ho gazes, deeply moved, at all those smiling,
charming creatures, especially at Elise, who stands a little behind the
others, and whose embarrassment in making that indiscreet visit stamps
her as the _fiancee_.

"Elise, kiss our mother and thank her. She has come to live with her
children."

Behold her entwined in all those caressing arms, pressed to four little
womanly hearts which have long lacked a mother's support, behold her
made welcome with sweet cordiality in the circle of light cast by the
family lamp, broadened a little so that she can find room there, can dry
her eyes, obtain warmth and light for her heart at that sturdy flame
which rises without a flicker, even in that little artist's studio under
the roof, where the storm howled so fiercely just now, the terrible
storm that must be at once forgotten.

The man who is breathing his last yonder, lying in a heap in the bloody
bath-tub, has never known that sacred flame. Selfish and hard-hearted,
he lived to the last for show, puffing out his superficial breastplate
with a blast of vanity. And that vanity was the best that there was in
him. It was that which kept him on his feet and jaunty and swaggering so
long, that which clenched his teeth on the hiccoughs of his death agony.
In the damp garden the fountain drips sadly. The firemen's bugle sounds
the curfew. "Just go up to number 7," says the mistress of the
establishment, "he's a long while over his bath." The attendant goes up
and utters a shriek of horror: "O Madame, he 's dead--but it isn't the
same man." They run to the spot, and no one, in truth, can recognize the
fine gentleman who entered just now in this lifeless doll, with its head
hanging over the side of the bath-tub, the rouge mingling with the blood
that moistens it, and every limb relaxed in utter weariness of the part
played to the very end, until it killed the actor. Two slashes of the
razor across the magnificent, unwrinkled breastplate, and all his
factitious majesty has burst like a bubble, has resolved itself into
this nameless horror, this mass of mud and blood and ghastly, streaked
flesh, wherein lies unrecognizable the model of good-breeding, Marquis
Louis-Marie-Agenor de Monpavon.

XXIII.

MEMOIRS OF A CLERK.--LAST SHEETS.

I here set down, in haste and with an intensely agitated pen, the
shocking events of which I have been the plaything for some days past.
This time it is all up with the _Territoriale_ and all my ambi