real treasure. There it lies, my treasure! With you, my
peace of mind, my affections, all, are gone. If you had only known what
good it would have done me to live two nights longer, you would have
lived, solely to please me, my poor sister! Ah, Jeanne! thirteen hundred
thousand crowns! Won't that wake you?--No, she is dead!"

Thereupon, he sat down, and said no more; but two great tears issued
from his eyes and rolled down his hollow cheeks; then, with strange
exclamations of grief, he locked up the room and returned to the king.
Louis XI. was struck with the expression of sorrow on the moistened
features of his old friend.

"What is the matter?" he asked.

"Ah! sire, misfortunes never come singly. My sister is dead. She
precedes me there below," he said, pointing to the floor with a dreadful
gesture.

"Enough!" cried Louis XI., who did not like to hear of death.

"I make you my heir. I care for nothing now. Here are my keys. Hang me,
if that's your good pleasure. Take all, ransack the house; it is full of
gold. I give up all to you--"

"Come, come, crony," replied Louis XI., who was partly touched by the
sight of this strange suffering, "we shall find your treasure some fine
night, and the sight of such riches will give you heart to live. I will
come back in the course of this week--"

"As you please, sire."

At that answer the king, who had made a few steps toward the door of the
chamber, turned round abruptly. The two men looked at each other with an
expression that neither pen nor pencil can reproduce.

"Adieu, my crony," said Louis XI. at last in a curt voice, pushing up
his cap.

"May God and the Virgin keep you in their good graces!" replied the
silversmith humbly, conducting the king to the door of the house.

After so long a friendship, the two men found a barrier raised between
them by suspicion and gold; though they had always been like one man on
the two points of gold and suspicion. But they knew each other so well,
they had so completely the habit, one may say, of each other, that the
king could divine, from the tone in which Cornelius uttered the words,
"As you please, sire," the repugnance that his visits would henceforth
cause to the silversmith, just as the latter recognized a declaration of
war in the "Adieu, my crony," of the king.

Thus Louis XI. and his torconnier parted much in doubt as to the conduct
they ought in future to hold to each other. The monarch possessed the
secret of th