In society General de Sucy is looked upon as very agreeable, and above all things, as very lively and amusing. Not very long ago a lady complimented him upon his good humor and equable temper.
“Ah! madame,” he answered, “I pay very dearly for my merriment in the evening if I am alone.”
“Then, you are never alone, I suppose.”
“No,” he answered, smiling.
If a keen observer of human nature could have seen the look that Sucy’s face wore at that moment, he would, without doubt, have shuddered.
“Why do you not marry?” the lady asked (she had several daughters of her own at a boarding-school). “You are wealthy; you belong to an old and noble house; you are clever; you have a future before you; everything smiles upon you.”
“Yes,” he answered; “one smile is killing me—”
On the morrow the lady heard with amazement that M. de Sucy had shot himself through the head that night.
The fashionable world discussed the extraordinary news in divers ways, and each had a theory to account for it; play, love, ambition, irregularities in private life, according to the taste of the speaker, explained the last act of the tragedy begun in 1812. Two men alone, a magistrate and an old doctor, knew that Monsieur le Comte de Sucy was one of those souls unhappy in the strength God gives to them to enable them to triumph daily in a ghastly struggle with a mysterious horror. If for a minute God withdraws His sustaining hand, they succumb.
PARIS, March 1830.