Sometimes, almost oblivious, he would leave the little wicket of his door open, and then the passers-by could see the shriveled old man standing in the middle of his neglected garden, perfectly motionless, and looking at any who stopped to gaze at him, with a fixed stare, a lurid glare, that froze them with terror. If by chance he went out into the streets of the town, you would have thought he was a stranger; he never knew where he was, nor whether it was the sun or the moon that were shining. He would often ask his way of the persons he met, fancying himself at Ghent, and he seemed always to be looking for his lost treasure.
The most irrepressible and most incorporate of all human ideas,—that by which a man identifies himself by creating outside and apart from his person the whole fictitious entity which he calls his property,—this demon idea had its talons constantly clutching at the miser's soul.
Then, in the midst of his torments, Fear would rise up with all the feelings that come in its train. For, in fact, two men knew his secret—the secret which he himself did not know. Louis XI. or Coyctier might post their spies to watch his movements while he was asleep, and discover the unknown gulf into which he had flung his wealth with the blood of so many innocent men; for Remorse kept watch with Fear.
To preserve his lost riches from being snatched from him while he lived, during the early days after his disaster, he took the utmost precaution to avoid sleeping, and his connection with the commercial world enabled him to procure the strongest anti-narcotics. His wakeful nights must have been terrible; he was alone to struggle against the night and silence, against remorse and fear, and all the thoughts that man has most effectually personified—instinctively, no doubt, in obedience to some law of the mind, true, though not yet proved.
In short, this man, strong as he was; this heart, annealed by the life of politics and commerce; this genius, though unknown to history,—was doomed to succumb under the horrors of the torments he himself had created. Crushed by some reflection even more cruel than all that had gone before, he cut his throat with a razor.
His death almost exactly coincided in time with the King's, so that the House of Evil was plundered by the mob. Some of the older inhabitants of the province asserted that a revenue farmer named Bohier had found the extortioner's treasure, and had employed it in building the beginnings of the château of Chenonceaux, that wonderful palace which, in spite of the lavish outlay of several kings and the fine taste of Diane de Poitiers and her rival Catherine de' Medici, is still unfinished.
Happily for Marie de Sassenage, the Comte de Saint-Vallier died, as is well known, as ambassador to Venice. The family did not become extinct. After the Count's departure his wife had a son, whose fortunes were famous in the history of France under the reign of François I. He was saved by his daughter, the famous Diane de Poitiers, Louis XI.'s illegitimate great-granddaughter; and she became the illegal wife, the adored mistress, of Henri II.; for in that noble family bastardy and love were hereditary.
Château de Saché, November and December 1831.