se at all;
he declined all nourishment, and his terrified people, although he did
not complain, although he had a smile on his lips, although he continued
to speak with his sweet voice--his people went to Blois in search of the
ancient physician of the late Monsieur, and brought him to the Comte de
la Fere in such a fashion that he could see the comte without being
himself seen. For this purpose, they placed him in a closet adjoining
the chamber of the patient, and implored him not to show himself, in the
fear of displeasing their master, who had not asked for a physician. The
doctor obeyed; Athos was a sort of model for the gentlemen of the
country; the Blaisois boasted of possessing this sacred relic of the old
French glories. Athos was a great seigneur compared with such nobles as
the king improvised by touching with his yellow fecundating scepter the
dry trunks of the heraldic trees of the province.

People respected, we say, if they did not love Athos. The physician
could not bear to see his people weep, and to see flock round him the
poor of the canton, to whom Athos gave life and consolation by his kind
words and his charities. He examined, therefore, from the depths of his
hiding-place, the nature of that mysterious malady which bent down and
devoured more mortally every day a man but lately so full of life, and
of a desire to live. He remarked upon the cheeks of Athos the purple of
fever, which fires itself and feeds itself; slow fever, pitiless, born
in a fold of the heart, sheltering itself behind that rampart, growing
from the suffering it engenders, at once cause and effect of a perilous
situation. The comte spoke to nobody, we say; he did not even talk to
himself. His thought feared noise; it approached to that degree of
over-excitement which borders upon ecstasy. Man thus absorbed, though he
does not yet belong to God, already belongs no longer to earth. The
doctor remained for several hours studying this painful struggle of the
will against a superior power; he was terrified at seeing those eyes
always fixed, always directed toward an invisible object; he was
terrified at seeing beat with the same movement that heart from which
never a sigh arose to vary the melancholy state; sometimes the acuteness
of pain creates the hope of the physician. Half a day passed away thus.
The doctor formed his resolution like a brave man, like a man of firm
mind; he issued suddenly from his place of retreat, and went straig