"The marquis, my master—yonder in the little white house behind Notre Dame." He did not say the morgue, because that is a too vulgar word. "I was very sure I should find him there. I went straight there the next day. And there he was. Oh! very well hidden, I promise you. No one but his valet de chambre could have recognized him. His hair all gray, his teeth gone, and his real wrinkles, his sixty-five years that he used to fix up so well. As he lay there on that marble slab with the faucet dripping on him, I fancied I saw him at his dressing table."
"And you said nothing?"
"No, I had known his intentions on that subject for a long while. I let him go out of the world quietly, in the English fashion, as he wanted to do. All the same, he might have given me a bit of bread before he went, when I had been in his service twenty years."
Suddenly he brought his fist down upon the table in a rage:
"When I think that, if I had chosen, I might have entered Mora's service instead of Monpavon's, that I might have had Louis's place! There was a lucky dog! Think of the rolls of a thousand he nabbed at his duke's death!—And the clothes the duke left, shirts by the hundred, a dressing-gown in blue fox-skin worth more than twenty thousand francs! And there's that Noël, he must have lined his pockets! Simply by making haste, parbleu! for he knew it couldn't last long. And there's nothing to be picked up on Place Vendôme now. An old gendarme of a mother who manages everything. They're selling Saint-Romans, they're selling the pictures. Half of the house is to let. It's the end of everything."
I confess that I could not help showing my satisfaction; for, after all, that wretched Jansoulet is the cause of all our misfortunes. A man who boasted of being so rich and talked about it everywhere. The public was taken in by it, like the fish that sees scales shining in a net. He has lost millions, I grant you; but why did he let people think he had plenty more? They have arrested Bois-l'Héry, but he's the one they should have arrested.—Ah! if we had had another expert, I am sure it would have been done long ago.—Indeed, as I said to Francis, one has only to look at that parvenu of a Jansoulet to see what he amounts to. Such a face, like a high and mighty brigand!
"And so common," added the former valet.
"Not the slightest moral character."
"Utter lack of breeding.—However, he's under water, and Jenkins too, and many others with them."
"What! the doctor too? That's too bad. Such a polite, pleasant man!"