those very men who had entreated
him and called him _dear master_ in the old days, soliciting and
flattering him, now no longer knew his name. Had he disappeared, or did
he still live, that forerunner, a sort of Japanese idol, an ancient, a
useless being who had known neither how to make his fortune nor his
position, while building up that of others? Nobody knew or cared.
Occasionally when circumstances called for it, they laughed at this
romantic figure in politics, living like a porter, poor, lost, and
buried under a mass of unknown individuals, after having made ministers
and unmade governments. Yet, at the news of his death, not one of those
who were indebted to him for everything, not a single politician who was
well in the saddle, and for whom he had held the stirrup, not a comedian
of the Chambers or the theatre who had pleaded with him, urged and
flattered him, was to be found there to pay the most ordinary respects
of memory to the man who had disappeared. That fateful solitude, added
to a keen winter's wind, appeared to Sulpice to be a cruel abandonment
and an act of cowardice. Two men followed the cortege of that maker of
men!

"Follow journalism and you make the fame of others," said Vaudrey,
shaking his head.

"After all," answered Garnier, "there are dupes in every trade, and they
are necessarily the most honest."

When this man, who had been a minister, left the grave above which the
whistling trains passed, a freezing rain was falling and he passed out
of the cemetery in the company of the poor devil who coughed so sadly
within the collar of his overcoat that was tightly drawn up over his
comforter.

Before leaving him, Vaudrey, with a feeling of timidity, desired to ask
him if work was at least fairly good.

"Thanks!" replied Garnier. "I have found a situation--And then--" he
shook his head as he pointed out behind the black trees and the white
graves, the spot where they had lowered Ramel--"One has always a place
when all is over, and that perhaps is the best of all!"

He bowed and Vaudrey left in a gloomy mood. It seemed to him that his
life was crumbling away, that he was sowing, shred by shred, his flesh
on the road. The black hangings of Ramel's coffin--and he smiled sadly
at this new irony--recalled to him the bills of the upholsterers that he
still owed for the furnishing of that fete at the ministry on the last
day of his power and his happiness. The official decorations of Belloir
and