e conscious air in
this indiscreet visit points her out as the _fiancee_.

"Elise, embrace our mother and thank her. She has come to live with her
children."

There she is, caught in all these caressing arms, pressed against four
little feminine hearts which have missed the shelter of a mother's love
for so long; there she is introduced, and so gently, into the luminous
circle of the family lamp, widened to allow her to take her place there,
to dry her eyes, to warm and brighten her spirit at this steady flame,
even in this little studio near the roof, where just now the terrible
storm blew so wildly.

He who breathes his last over there, lying in his blood-stained bath,
has never known this sacred flame. Egoistical and hard, he has lived up
to the last for show, throwing out his chest in a bubble of vanity. And
this vanity was what was best in him. It alone had held him firm and
upright so long; it alone clinched his teeth on the groans of his
last agony. In the damp garden the water drips sadly. The bugle of the
firemen sounds the curfew. "Go and look at No. 7," says the mistress,
"he will never have done with his bath." The attendant goes, and utters
a cry of fright, of horror: "Oh, madame, he is dead! But it is not the
same man." They go, but nobody can recognise the fine gentleman who
entered a short time ago, in this death's-head puppet, the head leaning
on the edge of the bath, a face where the blood mingles with paint and
powder, all the limbs lying in the supreme lassitude of a part played
to the end--to the death of the actor. Two cuts of the razor across the
magnificent chest, and all the factitious majesty has burst and resolved
itself into this nameless horror, this heap of mud, of blood, of spoiled
and dead flesh, where, unrecognisable, lies the man of appearances, the
Marquis Louis-Marie-Agenor de Monpavon.

MEMOIRS OF AN OFFICE PORTER THE LAST LEAVES

I put down in haste and with an agitated pen the terrible events of
which I have been the plaything for the last few days. This time it
is all up with the Territorial and with my ambitious dreams. Disputed
bills, men in possession, visits of the police, all our books in the
hands of the courts, the governor fled, Bois l'Hery, the director, in
prison, another--Monpavon--disappeared. My brain reels in the midst of
these catastrophes. And if I had obeyed the warnings of reason, I should
have been quietly six months ago at Montbars cultivating my v