e pointed caps of the towers. He stood
amazed; his suicide was postponed to his admiration. The phenomena
of hallucination are in these days so fully recognized by the medical
faculty that this mirage of the senses, this strange illusion of the
mind is beyond dispute. A man under the stress of a feeling which by its
intensity has become a monomania, often finds himself in the frame of
mind to which opium, hasheesh, or the protoxyde of azote might have
brought him. Spectres appear, phantoms and dreams take shape, things
of the past live again as they once were. What was but an image of the
brain becomes a moving or a living object. Science is now beginning to
believe that under the action of a paroxysm of passion the blood rushes
to the brain, and that such congestion has the terrible effects of
a dream in a waking state, so averse are we to regard thought as a
physical and generative force. (See _Louis Lambert_.)

Lucien saw the building in all its pristine beauty; the columns were
new, slender and bright; Saint-Louis' Palace rose before him as it had
once appeared; he admired its Babylonian proportions and Oriental
fancy. He took this exquisite vision as a poetic farewell from civilized
creation. While making his arrangements to die, he wondered how this
marvel of architecture could exist in Paris so utterly unknown. He was
two Luciens--one Lucien the poet, wandering through the Middle Ages
under the vaults and the turrets of Saint-Louis, the other Lucien ready
for suicide.

Just as Monsieur de Granville had ended giving his instructions to
the young secretary, the Governor of the Conciergerie came in, and
the expression of his face was such as to give the public prosecutor a
presentiment of disaster.

"Have you met Monsieur Camusot?" he asked.

"No, monsieur," said the Governor; "his clerk Coquart instructed me
to give the Abbe Carlos a private room and to liberate Monsieur de
Rubempre--but it is too late."

"Good God! what has happened?"

"Here, monsieur, is a letter for you which will explain the catastrophe.
The warder on duty in the prison-yard heard a noise of breaking glass
in the upper room, and Monsieur Lucien's next neighbor shrieking wildly,
for he heard the young man's dying struggles. The warder came to me pale
from the sight that met his eyes. He found the prisoner hanged from the
window bar by his necktie."

Though the Governor spoke in a low voice, a fearful scream from
Madame de Serizy sho