The club on Rue Royale, renowned for its card-playing, had rarely seen so terrible a game as it saw that night. It began at eleven o'clock and was still in progress at five in the morning. Enormous sums lay on the green cloth, changed hands and direction, heaped up, scattered, reunited; fortunes were swallowed up in that colossal game, and at its close the Nabob, who had started it to forget his fears in the caprices of luck, after extraordinary alternations, somersaults of fortune calculated to make a neophyte's hair turn white, withdrew with winnings of five hundred thousand francs. They said five millions on the boulevard the next day, and every one cried shame, especially the Messager, which gave up three-quarters of its space to an article against certain adventurers who are tolerated in clubs, and who cause the ruin of the most respectable families.
Alas! Jansoulet's winnings hardly represented the amount of the first Schwalbach notes.
During that insane game, although Mora was its involuntary cause, and, as it were, its soul, his name was not once mentioned. Neither Cardailhac nor Jenkins appeared. Monpavon had taken to his bed, more affected than he chose to have people think. They were without news from the sick-room.
"Is he dead?" Jansoulet wondered as he left the club, and he was conscious of an impulse to go and see before returning home. It was no longer hope that impelled him, but that unhealthy, nervous sort of curiosity which attracts the poor, ruined, shelterless victims of a conflagration to the débris of their home.
Although it was still very early, the pink flush of dawn still lingering in the air, the whole mansion was open as if for a solemn departure. The lamps were still smoking on the mantels, the air was filled with dust. The Nabob walked on through inexplicable solitude as far as the first floor, where he at last heard a familiar voice, Cardailhac's, dictating names, and the scratching of pens on paper. The skilful organizer of the fêtes for the bey was arranging with the same zeal the funeral ceremonial of the Duc de Mora. Such activity! His Excellency had died during the evening; in the morning ten thousand letters were already printed, and everybody in the house who knew how to hold a pen was busy with the addresses. Without passing through those extemporized offices, Jansoulet made his way to the reception-room, usually so thronged, to-day all the chairs empty. In the centre of the room, on a table, lay Monsieur le Duc's hat and gloves and cane, always ready in the event of his going out unexpectedly, to save him the trouble of an order. The articles that we wear retain something of ourselves. The curve of the hat-rim recalled the curl of the moustaches, the light gloves were ready to grasp the flexible, strong Chinese bamboo, everything seemed to quiver and live, as if the duke were about to appear, to put out his hand as he talked, take them up and go out.
Oh! no, Monsieur le Duc was not going out. Jansoulet had only to walk to the bedroom door, which stood ajar, to see lying on the bed, three steps above the floor—the same platform even after death—a rigid, haughty form, a motionless, aged profile, transformed by the gray beard that had grown in a night; kneeling against the sloping pillow, her face buried in the white sheets, was a woman whose fair hair fell neglected about her shoulders, ready to fall under the shears of eternal widowhood; a priest, too, and a nun stood absorbed in meditation in that atmosphere of the death vigil, wherein the weariness of sleepless nights is blended with the mumbling of prayers and whispering in the shadow.
That room, in which so many ambitions had felt their wings expand, in which so many hopes and disappointments had had their day, was given over to the tranquillity of death. Not a sound, not a sigh. But, early as it was, over in the direction of Pont de la Concorde, a shrill, piercing little clarinet soared above the rumbling of the first carriages; but its vigorous mockery was wasted thenceforth upon the man who lay sleeping there, revealing to the terrified Nabob the image of his own destiny, cold, discolored, ready for the grave.
Others than Jansoulet saw that death-chamber under even more dismal circumstances. The windows thrown wide open. The night air from the garden entering freely in a brisk current. A form upon trestles; that form, the body just embalmed. The head hollowed out, filled with a sponge, the brain in a bucket. The weight of that statesman's brain was really extraordinary. It weighed—it weighed—The newspapers of the day gave the figures. But who remembers them to-day?