"He died suddenly then?"
"Yes, and quite alone, while reading a book. He was found thus. They thought he was sleeping. It is all over, he is to be buried to-morrow. Will you come, monsieur?—I did not know who you were when—you know—I said—In fact, it is kind—let us say no more about it—I beg your pardon—There will be a vast gathering at Denis Ramel's funeral, if there are present only a quarter of those whom he has obliged."
Vaudrey was heartbroken the next day. Behind Ramel's coffin, not a person followed. Himself, Garnier, and one or two old women from the house on Rue Boursault, who did not go all the way to the cemetery of Saint-Ouen because it was too far, were all that were present. At the grave Sulpice Vaudrey stood alone with the grave-digger and the workman Garnier. They buried Ramel in a newly-opened part close to the foot of a railway embankment.
For years Ramel had been forgotten, had even forgotten himself, he had let ambitious men pass beyond him, ingrates succeed and selfish men get to the top! He no longer existed! And those very men who had entreated him and called him dear master in the old days, soliciting and flattering him, now no longer knew his name. Had he disappeared, or did he still live, that forerunner, a sort of Japanese idol, an ancient, a useless being who had known neither how to make his fortune nor his position, while building up that of others? Nobody knew or cared. Occasionally when circumstances called for it, they laughed at this romantic figure in politics, living like a porter, poor, lost, and buried under a mass of unknown individuals, after having made ministers and unmade governments. Yet, at the news of his death, not one of those who were indebted to him for everything, not a single politician who was well in the saddle, and for whom he had held the stirrup, not a comedian of the Chambers or the theatre who had pleaded with him, urged and flattered him, was to be found there to pay the most ordinary respects of memory to the man who had disappeared. That fateful solitude, added to a keen winter's wind, appeared to Sulpice to be a cruel abandonment and an act of cowardice. Two men followed the cortége of that maker of men!
"Follow journalism and you make the fame of others," said Vaudrey, shaking his head.
"After all," answered Garnier, "there are dupes in every trade, and they are necessarily the most honest."
When this man, who had been a minister, left the grave above which the whistling trains passed, a freezing rain was falling and he passed out of the cemetery in the company of the poor devil who coughed so sadly within the collar of his overcoat that was tightly drawn up over his comforter.
Before leaving him, Vaudrey, with a feeling of timidity, desired to ask him if work was at least fairly good.
"Thanks!" replied Garnier. "I have found a situation—And then—" he shook his head as he pointed out behind the black trees and the white graves, the spot where they had lowered Ramel—"One has always a place when all is over, and that perhaps is the best of all!"
He bowed and Vaudrey left in a gloomy mood. It seemed to him that his life was crumbling away, that he was sowing, shred by shred, his flesh on the road. The black hangings of Ramel's coffin—and he smiled sadly at this new irony—recalled to him the bills of the upholsterers that he still owed for the furnishing of that fête at the ministry on the last day of his power and his happiness. The official decorations of Belloir and the Gobelins were not sufficient for him. He had desired more modern decorations. He gave the coachman the upholsterer's address, Boulevard des Capucins. He hardly dared to enter and say: "I have come to pay the account of the furnishing supplied at the ministry!" It still seemed like a funeral bill he was paying. This upholsterer's account, paid for forgotten display, seemed to him a sort of mortuary transaction.