e would
not suffer them to set his room in order, no one could nurse him, he
would not even allow them to make his bed. All his surroundings bore the
marks of this last degree of apathy, the furniture was out of place, the
daintiest trifles were covered with dust and cobwebs. In health he had
been a man of refined and expensive tastes, now he positively delighted
in the comfortless look of the room. A host of objects required in
illness--rows of medicine bottles, empty and full, most of them dirty,
crumpled linen, and broken plates, littered the writing-table, chairs,
and chimney-piece. An open warming-pan lay on the floor before the
grate; a bath, still full of mineral water had not been taken away. The
sense of coming dissolution pervaded all the details of an unsightly
chaos. Signs of death appeared in things inanimate before the Destroyer
came to the body on the bed. The Comte de Restaud could not bear the
daylight, the Venetian shutters were closed, darkness deepened the gloom
in the dismal chamber. The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the
life in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still brilliant eyes. The
livid whiteness of his face was something horrible to see, enhanced as
it was by the long dank locks of hair that straggled along his cheeks,
for he would never suffer them to cut it. He looked like some religious
fanatic in the desert. Mental suffering was extinguishing all human
instincts in this man of scarce fifty years of age, whom all Paris had
known as so brilliant and so successful.

"One morning at the beginning of December 1824, he looked up at Ernest,
who sat at the foot of his bed gazing at his father with wistful eyes.

"'Are you in pain?' the little Vicomte asked.

"'No,' said the Count, with a ghastly smile, 'it all lies _here and
about my heart_!'

"He pointed to his forehead, and then laid his wasted fingers on his
hollow chest. Ernest began to cry at the sight.

"'How is it that M. Derville does not come to me?' the Count asked his
servant (he thought that Maurice was really attached to him, but the man
was entirely in the Countess' interest)--'What! Maurice!' and the dying
man suddenly sat upright in his bed, and seemed to recover all his
presence of mind, 'I have sent for my attorney seven or eight times
during the last fortnight, and he does not come!' he cried. 'Do you
imagine that I am to be trifled with? Go for him, at once, this very
instant, and bring him back with you.