of pity, the condolences, the compassion with
which he knew that his sick-bed would be surrounded; the tears because
he suspected them to be hypocritical, and because, if sincere, they
displeased him still more by their grimacing ugliness.

He had always detested scenes, exaggerated sentiments, everything that
could move him to emotion or disturb the harmonious equilibrium of his
life. Every one knew this, and the order was to keep away from him the
distress, the misery, which from one end of France to the other flowed
towards Mora as to one of those forest refuges lighted during the
night at which all wanderers may knock. Not that he was hard to the
unfortunate; perhaps he may have been too easily moved to the pity which
he regarded as an inferior sentiment, a weakness unworthy of the strong,
and, refusing it to others, he dreaded it for himself, for the integrity
of his courage. Nobody in the palace, then, except Monpavon and Louis
the _valet de chambre_, knew of the visit of those three personages
introduced mysteriously into the Minister of State's apartments. The
duchess herself was ignorant of it. Separated from her husband by the
barriers frequently placed by the political and fashionable life of
the great world between married people, she believed him slightly
indisposed, nervous more than anything else; and had so little suspicion
of a catastrophe that at the very hour when the doctors were mounting
the great, dimly lit staircase at the other end of the palace, her
private apartments were being lit up for a girls' dance, one of those
_bals blancs_ which the ingenuity of the idle world had begun to make
fashionable in Paris.

This consultation was like all others: solemn and sinister. Doctors no
longer wear their great periwigs of the time of Moliere, but they still
assume the same gravity of the priests of Isis, of astrologers bristling
with cabalistic formulae pronounced with sage noddings of the head, to
which, for comical effect, there is only wanting the high pointed cap of
former days. In this case the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from its
setting. In the vast bed-chamber, transformed, heightened, as it were,
in dignity by the immobility of the owner, these grave figures came
forward round the bed on which the light was concentrated, illuminating
amid the whiteness of the linen and the purple of the hangings a face
worn into hollows, pale from lips to eyes, but wrapped in serenity as in
a veil, as in