airing appeals that were
made to Mora from one end of France to the other, as to one of those
houses of refuge in the forest in which a light shines at night and at
which all those who have lost their way apply for shelter. Not that he
was hard to the unfortunate, perhaps indeed he felt that he was too
readily susceptible to pity, which he regarded as an inferior sentiment,
a weakness unworthy of the strong, and for the same reason that he
denied it to others, dreaded it for himself, lest it impair his courage.
So that no one in the palace, save Monpavon and Louis the valet, knew
the purpose of the visit of those three persons who were mysteriously
ushered into the presence of the Minister of State. Even the duchess
herself was in ignorance. Separated from her husband by all the barriers
that life in the most exalted political and social circles places
between the husband and wife in such exceptional establishments, she
supposed that he was slightly indisposed, ill mainly in his imagination,
and had so little suspicion of an impending catastrophe that, at the
very hour when the physicians were ascending the half-darkened grand
staircase, her private apartments at the other end of the palace were
brilliantly illuminated for an informal dancing-party, one of those
_white balls_ which the ingenuity of idle Paris was just beginning to
introduce.

That consultation was, like all consultations, grim and solemn. Doctors
no longer wear the huge wigs of Moliere's day, but they still assume the
same portentous gravity of priests of Isis or astrologers, bristling
with cabalistic formulae accompanied by movements of the head which lack
only the pointed cap of an earlier age to produce a laughable effect. On
this occasion the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from the
surroundings. In the vast room, transformed, magnified as it were, by
the master's immobility, those solemn faces approached the bed upon
which the light was concentrated, revealing amid the white linen and the
purple curtains a shrivelled face, pale from the lips to the eyes, but
enveloped with serenity as with a veil, as with a winding-sheet. The
consulting physicians talked in low tones, exchanged a furtive glance,
an outlandish word or two, remained perfectly impassive without moving
an eyebrow. But that mute, unmeaning expression characteristic of the
doctor and the magistrate, that solemnity with which science and justice
encompass themselves in order to conceal