ed to attend the obsequies, and therefore postponed his
departure until the following evening. And thus he would spend one more
day in that old crumbling palace, near the corpse of that unhappy young
woman to whom he had been so much attached and for whom he would try to
find some prayers in the depths of his empty and lacerated heart.

When he reached the threshold of the Cardinal's reception-rooms, he
suddenly remembered his first visit to them. They still presented the
same aspect of ancient princely pomp falling into decay and dust. The
doors of the three large ante-rooms were wide open, and the rooms
themselves were at that early hour still empty. In the first one, the
servants' anteroom, there was nobody but Giacomo who stood motionless in
his black livery in front of the old red hat hanging under the
_baldacchino_ where spiders spun their webs between the crumbling
tassels. In the second room, which the secretary formerly had occupied,
Abbe Paparelli, the train-bearer, was softly walking up and down whilst
waiting for visitors; and with his conquering humility, his all-powerful
obsequiousness, he had never before so closely resembled an old maid,
whitened and wrinkled by excess of devout observances. Finally, in the
third ante-room, the _anticamera nobile_, where the red cap lay on a
credence facing the large imperious portrait of the Cardinal in
ceremonial costume, there was Don Vigilio who had left his little
work-table to station himself at the door of the throne-room and there
bow to those who crossed the threshold. And on that gloomy winter morning
the rooms appeared more mournful and dilapidated than ever, the hangings
frayed and ragged, the few articles of furniture covered with dust, the
old wood-work crumbling beneath the continuous onslaught of worms, and
the ceilings alone retaining their pompous show of gilding and painting.

However, Pierre, to whom Abbe Paparelli addressed a profound bow, in
which one divined the irony of a sort of dismissal given to one who was
vanquished, felt more impressed by the mournful grandeur which those
three dilapidated rooms presented that day, conducting as they did to the
old throne-room, now a chamber of death, where the two last children of
the house slept their last sleep. What a superb and sorrowful _gala_ of
death! Every door wide open and all the emptiness of those over-spacious
rooms, void of the throngs of ancient days and leading to the supreme
affliction--the