:

"It is not a case of suicide. It is a crime of passion. Monsieur de
Ligny surprised Chevalier with Nanteuil. He fired seven revolver shots
at him. Two bullets struck our unfortunate comrade in the head and the
chest, four went wide, and the fifth grazed Nanteuil below the left
breast."

"Is Nanteuil wounded?"

"Only slightly."

"Will Monsieur de Ligny be arrested?"

"The affair is to be hushed up, and rightly so. I have, however, the best
authority for what I say."

In the carriages, too, the actresses were engaged in spreading various
reports. Some felt sure it was a case of murder; others, one of suicide.

"He shot himself in the chest with a revolver," asserted Falempin. "But
he only succeeded in wounding himself. The doctor said that if he had
been attended to in time he might have been saved. But they left him
lying on the floor, bathed in blood."

And Madame Doulce said to Ellen Midi:

"It has often been my fate to stand beside a deathbed. I always go down
on my knees and pray. I at once feel myself invaded by a heavenly
serenity."

"You are indeed fortunate!" replied Ellen Midi.

At the end of the Rue Campagne-Premiere, on the wide grey boulevards,
they became conscious of the length of the road which they had covered,
and the melancholy nature of the journey. They felt that while following
the coffin they had crossed the confines of life, and were already in
the country of the dead. On their right stretched the yards of the
marble-workers, the florists' shops which supplied wreaths for funerals,
displays of potted flowers, and the economical furniture of tombs, zinc
flower-stands, wreaths of immortelles in cement, and guardian angels in
plaster. On their left, they could see behind the low wall of the
cemetery the white crosses rising among the bare tops of the lime-trees,
and everywhere, in the wan dust, they breathed death, commonplace,
uniform deaths under the administration of City and State, and poorly
embellished by the pious hands of relations.

They passed between two massive pillars of stone surmounted by winged
hour-glasses. The hearse advanced slowly on the gravel which creaked in
the silence. It seemed, amid the homes of the dead, to be twice as tall
as before. The mourners read the famous names on some of the tombs, or
gazed at the statue of a young girl, seated, book in hand. Old Maury
deciphered, in the inscriptions, the age of the deceased. Short lives,
and even more lives of a