rom her women. She lay there
roaring among her lace pillows, her hair in a tangled mass around her
diadem, the windows closed and curtains tightly drawn, lamps lighted
day and night, crying out that she wanted to go away--ay, to go
away--ay; and it was a pitiful thing to see, in that tomb-like
darkness, the half-filled trunks scattered over the carpet, the
frightened gazelles, the negresses crouching around their hysterical
mistress, groaning in unison, with haggard eyes, like the dogs of
travellers in polar countries which go mad when they cannot see the
sun.

The Irish doctor, upon being admitted to that distressing scene, had no
success with his fatherly ways, his fine superficial phrases. Not at
any price would the Levantine take the pearls with arsenical base, to
give tone to her system. The Nabob was horrified. What was he to do?
Send her back to Tunis with the children? That was hardly possible. He
was definitively in disgrace there. The Hemerlingues had triumphed. A
last insult had filled the measure to overflowing: on Jansoulet's
departure the bey had commissioned him to have several millions of gold
coined after a new pattern at the Paris Mint; then the commission had
been abruptly withdrawn and given to Hemerlingue. Jansoulet, being
publicly insulted, retorted with a public manifesto, offering all his
property for sale, his palace on the Bardo presented to him by the
former bey, his villas at La Marse, all of white marble, surrounded by
magnificent gardens, his counting rooms, the most commodious and most
sumptuously furnished in the city, and instructing the intelligent
Bompain to bring his wife and children to Paris in order to put the
seal of finality to his departure. After such a display, it would be
hard to return; that is what he tried to make Mademoiselle Afchin
understand, but she replied only by prolonged groans. He strove to
comfort her, to amuse her, but what form of distraction could be made
to appeal to that abnormally apathetic nature? And then, could he
change the skies of Paris, give back to the wretched Levantine her
marble-tiled _patio_, where she used to pass long hours in a cool,
delicious state of drowsiness, listening to the plashing of the water
in the great alabaster fountain with three basins one above the other,
and her gilded boat, covered with a purple awning and rowed by eight
supple, muscular Tripolitan oarsmen over the lovely lake of El-Baheira,
when the sun was setting? Sumpt