"Yes, there's another man that's being sold out. Horses, carriages, furniture. The courtyard at his house is full of placards and sounds empty as if death had passed that way. The château at Nanterre's for sale. There were half a dozen 'little Bethlehems' left, and they packed them off in a cab. It's the crash, I tell you, Père Passajon, a crash that we may not see the end of, perhaps, because we're both old, but it will be complete. Everything's rotten; everything must burst!"
It was horrible to see that old flunkey of the Empire, gaunt and stooping, covered with filth and crying like Jeremiah: "This is the end," with his toothless mouth wide open like a great black hole. I was afraid and ashamed before him, I longed to see his back; and I thought to myself: "O Monsieur Chalmette! O my little vineyard at Montbars!"
Same date.
Great news! Madame Paganetti came this afternoon mysteriously and brought me a letter from the Governor. He is in London, just about to start a magnificent enterprise. Splendid offices in the finest part of the city; a stock company with superb prospects. He requests me to join him there, "happy," he says, "to repair in that way the wrong that has been done me." I shall have twice the salary I had at the Territoriale, with lodgings and fuel thrown in, five shares in the new company, and all my back pay in full. Only a trifling advance to be made for travelling expenses and some few importunate debts in the quarter. Vive la joie! my fortune is assured. I must write to the notary at Montbars to raise some money on my vineyard.
CHAPTER XXIV.
AT BORDIGHERA.
As M. Joyeuse had informed the examining magistrate, Paul de Géry was on his way home from Tunis after an absence of three weeks. Three interminable weeks, passed in struggling amid a network of intrigues, of plots cunningly devised by the powerful enmity of the Hemerlingues, wandering from office to office, from department to department, through that vast résidence on the Bardo, where all the different departments of the State are collected in the same frowning enclosure, bristling with culverins, under the immediate supervision of the master, like his stables and his harem. Immediately on his arrival Paul had learned that the Chamber of Justice was beginning to hear the Jansoulet case in secret,—a mockery of a trial, lost beforehand; and the Nabob's closed counting-rooms on the Marine Quay, the seals placed upon his cash boxes, his vessels lying at anchor in the harbor of Goletta, the guard of chaouchs around his palaces, already denoted a species of civil death, an intestacy as to which there would soon be nothing left to do but divide the spoils.
Not a champion, not a friend in that greedy pack; even the Frankish colony seemed not displeased at the downfall of a courtier who had so long obstructed all the roads to favor by occupying them himself. It was absolutely hopeless to think of rescuing that victim from the bey's clutches in the absence of a signal triumph in the Chamber of Deputies. All that de Géry could hope to do was to save a few spars from the wreck, and even that required haste, for he expected from day to day to be advised of his friend's complete discomfiture.