--it beat no longer.

"Can it really be so?" he said, looking from the colonel, who stood
there motionless, to Stephanie's face. Death had invested it with
a radiant beauty, a transient aureole, the pledge, it may be, of a
glorious life to come.

"Yes, she is dead."

"Oh, but that smile!" cried Philip; "only see that smile. Is it
possible?"

"She has grown cold already," answered M. Fanjat.

M. de Sucy made a few strides to tear himself from the sight; then he
stopped, and whistled the air that the mad Stephanie had understood;
and when he saw that she did not rise and hasten to him, he walked away,
staggering like a drunken man, still whistling, but he did not turn
again.

In society General de Sucy is looked upon as very agreeable, and
above all things, as very lively and amusing. Not very long ago a lady
complimented him upon his good humor and equable temper.

"Ah! madame," he answered, "I pay very dearly for my merriment in the
evening if I am alone."

"Then, you are never alone, I suppose."

"No," he answered, smiling.

If a keen observer of human nature could have seen the look that Sucy's
face wore at that moment, he would, without doubt, have shuddered.

"Why do you not marry?" the lady asked (she had several daughters of her
own at a boarding-school). "You are wealthy; you belong to an old and
noble house; you are clever; you have a future before you; everything
smiles upon you."

"Yes," he answered; "one smile is killing me--"

On the morrow the lady heard with amazement that M. de Sucy had shot
himself through the head that night.

The fashionable world discussed the extraordinary news in divers
ways, and each had a theory to account for it; play, love, ambition,
irregularities in private life, according to the taste of the speaker,
explained the last act of the tragedy begun in 1812. Two men alone, a
magistrate and an old doctor, knew that Monsieur le Comte de Sucy was
one of those souls unhappy in the strength God gives to them to enable
them to triumph daily in a ghastly struggle with a mysterious horror. If
for a minute God withdraws His sustaining hand, they succumb.

PARIS, March 1830.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Farewell, by Honore de Balzac

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAREWELL ***

***** This file should be named 5873.txt or 5873.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gut