he had named. Every jolt of the hired conveyance over the paving of the square brought into sight an ominous long case of green baize projecting beyond the lowered hood of the carriage. Paul had chosen, as seconds for this meeting with D'Athis, first the Vicomte de Freydet, on account of his title and his 'de,' and with him the Count Adriani. But the Papal Embassy was afraid of adding another scandal to the recent affair of the Cardinal's hat, and he had been obliged to find a substitute for Pepino in the sculptor, who would perhaps allow himself at the last minute to be described in the official statement as 'Marquis.' The matter, however, was not supposed to be serious, only a quarrel at the club over the card-table, where the Prince had taken a hand for a last game before leaving Paris. The affair could not be hushed up; it was specially impossible to cave in to a fighting man like Paul Astier, who had a great reputation in fencing rooms, and whose records were framed and hung in the shooting-gallery in the Avenue d'Antin.

While the carriage waited by the terrace of the restaurant and the waiters unobtrusively bestowed on it knowing glances, down a steep little path came rolling a short, fat man, with the white spats, white tie, silk hat, and captivating air of the doctor of a fashionable watering-place. He made signals from the distance with his sunshade, there's Gomes,' said Paul. Doctor Gomes, formerly on the resident staff of one of the Paris hospitals, had been ruined by play and an old attachment. Now he was 'Uncle Gomes,' and had an irregular practice; not a bad fellow, but one who would stick at nothing, and had made a specialty of affairs like the present. Fee, two guineas and breakfast. Just now he was spending his holiday with Cloclo at Ville d'Avray, and came puffing to the meeting place, carrying a little bag which held his instrument case, medicines, bandages, splints—enough to set up an ambulance.

'Is it to be scratch or wound?' he asked, as he took his seat in the carriage opposite Paul.

'Scratch, of course, doctor, scratch, with swords of the Institute. The Academie Francaise against the Sciences Morales et Politiques.'

Gomes smiled as he steadied his bag between his knees.

'I did not know, so I brought the big apparatus.'

'Well, you must display it; it will impress the enemy,' suggested Vedrine, in his quiet way.

The doctor winked, a little put out by the two seconds, whose faces were unknown to the boulevards, and to whom Paul Astier, who treated him like a servant, did not even introduce him.

As the carriage started, the window of a room on the first floor opened, and a pair came and looked at them curiously. The girl was Marie Donval, of the Gymnase, whom the doctor recognised and named in a loud voice. The other was a deformed little creature, whose head was barely visible above the window-sill. Freydet, with much indignation, and Vedrine, with some amusement, recognised Fage.

'Are you surprised, M. de Freydet?' said Paul. And hereupon he launched into a savage attack upon woman. Woman! A disordered child, with all a child's perversity and wickedness, all its instinctive desire to cheat, to lie, to tease, all its cowardice. She was greedy, she was vain, she was inquisitive. Oh yes, she could serve you a hash of somebody else, but she had not an idea of her own; and in argument, why, she was as full of holes, twists, and slippery places as the pavement on a frosty night after a thaw. How was conversation possible with a woman? Why, there was nothing in her, neither kindness nor pity nor intellect—not leven common sense. For a fashionable bonnet or one of Spricht's gowns she was capable of stealing, of any trick however dirty; for at bottom the only thing she cares for is dress. To know the strength of this passion a man must have gone, as Paul had, with the most elegant ladies of fashion to the rooms of the great man-milliner. They were hand-and-glove with the forewomen, asked them to breakfast at their country houses, knelt to old Spricht as if he were the Pope himself. The Marquise de Roca-Nera took her young daughters to him, and all but asked him to bless them!

'Just so,' said the doctor, with the automatic jerk of a hireling whose neck has been put out of joint by perpetual acquiescence. Then followed an awkward pause, the conversation being, as it were, thrown out of gear by this sudden and unexpectedly violent effusion from a young fellow usually very civil and self-possessed. The sun was oppressive, and was reflected off the dry stone walls on each side of the steep road, up which the horses were toiling painfully, while the pebbles creaked under the wheels.

'To show the kindness and pity of woman, I can vouch for the following.' It was Vedrine who spoke, his head thrown back and swaying as it rested on the hood of the carriage, his eyes half shut as he looked at some inward vision. 'It was not at the great milliner's. It was at the Hotel-Dieu, in Bouchereau's department. A rough, white-washed cell, an iron bedstead with all the clothes thrown off, and on it, stark naked, covered with sweat and foam, contorted and twisted like a clown with sudden springs and with yells that re-echoed through the fore-court of Notre Dame, a madman in the last agony. Beside the bed two women, one on either side, the Sister, and one of Bouchereau's little lady-students, both quite young, yet with no disgust and no fear, both leaning over the poonwretch whom no one dared go near, wiping from his brow and mouth the sweat of his agony and the suffocating foam. The Sister was praying all the time; the other was not. But in the inspired look in the eyes of both, in the gentleness of the brave little hands which wiped away the madman's foam right from under his teeth, in the heroic and maternal beauty of their unwearied movements, you felt that they were both very women. There is woman! It was enough to make a man fall on his knees and sob.'

'Thank you, Vedrine,' said Freydet under his breath; he had been choking with the recollection of the dear one at Clos Jallanges. The doctor began his jerk and his 'just so,' but was cut short by the dry, incisive tones of Paul Astier.

'Oh yes, sick nurses, I'll allow. Sickly themselves, nothing gives them such pleasure as nursing, dressing, bathing their patients, handling hot towels and basins; and then there's the power they exercise over the suffering and the weak.' His voice hissed and rose to the pitch of his mother's, while from his cold eye darted a little gleam of wickedness which made his companions wonder 'what is up,' and suggested to the doctor the sage reflection, 'All very well to talk about a scratch, and swords of the Institute, but I should not care to be in the Prince's skin.'

'Now I'll paint you a pendant to our friend's chromo,' sneered Paul. 'As a specimen of feminine delicacy and faithfulness, take a little widow, who even in the burial vault of the departed, and on his very tombstone——'

'The Ephesian Matron!' broke in Vedrine, 'you want to tell us that!' The discussion grew animated and ran on, still to an accompaniment of the jolting wheels, upon the never-failing topics of masculine discussion, woman and love.

'Gentlemen, look,' said the doctor, who from his place on the front seat saw two carriages coming up the hill at a quick trot. In the first, an open victoria, were the Prince's seconds. Gomes stood up, and as he sat down again named them in a low and respectful tone, 'the Marquis d'Urbin and General de Bonneuil of the Jockey Club—very good form—and my brother-surgeon, Aubouis.' This Doctor Aubouis was another low-caste of the same stamp as Gomes; but as he had a ribbon his fee was five guineas. Behind was a little brougham in which, along with the inseparable Lavaux, was concealed D'Athis, desperately bored with the whole business. During five minutes the three vehicles went up the hill one behind another like a wedding or funeral procession, and nothing was heard but the sound of the wheels and the panting or snorting of the horses as they rattled their bits.

'Pass them,' said a haughty nasal voice.

'By all means,' said Paul, 'they are going to see to our quarters.' The wheels grazed on the narrow road, the seconds bowed, the doctors exchanged professional smiles. Then the brougham went by, showing behind the window glass, pulled up in spite of the heat, a morose motionless profile, as pale as a corpse. 'He won't be paler than that an hour hence, when they take him home with a hole in his side,' thought Paul, and he pictured the exact thrust, feint No. 2, followed by a direct lunge straight in between the third and fourth ribs.

At the top of the hill the air was cooler, and laden with the scent of lime-flowers, acacias, and roses warm in the sun. Behind the low park railings sloped great lawns over which moved the mottled shadows of the trees. Presently was heard the bell of a garden gate.

'Here we are,' said the doctor, who knew the place. It was where the Marquis d'Urbin's stud used to be, but for the last two years it had been for sale. All the horses were gone, except a few colts gambolling about in fields separated by high barriers.

The duel was to take place at the further end of the estate, on a wide terrace in front of a white brick stable. It was reached by sloping paths all overgrown with moss and grass, along which both parties walked together, mingling, but not speaking, proper as could be; except that Vedrine, unable to support these fashionable formalities, scandalised Freydet, who carried his high collar with much gravity, by exclaiming, 'Here's a lily of the valley,' or pulling off a bough, and presently, struck with the contrast between the splendid passivity of nature and the futile activity of man, ejaculated, as he gazed on the great woods that climbed the opposite hill-side, and the distance composed of clustered roofs, shining water and blue haze, 'How beautiful, how peaceful!' With an involuntary movement he pointed to the horizon, for the benefit of some one whose patent leather boots came squeaking behind him. But oh, what an outpouring of contempt, not only upon the improper Vedrine, but upon the landscape and the sky! The Prince d'Athis was unsurpassed in contempt. He expressed it with his eye, the celebrated eye whose flash had always overcome Bismarck; he expressed it with his great hooked nose, and with the turned down corners of his mouth; he expressed it without reason, without inquiry, study, or thought, and his rise in diplomacy, his successes in love and in society, were all the work of this supposed contempt!

In reality 'Sammy 'was an empty-headed bauble, a puppet picked by a clever woman's compassion out of the refuse and oyster shells of the supper-tavern, raised by her higher and higher, prompted by her what to say and, more important still, what not to say, lessoned and guided by her, till the day when, finding himself at the top of the ladder, he kicked away the stool which he no longer wanted. Society thought him a very clever fellow, but Vedrine did not share the general opinion; and the comparison of Talleyrand to a 'silk stocking full of mud' came into his mind as he watched this highly respectable and proper personage stalk majestically past him. Evidently the Duchess had her wits about her when she disguised his emptiness by making him both diplomatist and academician, and cloaking him for the official carnival with the double thickness of both the two thread-bare, though venerable, dominos, to which society continues to bow. But how she could have loved such a hollow, stony-hearted piece of crockery, Vedrine did not understand. Was it his title? But her family was as good as his. Was it the English cut of his clothes, the frock coat closely fitted to his broken-down shoulders, and the mud-coloured trousers that made so crude a bit of colour among the trees? One might almost think that the young villain, Paul, was right in his contemptuous remarks on woman's taste for what is low, for deformity in morals or physique!

The Prince had reached the three-foot fence which divided the path from the meadow, and either because he mistrusted his slender legs, or because he thought a vigorous movement improper for a man of his position, he hesitated, particularly bothered by the sense that 'that huge artist fellow' was just at his back. At last he made up his mind to step out of his way to a gap in the wooden fence. Vedrine winked his little eyes. 'Go round, my good sir,' was his thought, 'go round; make the road as long as you will, it must bring you in the end to the front of the white building yonder. And when you get there, you may possibly have to pay a heavy reckoning for all your scoundrelly tricks. There is always a reckoning to pay in the end.' Having relieved his mind by this soliloquy, he jumped clean over the fence without so much as putting a hand on it (a proceeding extremely improper), and joined the knot of seconds busily engaged in casting lots for places and swords. In spite of the dandified solemnity of their aspect, they looked, as they all bent to see whether the toss fell head or tail, or ran to pick up the coins, like big school-boys in the playground, wrinkled and grey. During a discussion on a doubtful pitch, Vedrine heard his name called by Astier, who, with perfect self-possession, was taking off his coat and emptying his pockets behind the little building. 'What's that stuff the General is talking? Wants to have his walking-stick within reach of our swords, to prevent accidents? I won't have that sort of thing, do you hear? This is not a lower school fight. We are both old hands, fifth form.' In spite of his light words, his teeth were clenched and his eye gleamed fiercely. 'It's serious then?' asked Vedrine, looking at him hard.

'Couldn't be more so.'

'Ah! Somehow I thought as much,' and the sculptor returned to convey the message to the General, commander of a cavalry division, looking all leg from his heels to his pointed ears, which in brilliancy of colour vied with Freydet's. At Vedrine's intimation these ears flushed suddenly scarlet, as if the blood boiled in them. 'Right, Sir! 'Course, Sir!' His words cut the air like the lash of a whip. Sammy was being helped by Doctor Aubouis to turn up his shirt sleeves. Did he hear? or was it the aspect of the lithe, cat-like, vigorous young fellow as he came forward with neck and arms bare and round as a woman's, and with that pitiless look. Be the reason what it may, D'Athis, who had come to the ground as a social duty without a shade of anxiety, as befitted a gentleman who was not inexperienced and knew the value of two good seconds, suddenly changed countenance, turned earthy pale, while his beard scarcely concealed the twitch of his jaw in the horrible contortion of fear. But he kept his self-control, and put himself on the defensive bravely enough.

'Now, gentlemen.'

Yes, there is always a reckoning to pay. He realised that keenly as he faced that pitiless sword-point, which sought him, felt him at a distance, seemed to spare him now only to make more sure of hitting presently. They meant to kill him; that was certain. And as he parried the blows with his long, thin arm stretched out, amid the clashing of the hilts he felt, for the first time, a pang of remorse for his mean desertion of the noble lady who had lifted him out of the gutter and given him once more a decent place in the world; he felt too that her merited wrath was in some way connected with this present encompassing peril, which seemed to shake the air all about him, to send round and round in a glancing, vanishing vision the expanse of sky overhead, the alarmed faces of the seconds and doctors, and the remoter figures of two stable boys wildly beating off with their caps the gambolling horses that wanted to come and look on. Suddenly came exclamations, sharp and peremptory: 'Enough! Stop, stop!' What has happened? The peril is gone, the sky stands still, everything has resumed its natural colour and place. But at his feet over the torn and trampled ground spreads a widening pool of blood, which darkens the yellow soil, and in it lies Paul Astier helpless, with a wound right through his bare neck, stuck like a pig. In the still pause of horror which followed the disaster was heard the shrill, unceasing noise of insects in the distant meadow, while the horses, no longer watched, gathered together a little way off and stretched out inquisitive noses towards the motionless body of the vanquished.

Yet he was a skilful swordsman. His fingers had a firm grasp of the hilt and could make the whistling blade flash, hover, and descend where he pleased, while his adversary encountered him with a wavering cowardly spit. How had it come about? The seconds will say, and the evening papers repeat, and to-morrow all Paris will take up the cue, that Paul Astier slipped as he made his thrust and ran on his opponent's point. A full and accurate account will no doubt be given: but in life it usually happens that decision of language varies inversely with certainty of knowledge. Even from the spectators, even from the combatants themselves, a certain mist and confusion will always veil the crucial moment, when, against all reasonable calculation, the final stroke was given by intervening fate, wrapped in that obscure cloud which by epic rule closes round the end of a contest.

Carried into a small coachman's room adjoining the stable, Paul, on opening his eyes after a long swoon, saw first from the iron bedstead on which he lay a lithographic print of the Prince Imperial pinned to the wall over the drawers, which were covered with surgical instruments. As consciousness returned to him through the medium of external objects, the poor melancholy face with its faded eyes, discoloured by the damp of the walls, suggested a sad omen of ill-fated youth. But besides ambition and cunning, Paul had his full share of courage; and raising with difficulty his head and its cumbrous wrapping of bandages, he asked in a voice broken and weak, though fleeting still, 'Wound or scratch, doctor?' Gomes, who was rolling up his medicated wool, waved to him to keep quiet, as he answered, 'Scratch, you lucky dog; but a near shave. Aubouis and I thought the carotid was cut.' A faint colour came into the young man's cheeks, and his eyes sparkled. It is so satisfactory not to die! Instantly his ambition revived, and he wanted to know how long he should take to get well again. 'From three weeks to a month.' Such was the doctor's judgment, announced in an indifferent tone with an amusing shade of contempt. He was really very much annoyed and mortified that his patient had got the worst of it. Paul with his eyes on the wall was making calculations. D'Athis would be gone and Colette married before he was even out of bed. Well, that business had failed; he must look out for something else.

The door was opened, and a great flood of light poured into the miserable room. How delightful was life and the warm sunshine! Vedrine, coming in with Freydet, went up to the bed and held out his hand joyously, saying 'You did give us a fright!' He was really fond of his young rascal, and cherished him as a work of art. 'Ah, that you did!' said Freydet, wiping his brow with an air of great relief. His eyes had seen all his hopes of election to the Academie lying on the ground in that pool of blood. How could Astier, the father, ever have come out as the champion of a man connected with such a fatal event? Not but that Freydet had a warm heart, but the absorbing thought of his candidature brought his mind, like a compass needle, always round to the same point; howsoever shaken and turned about, it came back still to the Academic Pole. And as the wounded man smiled at his friends, feeling a little foolish at finding himself, for all his cleverness, lying there at full length, Freydet dilated with admiration on the 'proper' behaviour of the seconds, whom they had just assisted in framing the report, of Doctor Aubouis, who had offered to stay with his professional friend, of the Prince, who had gone off in the victoria and left for Paul his well-hung carriage, which having only one horse could be brought right up to the door of the little building. Every one had behaved most properly.

'How he bores one with his proprieties!' said Vedrine, seeing the face Paul had not been able to help making.

'It really is very odd,' murmured the young fellow in a vague and wandering voice. So it would be he, and not the other fellow, whose pale, bloodstained face would be seen by the doctors side through the window of the brougham as it went slowly home. Well, he had made a mess of it! Suddenly he sat up, in spite of the doctor's protest, rummaged in his card-case for a card, and scribbled on it with pencil in a shaky hand, 'Fate is as faithless as man. I wanted to avenge you, but could not. Forgive me.' He signed his name, read it over, reflected, read it again, then fastened up the envelope, which they had found in a dusty drawer, a nasty scented envelope from some rural stores, and directed it to the Duchess Padovani. He gave it to Freydet, begging him to deliver it himself as soon as possible.

'It shall be there within an hour, my dear Paul.'

He made with his hand a sign of thanks and dismissal, then stretched himself out, shut his eyes, and lay quiet and still till the departure, listening to the sound which came from the sunny meadow around—a vast shrill hum of insects, which imitated the pulsation of approaching fever. Beneath the closed lids his thoughts pursued the windings of this second and quite novel plot, conceived by a sudden inspiration on 'the place of defeat.

Was it a sudden inspiration? There perhaps the ambitious young man was wrong; for the spring of our actions is often unseen, lost and hidden amid the internal disturbance of the crisis, even as the agitator who starts a crowd himself disappears in it. A human being resembles a crowd; both are manifold, complicated things, full of confused and irregular impulses, but there is an agitator in the background; and the movements of a man, like those of a mob, passionate and spontaneous as they may appear, have always been preconcerted. Since the evening when on the terrace of the Hotel Padovani Lavaux had suggested the Duchess to the young Guardsman, the thought had occurred to Paul that, if Madame de Rosen failed him, he might fall back on the fair Antonia. It had recurred two nights ago at the Francais, when he saw Adriani in the Duchess's box; but it took no definite shape, because all his energy was then turned in another direction, and he still believed in the possibility of success. Now that the game was completely lost, his first idea on returning to life was 'the Duchess.' Thus, although he scarcely knew it, the resolution reached so abruptly was but the coming to light of what grew slowly underground. 'I wanted to avenge you, but could not.' Warm-hearted, impulsive, and revengeful as he knew her to be, 'Mari' Anto,' as her Corsicans called her, would certainly be at his bedside the next morning. It would be his business to see that she did not go away.

Vedrine and Freydet went back together in the landau, without waiting for Sammy's brougham, which had to come slowly for the sake of the wounded man. The sight of the swords lying in their baize cover on the empty seat opposite suggested reflection. 'They don't rattle so much as they did going, the brutes,' said Vedrine, kicking them as he spoke. 'Ah, you see they are his!' said Freydet, giving words to his thoughts. Then, resuming the air of gravity and propriety appropriate to a second, he added, 'We had everything in our favour, the ground, the weapons, and a first rate fencer. As he says, it is very odd.'

Presently there was a pause in the dialogue, while their attention was fixed by the gorgeous colour of the river, spread in sheets of green and purple under the setting sun. Crossing the bridge the horses trotted fast up the street of Boulogne. 'Yes,' Vedrine went on, as if there had been no long interruption of silence; 'yes, after all, in spite of apparent successes, the fellow is unlucky at bottom. I have now seen him more than once fighting with circumstances in one of those crises which are touchstones to a man's fate, and bring out of him all the luck he has. Well, let him plot as cunningly as he will, foresee everything, mix his tints with the utmost skill, something gives way at the last moment, and without completely ruining him prevents him from attaining his object. Why? Very likely, just because his nose is crooked. I assure you, that sort of crookedness is nearly always the sign of a twist in the intellect, an obliquity in the character. The helm's not straight, you see!'

They laughed at the suggestion; and Vedrine, pursuing the subject of good and bad luck, told an odd story of a thing which had happened almost under his eyes when he was staying with the Padovani in Corsica. It was on the coast at Barbicaglia, just opposite the lighthouse on the Sanguinaires. In this lighthouse lived an old keeper, a tried servant, just on the eve of retirement. One night when he was on duty the old fellow fell asleep and dozed for five minutes at the most, stopping with his outstretched leg the movement of the revolving light, which ought to change colour once a minute. That very night, just at that moment, the inspector-general, who was making his annual round in a Government boat, happened to be opposite the Sanguinaires. He was amazed to see a stationary light, had the boat stopped, investigated and reported the matter, and the next morning the official boat brought a new keeper to the island and notice of instant dismissal to the poor old man. 'It seems to me,' said Vedrine, 'a curiosity in ill-luck that, in the chances of darkness, time, and space, the inspector's survey should have coincided with the old man's nap.' Their carriage was just reaching the Place de la Concorde, and Vedrine pointed with one of his slow calm movements to a great piece of sky overhead where the dark green colour was pierced here and there by newly-appearing stars, visible in the waning light of the glorious day.

A few minutes later the landau turned into the Rue de Poitiers, a short street, already in shadow, and stopped in front of the high iron gates bearing the Padovani shield. All the shutters of the house were closed, and there was a great chattering of birds in the garden. The Duchess had gone for the summer to Mousseaux. Freydet stood hesitating, with the huge envelope in his hand. He had expected to see the fair Antonia and give a graphic account of the duel, perhaps even to slip in a reference to his approaching candidature. Now he could not make up his mind whether he should leave the letter, or deliver it himself a few days hence, when he went back to Clos Jallanges. Eventually he decided to leave it, and as he stepped back into the carriage he said, 'Poor fellow! He impressed upon me that the letter was urgent.'

'Quite so,' said Vedrine, as the landau carried them along the quays, now beginning to glimmer with rows of yellow lights, to the meeting place arranged with D'Athis's seconds; 'quite so. I don't know what the letter is about, but for him to take the trouble to write it at such a moment, it must be something very smart, something extremely ingenious and clever. Only there you are! Very urgent—and the Duchess has left.'

And pushing the end of his nose on one side between two fingers, he said with the utmost gravity, 'That's what it is, you see.'



CHAPTER XI.

The sword-thrust which had so nearly cost Paul Astier his life made peace for the time between his parents. In the emotion produced by such a shock to his natural feelings, the father forgave all; and as for three weeks Madame Astier remained with her patient, coming home only on flying visits to fetch linen or change her dress, there was no risk of the covert allusions and indirect reproaches, which will revive, even after forgiveness and reconciliation, the disagreement of husband and wife. And when Paul got well and went, at the urgent invitation of the Duchess, to Mousseaux, the return of this truly academic household, if not to warm affection, at least to the equable temperature of the 'cold bed,' was finally secured by its establishment in the Institute, in the official lodgings vacated by Loisillon, whose widow, having been appointed manager of the school of Ecouen, removed so quickly, that the new secretary began to move in within a very few days of his election.

It was not a long process to settle in rooms which they had surveyed for years with the minute exactness of envy and hope, till they knew the very utmost that could be made of every corner. The pieces of furniture from the Rue de Beaune fell into the new arrangement so smartly, that it looked as if they were merely returning after a sojourn in the country, and finding their fixed habitat and natural place of adhesion by the marks of their own forms upon the floors or panels. The redecoration was limited to cleaning the room in which Loisillon died, and papering what had been the reception-room of Villemain and was now taken by Astier for his study, because there was a good light from the quiet court and a lofty bright little room, immediately adjoining, for his MSS., which were transferred there in three journeys of a cab, with the help of Fage the bookbinder.



Every morning, with a fresh delight, he enjoyed the convenience of a 'library' scarcely inferior to the Foreign Office, which he could enter without stooping or climbing a ladder. Of his kennel in the Rue de Beaune he could not now think without anger and disgust. It is the nature of man to regard places in which he has felt pain with an obstinate and unforgiving dislike. We can reconcile ourselves to living creatures, which are capable of alteration and differences of aspect, but not to the stony unchange-ableness of things. Amid the pleasures of getting in, Astier-Rehu could forget his indignation at the offence of his wife, and even his grievances against Teyssedre, who received orders to come every Wednesday morning as before. But at the mere remembrance of the slope-roofed den, into which he was lately banished for one day in each week, the historian ground his teeth, and the jaw of 'Crocodilus' reappeared.

Teyssedre, incredible as it may be, was very little excited or impressed by the honour of polishing the monumental floors of the Palais Mazarin, and still shoved about the table, papers, and numberless refaits of the Permanent Secretary with the calm superiority of a citizen of Riom over a common fellow from 'Chauvagnat.' Astier-Rehu, secretly uncomfortable under this crushing contempt, sometimes tried to make the savage feel the dignity of the place upon which his wax-cake was operating. 'Teyssedre,' said he to him, one morning, 'this was the reception-room of the great Villemain. Pray treat it accordingly;' but he instantly offered satisfaction to the Arvernian's pride by saying weakly to Corentine, 'Give the good man a glass of wine.' The astonished Corentine brought it, and the polisher, leaning on his stick, emptied it at a draught, his pupils dilating with pleasure. Then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and, setting down the glass with the mark of his greedy lips upon it, said, 'Look you, Meuchieu Astier, a glass of good wine is the only real good in life.' There was such a ring of truth in his voice, such a sparkle of contentment in his eyes, that the Permanent Secretary, going back into his library, shut the door a little sharply.



It was scarcely worth while to have scrambled from his low beginning to his present glory as head of literature, historian of the 'House of Orleans,' and keystone of the Academie Francaise, if a glass of good wine could give to a boor a happiness worth it all. But the next minute, hearing the polisher say with a sneer to Corentine that 'mooch 'e cared for the 'ception-room of the great Villemain,' Leonard Astier shrugged his shoulders, and at the thought of such ignorance his half-felt envy gave way to a deep and benign compassion.

Meanwhile Madame Astier, who had been brought up in the building, and recognised with remembrances of her childhood every stone in the court and every step in the dusty and venerable Staircase B, felt as if she had at last got back to her home. She had, moreover, a sense far keener than her husband's of the material advantages of the place. Nothing to pay for rent, for lighting, for fires, a great saving upon the parties of the winter season, to say nothing of the increase of income and the influential connection, so particularly valuable in procuring orders for her beloved Paul. Madame Loisillon in her time, when sounding the praises of her apartments at the Institute, never failed to add with emphasis, 'I have entertained there even Sovereigns.' 'Yes, in the little room,' good Adelaide would answer tartly, drawing up her long neck. It was the fact that not unfrequently, after the prolonged fatigue of a Special Session, some great lady, a Royal Highness on her travels, or a leader influential in politics, would go upstairs to pay a little particular visit to the wife of the Permanent Secretary. To this sort of hospitality Madame Loisillon was indebted for her present appointment as school-manager, and Madame Astier would certainly not be less clever than her predecessor in utilising the convenience. The only drawback to her triumph was her quarrel with the Duchess, which made it impossible for her to follow Paul to Mousseaux. But an invitation, opportunely arriving at this moment, enabled her to get as near to him as the house at Clos Jallanges; and she had hopes of recovering in time the favour of the fair Antonia, towards whom, when she saw her so kind to Paul she began again to feel quite affectionate.

Leonard could not leave Paris, having to work off the arrears of business left by Loisillon. He let his wife go however, and promised to come down to their friends for a few hours now and then, though in truth he was resolved not to separate himself from his beloved Institute. It was so comfortable and quiet! He had to attend two meetings in the week, just on the other side of the court—summer meetings, where a friendly party of five or six 'tallymen' dozed at ease under the warm glass. The rest of the week he was entirely free, and the old man employed it industriously in correcting the proofs of his 'Galileo,' which, finished at last, was to come out at the opening of the season, as well as a second edition of 'The House of Orleans,' improved to twice its value by the addition of new and unpublished documents. As the world grows old, history, which being but a collective memory of the race is liable to all the lapses, losses, and weaknesses of memory in the individual, finds it ever more necessary to be fortified with authentic texts, and if it would escape the errors of senility, must refresh itself at the original springs. With what pride, therefore, with what enjoyment did Astier-Rehu, during those hot August days, revise the fresh and trustworthy information displayed in his beloved pages, as a preparation for returning them to his publisher, with the heading on which, for the first time, appeared beneath his name the words 'Secretaire perpetuel de l'Academie Francaise.' His eyes were not yet accustomed to the title, which dazzled him on each occasion, like the sun upon the white courtyard beneath his windows. It was the vast Second Court of the Institute, private and majestic, silent, but for sparrows or swallows passing rarely overhead, and consecrated by a bronze bust of Minerva with ten termini in a row against the back wall, over which rose the huge chimney of the adjoining Mint.

Towards four o'clock, when the helmeted shadow of the bust was beginning to lengthen, the stiff mechanical step of old Jean Rehu woould be heard upon the flags. He lived over the Astiers, and went out regularly every day for a long walk, watched from a respectful distance by a servant, whose arm he persistently refused. Within the barrier of his increasing deafness his faculties, under the great heat of this summer, had begun to give way, and especially his memory, no longer effectually guided by the reminding pins upon the lappets of his coat. He mixed his stories, and lost himself, like old Livingstone in the marshes of Central Africa, among his recollections, where he scrambled and floundered till some one assisted him. Such a humiliation irritated his spleen, and he now therefore seldom spoke to anyone, but talked to himself as he went along, marking with a sudden stop and a shake of the head the end of an anecdote and the inevitable phrase, 'That's a thing that I have seen.' But he still carried himself upright, and was as fond of a hoax as in the days of the Directory. It was his amusement to impose abstinence from wine, abstinence from meat, and every ridiculous variety of regimen upon cits enamoured of life, crowds of whom wrote to him daily, asking by what diet he had so miraculously extended his. He would prescribe sometimes vegetables, milk, or cider, sometimes shell-fish exclusively, and meanwhile ate and drank without restriction, taking after each meal a siesta, and every evening a good turn up and down the floor, audible to Leonard Astier in the room below.

Two months, August and September, had now elapsed since the Permanent Secretary came in—two clear months of fruitful, delightful peace; such a pause in the climb of ambition as perhaps in all his life he had never enjoyed before. Madame Astier, still at Clos Jallanges, talked of returning soon; the sky of Paris showed the grey of the first fogs; the Academicians began to come home; the meetings were becoming less sociable; and Astier, during his working hours in the reception-room of the great Villemain, found it no longer necessary to screen himself with blinds from the blazing reflection of the court. He was at his table one afternoon, writing to the worthy De Freydet a letter of good news about his candidature, when the old cracked door-bell was violently rung. Corentine had just gone out, so he went to the door, where, to his astonishment, he was confronted by Baron Huchenard and Bos the dealer in manuscripts. Bos dashed into the study wildly waving his arms, while breathless ejaculations flew out of his red tangle of beard and hair: 'Forged! The documents are forged! I can prove it! I can prove it!'

Astier-Rehu, not understanding at first, looked at the Baron, who looked at the ceiling. But when he had picked up the meaning of the dealer's outcry—that the three autograph letters of Charles V., sold by Madame Astier to Bos and by him transferred to Huchenard, were asserted not to be genuine—he said with a disdainful smile, that he would readily repurchase them, as he regarded them with a confidence not to be affected by any means whatsoever.

'Allow me, Mr. Secretary, allow me. I would ask you,' said Baron Huchenard, slowly unbuttoning his macintosh as he spoke, and drawing the three documents out of a large envelope, 'to observe this.' The parchments were so changed as scarcely to seem the same; their smoky brown was bleached to a perfect whiteness; and upon each, clear and legible in the middle of the page, below the signature of Charles V., was this mark,

BB.

Angouleme 1836.

'It was Delpech, the Professor of Chemistry, our learned colleague of the Academie des Sciences, who—' but of the Baron's explanation nothing but a confused murmur reached poor Leonard. There was no colour in his face, nor a drop of blood left at the tips of the big heavy fingers, in whose hold the three autographs shook.

'The 800L. shall be at your house this evening, M. Bos,' he managed to say at last with what moisture was left in his mouth.

Bos protested and appealed. The Baron had given him 900L.

'900L., then,' said Astier-Rehu, making a great effort to show them out. But in the dimly-lighted hall he kept back his colleague, and begged him humbly, as a Member of the Academie des Inscriptions, and for the honour of the whole Institute, to say nothing of this unlucky affair.

'Certainly, my dear sir, certainly, on one condition.'

'Name it, name it.'

'You will shortly receive notice that I am a candidate for Loisillon's chair.' The Secretary's answer was a firm clasp of hand in hand, which pledged the assistance of himself and his friends.

Once alone, the unhappy man sank down before the table with its load of proofs, on which lay outspread the three forged letters to Rabelais. He gazed at them blankly, and mechanically read: 'Maitre Rabelais, vous qu'avez l'esprit fin et subtil!' The characters seemed to go round and round in a mixture of ink, dissolved into broad blots of sulphate of iron, which to his imagination went on spreading, till they reached his whole collection of originals, ten or twelve thousand, all unhappily got from the same quarter. Since these three were forged, what of his 'Galileo'?—what of his 'House of Orleans'?—the letter of Catherine II. which he had presented to the Grand Duke?—the letter of Rotrou, which he had solemnly bestowed upon the Academie? What? What? A spasm of energy brought him to his legs. Fage! He must at once see Fage!

His dealings with the bookbinder had begun some years before, when the little man had come one day to the Library of the Foreign Office to request the opinion of its learned and illustrious Keeper respecting a letter from Marie de Medicis to Pope Urban VIII. in favour of Galileo. It happened that Petit-Sequard had just announced as forthcoming, among a series of short light volumes on history, entitled 'Holiday Studies,' a 'Galileo' by Astier-Rehu of the Academie Francaise. When therefore the librarian's trained judgment had assured him that the MS. was genuine, and he was told that Fage possessed also the letter of the Pope in reply, a letter of thanks from Galileo to the Queen, and others, he conceived instantaneously the idea of writing, instead of the 'slight trifle,' a great historical work. But his probity suggesting at the same moment a doubt as to the source of these documents, he looked the dwarf steadily in the face, and after examining, as he would have examined an original, the long pallid visage and the reddened, blinking eye-lids, said, with an inquisitorial snap of the jaw, 'Are these manuscripts your own, M. Fage?'

'Oh no, sir,' said Fage. He was merely acting on behalf of a third person, an old maiden lady of good birth, who was obliged to part gradually with a very fine collection, which had belonged to the family ever since Louis XVI. Nor had he been willing to act, till he had taken the opinion of a scholar of the highest learning and character. Now, relying upon so competent a judgment, he should go to rich collectors, such as Baron Huchenard, for instance—but Astier-Rehu stopped him, saying, 'Do not trouble yourself. Bring me all you have relating to Galileo. I can dispose of it.' People were coming in and taking their places at the little tables, the sort of people who prowl and hunt in libraries, colourless and taciturn as diggers from the mines, with an air as if they had themselves been dug up out of somewhere close and damp. 'Come to my private room, upstairs, not here,' whispered the librarian in the big ear of the humpback as he moved away, displaying his gloves, oiled hair, and middle parting with the self-sufficiency often observable in his species.

The collection of Mademoiselle du Mesnil-Case, a name disclosed by Albin Fage only under solemn promise of secrecy, proved to be an inexhaustible treasure of papers relating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which threw all sorts of interesting lights upon the past, and sometimes, by a word or a date, overturned completely the established opinions about facts or persons. Whatever the price, Leonard Astier took and kept every one of the documents, which almost always fitted in with his commenced or projected works. Without a shadow of doubt he accepted the little man's account of the masses of originals that were still accumulating dust in the attic of an ancient mansion at Menilmontant. If, after some venomous criticism from 'the first collector' in France, his trust was slightly disturbed the suspicion could not but vanish when the book-binder, seated at his table or watering his vegetables in the quiet grass-grown yard, met it with perfect composure, and offered in particular a quite natural explanation of certain marks of erasure and restoration, visible on some of the pages, as due to the submergence of the collection in sea-water, when it was sent to England during the emigration. After this fresh assurance Astier-Rehu would go back to the gate with a lively step, carrying off each time a purchase for which he had given, according to its historical value, a cheque for twenty, forty, or even as much as eighty pounds.

These extravagances, unsuspected as yet by those around him, were prompted, whatever he might say to quiet his conscience, not so much by the motives of the historian as by those of the collector. This, even in a place so ill-adapted for seeing and hearing as the attic in the Rue de Beaune, where the bargains were usually struck, would have been patent to any observer. The tone of pretended indifference, the 'Let me see' muttered with dry lips, the quivering of the covetous fingers, marked the progress from passion to mania, the growth of the hard and selfish cyst, which was feeding its monstrous size upon the ruin of the whole organism. Astier was becoming the intractable Harpagon of the stage, pitiless to others as to himself, bewailing his poverty and riding in the omnibus, while in two years nearly 6500L. of his savings dropped secretly into the pocket of the humpback. To account to Madame Astier, Corentine, and Teyssedre for the frequent visits of the little man, he received from the Academician pamphlets to bind, which he took away and brought back ostentatiously. They corresponded by a sort of private code. Fage would write on a post-card, 'I have some new tooling to show you, sixteenth century, in good condition and rare.' Astier would temporise: 'Not wanted, thanks. Perhaps later.' Then would come 'My dear Sir, Do not think of it. I will try elsewhere,' and to this the Academician invariably answered 'Early to-morrow morning. Bring the tooling.' Here was the torment of the collector's pleasure. He must buy and buy, or else let pass to Bos, Huchenard, or some other rival the treasures of Menilmontant. Sometimes the thought of the time when money must fail would put him into a grim rage, and infuriated by the calm, self-satisfied countenance of the dwarf, he would exclaim 'More than 6400L. in two years! And still you say, the lady is in want of money! How on earth does she get rid of it? 'At such moments he longed for the death of the old maid, the annihilation of the bookbinder, even a war, revolution, or general catastrophe, which might swallow up both the treasure and the relentless speculators who worked it.

And now the catastrophe was indeed near, not the catastrophe desired, for destiny never finds to her hand precisely the thing we asked for, but a turn of things so sudden and appalling as to threaten his work, his honour, fortune, and fame, all that he was and all that he had. As he strode away towards the Cour des Comptes, deadly pale and talking to himself, the booksellers and print-dealers along the quay scarcely recognised the Astier-Rehu who, instead of looking right into the shop for a bow, now passed them without recognition. To him neither person nor thing was visible. In imagination he was grasping the humpback by the throat, shaking him by his pin-bespangled scarf, and thrusting under his nose the autographs dishonoured by the chemistry of Delpech, with the question, 'Now then, what is your answer to that?'

When he reached the Rue de Lille, he dashed through the door of rough planks in the fence which surrounds the ruins, went up the steps, and rang the bell once and again. He was struck by the gloomy look of the building, now that no flowers or greenery covered the nakedness of the gaping, crumbling masonry and the confusion of the twisted iron-work and leafless creepers. The sound of pattens came slowly across the chilly court, and the caretaker appeared, a solid woman, who, broom in hand and without opening the gate, said, 'You want the bookbinder; but he isn't here now.' Not here! Yes, Fage had gone, and left no address. In fact, she was just cleaning up the cottage for the man who was to have the appointment to the Cour des Comptes, which Fage had resigned.

Astier-Rehu, for appearance' sake, stammered out a word or two, but his voice was lost in the harsh and mournful cries of a great flight of black birds, which made the arches echo as they descended upon the court. 'Why, here are the Duchess's rooks!' said the woman, with a respectful wave of the hand towards the bare plane-trees of the Hotel Padovani, visible over the roof opposite. 'They are come before the Duchess this year, and that means an early winter!'

He went away, with horror in his heart.



CHAPTER XII.

The day following that on which the Duchess Padovani, to show herself smiling under the blow which had fallen upon her, had appeared at the theatre, she went, as she usually did at that time of year, to Mousseaux. She made no change in her plans. She had sent out her invitations for the season, and did not cancel them. But before the arrival of the first instalment of visitors, during the few days' solitude usually spent in superintending in detail the arrangements for entertaining her guests, she passed the whole time from morning to night in the park at Mousseaux, whose slopes stretched far and wide on the banks of the Loire. She would go madly along, like a wounded and hunted animal, stop for a moment from exhaustion, and then at a throb of pain start off again. 'Coward! coward! wretch!' She hurled invectives at the Prince as though he had been by her side, and still she walked with the same fevered tread the labyrinth of green paths which ran down in long shady windings to the river. Here, forgetting her rank and her position, flinging off her mask and able to be natural at last, she would give vent to her despair, a despair perhaps something less than her wrath, for the voice of pride spoke louder within her than any other, and the few tears which escaped her lids did not flow, but leaped and sparkled like flames. Revenge, revenge! She longed for a revenge of blood, and sometimes pictured one of her foresters, Bertoli or Salviato, going off abroad to put a bullet into him on his wedding-day. Then she changed her mind. No, she would deal the blow herself, and feel the joy of the vendetta in her own grasp. She envied the women of lower class who wait behind a doorway for the traitor, and fling in his face a bottle full of vitriol with a storm of hideous curses. Why did she not know some of the horrible names that relieve the heart, some foul insult to shriek at the mean treacherous companion who rose before her mind with the hesitating look and false constrained smile he wore at their last meeting? But even in her savage Corsican patois the great lady knew no 'nasty words,' and when she had cried 'Coward! coward! wretch!' her beautiful mouth could only writhe in helpless rage.

In the evening after her solitary dinner in the vast hall, whose panelling of old leather was gilt by the setting sun, her wild pacing to and fro began again. Now it was on the gallery overhanging the river, quaintly restored by Paul Astier, with open arcades like lace-work and two pretty corbel-turrets. Below on the Loire, outspread like a lake, there still lingered a delicate silvery light from the departing day, while the hazy evening air exaggerated the distances between the willow beds and islands out towards Chaumont. But poor Mari' Anto did not look at the view when, worn out with retracing the steps of her grief, she leant both elbows on the balustrade and gazed into the dimness. Her life appeared before her, waste and desolate, at an age when it is difficult to make a fresh start. A faint sound of voices rose from Mousseaux, a group of two or three small houses on the embankment; the chain of a boat creaked as the night breeze rose. How easy it would be! Grief had bowed down her head so low, that if she were but to lean forward a little farther.... But then what would the world say? A woman of her rank and age could not kill herself like any little grisette! The third day Paul's note arrived, and with it the newspapers' detailed report of the duel. It gave her the same delight as a warm pressure of the hand. So some one still cared for her, and had wanted to avenge her at the risk of his life! Not that Paul's feeling was love, she supposed, but only a grateful affection, the reminiscence of kindnesses done by her to him and his family, perhaps an imperative desire to atone for his mother's treachery. Generous, brave fellow! If she had been in Paris, she would have gone to him at once, but as her guests were just due, she could only write and send him her own doctor.

Every hour came fresh arrivals from Blois and from Onzain, Mousseaux lying half way between the two stations. The landau, the victoria, and two great breaks set down at the steps in the great court, amid the incessant ringing of the bell, many illustrious members of the Duchess's set, academicians and diplomatists, the Count and Countess Foder, the Comte de Bretigny and his son the Vicomte, who was a Secretary of Legation, M. and Madame Desminieres, Laniboire the philosopher, who had come to the castle to draw up his report on the award of the Prix de vertu, the young critic of Shelley, who was 'run' by the Padovani set, and Danjou, handsome Danjou, all by himself, though his wife had been asked. Life at Mousseaux was exactly what it had been the year before. The day passed in calls, or work in the separate rooms, meals, general conversation, afternoon naps; then, when the great heat was passed, came long drives through the woods, or sails on the river in the little fleet of boats anchored at the bottom of the park. Parties would be made to picnic on an island, and some of the guests would repair to the fish preserves, which were always well stocked with lively fish, as the keeper took care to replenish them from his nets before each expedition. Then every one came back to the ceremonious dinner, after which the gentlemen, when they had smoked in the billiard room or on the gallery, joined the ladies in a splendid apartment, which had been the council-chamber of Catherine de Medicis.

All round the huge room were depicted in tapestry the loves of Dido and her despair at the departure of the Trojan ships. The irony of this strange coincidence was not remarked by any one, so little do people in society regard their surroundings, less for want of observation than because they are always and fully occupied with their personal behaviour and the effect they are to produce. But there was a striking contrast between the tragic despair of the abandoned queen, gazing with arms uplifted and streaming eyes as the little black speck disappeared, and the smiling serenity of the Duchess, as she presided in the drawing-room, maintaining her supremacy over the other ladies, whose dress and whose reading were guided by her taste, or joining in the discussions between Laniboire and the young critic, and in the disputes waged over the candidates for Loisillon's seat by Desminieres and Danjou. Indeed, if the Prince d'Athis, the faithless Sammy, whose name was in every one's thoughts, though on no one's lips, could have seen her, he would have been mortified to find how small was the gap left in a woman's life by his-absence, and how busy was the turmoil throughout the royal castle of Mousseaux, where in all the long front there were but three windows shut up, those belonging to what were called 'the Prince's rooms.'