Then I looked at Lerne. He was leaning out of his seat, his head nodding from side to side, and his eyes staring vacantly behind his spectacles. One of his arms was hanging down.
A fainting-fit! We had had a narrow escape; so, those fainting-fits were really syncope. What had I been imagining with my silly ideas?
However, my uncle was not coming to. When I took off his mask, I saw that his clean-shaven face was as pale as a wax candle. His ungloved hands too looked as if they were of wax. I took them, and being quite ignorant of medicine, I slapped them vigorously, as one does to actresses, for hysterics.
This form of applause was in the nature of a claque in the repose of the countryside—sonorous and funereal; it greeted the withdrawal of the great charlatan from the stage.
Frédéric Lerne had indeed ceased to live. I perceived it from his chilled fingers—from his livid cheeks, his soulless eye, and his heart, which had stopped beating. The cardiac affectation about which I had been so skeptical, had just put an end to his life, as is the way with those diseases, without any warning.
Stupefaction, and the reaction from the narrow shave I had just had, kept me motionless. So, in a second, there remained nothing of Lerne except food for worms, and a name fit for oblivion!
Nothing! in spite of my hatred for this detestable man, and my relief at knowing that he no longer had power to harm me, I was awestruck by the swift death which had spirited away this monster’s intelligence.
Like a puppet deprived of the hand that gave it life, and prostrate on the edge of the stage, Lerne lay stretched out, limp, his arm hanging down, and his funereal Pierrot’s face made whiter by Death.
And yet, as the spirit departed from it into the Unknown, the dead body of my uncle seemed to me to grow more beautiful. The soul is so praised in comparison with the flesh, that one is astonished at seeing the latter become beautiful at the departure of the former. I followed the progress of the phenomenon on Lerne’s features. The Great Mystery shed the light of a divine serenity over his brow, as if life were a cloud whose passing reveals some strange sun; and thus whilst the countenance took on the hue of white marble, the puppet became a statue.