final word which the courts pronounce fearlessly, but which the doctors,
whose science it mocks, elude, and express in periphrases.

"Well, gentlemen, what says the faculty?" demanded the sick man.

There were sundry murmurs of hypocritical encouragement, vague
recommendations; then the three learned physicians hastened to depart,
eager to escape from the responsibility of this disaster. Monpavon
rushed after them. Jenkins remained at the bedside, overwhelmed by the
cruel truths which he had just heard during the consultation. In vain
had he laid his hand on his heart, quoted his famous motto; Bouchereau
had not spared him. It was not the first of the Irishman's clients whom
he had seen thus suddenly collapse; but he fervently hoped that the
death of Mora would act as a salutary warning to the world of fashion,
and that the prefect of police, after this great calamity, would send
the "dealer in cantharides" to retail his drugs on the other side of the
Channel.

The duke understood immediately that neither Jenkins nor Louis would
tell him the true issue of the consultation. He abstained, therefore,
from any insistence in his questionings of them, submitted to their
pretended confidence, affected even to share it, to believe the most
hopeful things they announced to him. But when Monpavon returned, he
summoned him to his bedside, and, confronted by the lie visible even
beneath the make-up of the decrepit old man, remarked:

"Oh, you know--no humbug! From you to me, truth. What do they say? I am
in a very bad way, eh?"

Monpavon prefaced his reply with a significant silence; then brutally,
cynically, for fear of breaking down as he spoke:

"Done for, my poor Augustus!"

The duke received the sentence full in the face without flinching.

"Ah!" he said simply.

He pulled his mustache with a mechanical gesture, but his features
remained motionless. And immediately he made up his mind.

That the poor wretch who dies in a hospital, without home or family,
without other name than the number of his bed, that he should accept
death as a deliverance or bear it as his last trial; that the old
peasant who passes away, bent double, worn out, in his dark and smoky
cellar, that he should depart without regret, savouring in advance
the taste of that fresh earth which he has so many times dug over and
over--that is intelligible. And yet how many, even among such, cling to
existence despite all their misery! how many there are