tor's visit, but told at such length
on the three subjects above mentioned that, with "links" and
conclusion,[251] they run to nearly four hundred pages.

It is possible that some one may say "_Connu!_" both to the stories
themselves and to the moral of real suffering, as opposed to mere
megrim, which is so obviously deducible from them. But Stello was quite
as clever as the objectors, and knew these things quite as
well--perhaps, as far as the case of Gilbert is concerned, rather better
than most Englishmen. It is in the manner of the Black Doctor's telling
and handling that the charm lies.

[Sidenote: The death of Gilbert.]

Even for those gluttons of matter who do not care much for manner there
is a good deal in the three stories. The first avails itself--as Vigny
had unwisely _not_ availed himself in _Cinq-Mars_, though he was well
acquainted with Shakespeare and lesser English masters--of the mixture
of comic and tragic. The suffering[252] of the unfortunate youth who was
partly a French Chatterton and partly a French Clare, his strange visit
to the benevolent but rather ineffectual Archbishop of Paris, and the
scene at his death-bed, exhibit, at nearly its best, the tragic power
which Vigny possessed in a very high, though not always well exercised,
degree. And the passage of the poet's death is of such _macabre_ power
that one must risk a translation:

(_The doctor has been summoned, has found the patient in his
garret, bare of all furniture save a bed with tattered
clothes and an old trunk._)

His face was very noble and very beautiful; he looked at me
with fixed eyes, and between them and the nose, above the
cheeks, he showed that nervous contraction which no ordinary
convulsion can imitate, which no illness gives, but which
says to the physician, "Go your ways!" and is, as it were, a
standard which Death plants on his conquests. He clutched in
one hand his pen, his poor last pen, inky and ragged, in the
other a crust of his last piece of bread. His legs knocked
together, so as to make the crazy bed crackle. I listened
carefully to his hard breathing; I heard the rattle with
its hollow husk; and I recognised Death in the room as a
practised sailor recognises the tempest in the whistle of
the wind that precedes it.

"Always the same, to all thou comest," I said to Death, he
himself speaking low enough for my lips to