on the tops of omnibuses, in every
place where the unfolded public newspapers commented on this startling
rumour of the day.

Mora was the most brilliant incarnation of the Empire. One sees from a
distance, not the solid or insecure base of the building, but the gilded
and delicate spire, embellished, carved into hollow tracery, added
for the satisfaction of the age. Mora was what was seen in France and
throughout Europe of the Empire. If he fell, the monument would find
itself bereft of all its elegance, split as by some long and irreparable
crack. And how many lives would be dragged down by that sudden fall,
how many fortunes undermined by the weakened reverberations of
the catastrophe! None so completely as that of the big man sitting
motionless downstairs, on the bench in the monkey-house.

For the Nabob, this death was his own death, the ruin, the end of all
things. He was so deeply conscious of it that, when he entered the
house, on learning the hopeless condition of the duke, no expression of
pity, no regrets of any sort, had escaped him, only the ferocious word
of human egoism, "I am ruined!" And this word kept recurring to his
lips; he repeated it mechanically each time that he awoke suddenly
afresh to all the horror of his situation, as in those dangerous
mountain storms, when a sudden flash of lightning illumines the abyss
to its depths, showing the wounding spurs and the bushes on its sides,
ready to tear and scratch the man who should fall.

The rapid clairvoyance which accompanies cataclysms spared him no
detail. He saw the invalidation of his election almost certain, now that
Mora would no longer be there to plead his cause; then the consequences
of the defeat--bankruptcy, poverty, and still worse; for when these
incalculable riches collapse they always bury a little of a man's honour
beneath their ruins. But how many briers, how many thorns, how many
cruel scratches and wounds before arriving at the end! In a week there
would be the Schwalbach bills--that is to say, eight hundred thousand
francs--to pay; indemnity for Moessard, who wanted a hundred thousand
francs, or as the alternative he would apply for the permission of the
Chamber to prosecute him for a misdemeanour, a suit still more sinister
instituted by the families of two little martyrs of Bethlehem against
the founders of the Society; and, on top of all, the complications of
the Territorial Bank. There was one solitary hope, the mission of P