es.

"Well," cried the audience, "and what happened?"

"I will tell you in a few words--for this is not romance--it is
history."

We saw no more of Marcas. The administration lasted for three months; it
fell at the end of the session. Then Marcas came back to us, worked to
death. He had sounded the crater of power; he came away from it with the
beginnings of brain fever. The disease made rapid progress; we nursed
him. Juste at once called in the chief physician of the hospital where
he was working as house-surgeon. I was then living alone in our room,
and I was the most attentive attendant; but care and science alike were
in vain. By the month of January, 1838, Marcas himself felt that he had
but a few days to live.

The man whose soul and brain he had been for six months never even sent
to inquire after him. Marcas expressed the greatest contempt for the
Government; he seemed to doubt what the fate of France might be, and
it was this doubt that had made him ill. He had, he thought, detected
treason in the heart of power, not tangible, seizable treason, the
result of facts, but the treason of a system, the subordination of
national interests to selfish ends. His belief in the degradation of the
country was enough to aggravate his complaint.

I myself was witness to the proposals made to him by one of the leaders
of the antagonistic party which he had fought against. His hatred of
the men he had tried to serve was so virulent, that he would gladly have
joined the coalition that was about to be formed among certain ambitious
spirits who, at least, had one idea in common--that of shaking off the
yoke of the Court. But Marcas could only reply to the envoy in the words
of the Hotel de Ville:

"It is too late!"

Marcas did not leave money enough to pay for his funeral. Juste and I
had great difficulty in saving him from the ignominy of a pauper's bier,
and we alone followed the coffin of Z. Marcas, which was dropped into
the common grave of the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse.

We looked sadly at each other as we listened to this tale, the last we
heard from the lips of Charles Rabourdin the day before he embarked at
le Havre on a brig that was to convey him to the islands of Malay. We
all knew more than one Marcas, more than one victim of his devotion to a
party, repaid by betrayal or neglect.

LES JARDIES, May 1840.

ADDENDUM

The following personage appears in other stories of the Human Comedy.