who cry, holding
on to their sordid furniture and to their rags, "I don't want to die!"
and depart with nails broken and bleeding from that supreme wrench. But
here there was nothing of the kind.

To possess all, and to lose all. What a catastrophe!

In the first silence of that dreadful moment, while he heard the sound
of the music coming faintly from the duchess's ball at the other end of
the palace, whatever attached this man to life, power, honour, wealth,
all that splendour must have seemed to him already far away and in an
irrevocable past. A courage of a quite exceptional temper must have
been required to bear up under such a blow without any spur of personal
vanity. No one was present save the friend, the doctor, the servant,
three intimates acquainted with all his secrets; the lights moved back,
left the bed in shadow, and the dying man might quite well have turned
his face to the wall in lamentation of his own fate without being
noticed. But not an instant of weakness, nor of useless demonstration.
Without breaking a branch of the chestnut-trees in the garden, without
withering a flower on the great staircase of the palace, his footsteps
muffled on the thick pile of the carpets, Death had opened the door of
this man of power and signed to him "Come!" And he answered simply, "I
am ready." The true exit of a man of the world, unforeseen, rapid, and
discreet.

Man of the world! Mora was nothing if not that. Passing through life
masked, gloved, breast-plated--breast-plate of white satin, such as
the masters of fence wear on great days; preserving his fighting dress
immaculate and clean; sacrificing everything to that irreproachable
exterior which with him did duty for armour; he had determined on his
_role_ as statesman in the passage from the drawing-room to a wider
scene, and made, indeed, a statesman of the first rank on the strength
alone of his qualities as a man about town, the art of listening and of
smiling, knowledge of men, scepticism, and coolness. That coolness did
not leave him at the supreme moment.

With eyes fixed on the time, so short, which still remained to him--for
the dark visitor was in a hurry, and he could feel on his face the
draught from the door which he had not closed behind him--his one
thought now was to occupy the time well, to satisfy all the obligations
of an end like his, which must leave no devotion unrecompensed nor
compromise any friend. He gave a list of certain persons wh