ccording to etiquette, I was going to salute her respectfully, but she
did not give me time.

"'Captain,' she said excitedly and vehemently, 'give orders for my own
private coachman, Hans Hildersheim, to get a carriage ready for me
immediately,' but thinking better of it immediately she went on: 'But
no, we should only lose time, and every minute is precious; give me a
cloak quickly, Madame, and a lace veil; we will go out of one of the
small doors in the park, and take the first conveyance we see."

"She wrapped herself in her furs, hid her face in her mantilla, and I
accompanied her, without at first knowing what this mystery was, and
where we were going to, on this mad expedition. I hailed a cab that was
dawdling by the side of the pavement, and when the Empress gave me the
address of Ladislas Ferkoz, the Minister of State, in a low voice, in
spite of my usual phlegm, I felt a vague shiver of emotion, one of those
movements of hesitation and recoil, from which the bravest are not
exempt at times. But how could I get out of this unpleasant part of
acting as her companion, and how show want of politeness to a sovereign
who had completely lost her head? Accordingly, we started, but the
Empress did not pay any more attention to me than if I had not been
sitting by her side in that narrow conveyance, but stifled her sobs with
her pocket handkerchief, muttered a few incoherent words, and
occasionally trembled from head to foot. Her lover's name rose to her
lips as if it had been a response in a litany, and I thought that she
was praying to the Virgin that she might not arrive too late to see
Ladislas Ferkoz again in the possession of his faculties, and keep him
alive for a few hours. Suddenly, as if in reply to herself, she said: 'I
will not cry any more; he must see me looking beautiful, so that he may
remember me, even in death!'

"When we arrived, I saw that we were expected, and that they had not
doubted that the Empress would come to close her lover's eyes with a
last kiss. She left me there, and hurried to Ladislas Ferkoz's room,
without even shutting the doors behind her, where his beautiful,
sensual, gipsy head stood out from the whiteness of the pillows; but his
face was quite bloodless, and there was no life left in it, except in
his large, strange eyes, that were striated with gold, like the eyes of
an astrologer or of a bearded vulture.

"The cold numbness of the death struggle had already laid hold of his