stifled
words. His face became purple. He motioned "Take me away." And,
stumbling in his walk, leaning on de Gery's arm, he only managed to
cross the threshold of his box before he fell prostrate in the corridor.

"Bravo! Bravo!" cried the house in reply to the speech which the actor
had just finished; and there was a noise like a hailstorm, and stamping
of enthusiastic feet while the great lifeless body, raised with
difficulty by the scene-shifters, was carried through the brightly
lighted wings, crowded with people pressing in their curiosity round the
stage, excited by the atmosphere of success and who hardly noticed the
passage of the inert and vanquished man, borne on men's arms like
some victim of a riot. They laid him on a couch in the room where the
properties were stored, Paul de Gery at his side, with a doctor and two
porters who eagerly lent all the assistance in their power. Cardailhac,
extremely busy over his play, had sent word that he should come to hear
the news "directly, after the fifth act."

Bleeding after bleeding, cuppings, mustard leaves--nothing brought even
a quiver to the skin of the patient, insensible apparently to all the
remedies usually employed in cases of apoplexy. The whole being seemed
to be surrendering to death, to be preparing the way for the rigidity
of the corpse; and this in the most sinister place in the world, this
chaos, lighted by a lantern merely, amid which there lie about pell-mell
in the dust all the remains of former plays--gilt furniture, curtains
with gay fringes, coaches, boxes, card-tables, dismantled staircases
and balusters, among ropes and pulleys, a confusion of out-of-date
theatrical properties, thrown down, broken, and damaged. Bernard
Jansoulet, as he lay among this wreckage, his shirt opened over his
chest, pale and covered with blood, was indeed a man come to the
shipwreck of his life, bruised and tossed aside along with the pitiful
ruins of his artificial luxury dispersed and broken up, in the whirlpool
of Paris. Paul, with aching heart, contemplated the scene sadly, that
face with its short nose, preserving in its inertia the savage yet
kindly expression of an inoffensive creature that tried to defend itself
before it died and had not time to bite. He reproached himself bitterly
with his inability to be of any service to him. Where was that fine
project of leading Jansoulet across the bogs, of guarding him against
ambushes? All that he had been able to d