d and fell upon the velvet-covered bench
beside the great cage of monkeys, who, over-excited by all the turmoil,
clung in a bunch to the bars, hanging by their tails or by their little
long-thumbed hands, and in their frightened inquisitiveness assailed
with the most extravagant grimaces of their race the stout bewildered
man, who sat staring at the floor and repeating to himself aloud: "I am
lost! I am lost!"

The duke was dying. He had been taken suddenly ill on Sunday while
returning from the Bois. He had felt an intolerable burning sensation
which seemed to outline, as with a red-hot iron, the whole internal
structure of his body, alternating with chills and numbness and long
periods of drowsiness. Jenkins, being summoned at once, prescribed some
sedative remedies. The next day the pains returned, more intense than
before, and followed by the same icy torpor, also intensified, as if
life were leaving him by fierce leaps and bounds, uprooted. No one in
the household was at all disturbed. "The day after Saint-James," callers
whispered to one another in the reception-room, and Jenkins' handsome
face retained its serenity. He mentioned the duke's indisposition to but
two or three persons in his morning round of visits, and so lightly that
no one thought anything of it.

Mora himself, despite his extreme weakness, and although he felt as if
his head were absolutely empty, "not an idea behind his forehead," as he
expressed it, was very far from suspecting the gravity of his condition.
Not until the third day, when, upon waking in the morning, he saw a
slender thread of blood that had flowed from his mouth over his beard
and reddened his pillow, did that refined dandy shudder, that fastidious
creature who held in horror all forms of human misery, especially
disease, and who saw it creeping upon him stealthily with its
defilement, its weaknesses and with the self-abandonment which is the
first concession to death. Monpavon, entering the room in Jenkins' wake,
caught the suddenly perturbed expression of the great nobleman brought
face to face with the terrible truth, and was at the same time horrified
by the ravages made in a few hours on Mora's emaciated face, where all
the wrinkles belonging to his age, appearing suddenly, mingled with the
wrinkles caused by suffering, with the depression of muscles which
indicates serious internal lesions. He took Jenkins aside while the fine
gentleman's servants were supplying him with