their weakness or their
ignorance, had no power to move the duke.

Sitting on his bed, he continued to talk tranquilly, with that slightly
exalted expression in which the thought seems to soar upward as if to
escape, and Monpavon coolly replied to him, hardening himself against
his emotion, taking a last lesson in breeding from his friend, while
Louis, in the background, leaned against the door leading to the
duchess's apartments, the type of the silent servitor, in whom heedless
indifference is a duty.

The agitated, the feverish member of the party was Jenkins.

Overflowing with obsequious respect for "his illustrious confreres," as
he unctuously called them, he prowled about their conference and tried
to take part in it; but his confreres kept him at a distance, hardly
answered him, or answered him haughtily, as Fagon--Louis the
Fourteenth's Fagon--might have answered some charlatan who had been
summoned to the royal bedside. Old Bouchereau especially looked askance
at the inventor of the Jenkins Pearls. At last, when they had thoroughly
examined and questioned their patient, they withdrew for deliberation to
a small salon, all in lacquer-work, with gleaming highly-colored walls
and ceiling, filled with an assortment of pretty trifles, whose
uselessness contrasted strangely with the importance of the discussion.

A solemn moment, the agony of the accused man awaiting the decision of
his judges, life, death, reprieve or pardon!

With his long white hand Mora continued to caress his moustache, his
favorite gesture, to talk with Monpavon about the club and the
green-room at the Varietes, asking for news of the proceedings in the
Chamber and what progress had been made in the matter of the Nabob's
election--all with perfect coolness and without the slightest
affectation. Then, fatigued doubtless, or fearing that his glance, which
constantly returned to the portiere opposite through which the decree of
fate was presently to come forth, should betray the emotion that lurked
at the bottom of his heart, he leaned his head back, closed his eyes,
and did not open them again until the doctors returned. Still the same
cold, ominous faces, veritable faces of judges with the terrible word of
human destiny on their lips, the Final word, which the courts pronounce
without emotion, but which the doctors, all of whose skill and learning
it baffles, evade and seek to convey by circumlocution.

"Well, messieurs, what says the Facu