d see no bottom to the
gulf of misery that lay before him, into which he was about to roll. In
presence of such threatened evil his boldness deserted him. Would the
Comtesse de Vandenesse stand by him? Would she fly with him? Women are
never led into a gulf of that kind except by an absolute love, and the
love of Raoul and Marie had not bound them together by the mysterious
and inalienable ties of happiness. But supposing that the countess did
follow him to some foreign country; she would come without fortune,
despoiled of everything, and then, alas! she would merely be one more
embarrassment to him. A mind of a second order, and a proud mind like
that of Nathan, would be likely to see, under these circumstances, and
did see, in suicide the sword to cut the Gordian knots. The idea of
failure in the face of the world and that society he had so lately
entered and meant to rule, of leaving the chariot of the countess and
becoming once more a muddied pedestrian, was more than he could bear.
Madness began to dance and whirl and shake her bells at the gates of the
fantastic palace in which the poet had been dreaming. In this extremity,
Nathan waited for some lucky accident, determined not to kill himself
until the final moment.

During the last days employed by the legal formalities required before
proceeding to arrest for debt, Raoul went about, in spite of himself,
with that coldly sullen and morose expression of face which may be
noticed in persons who are either fated to commit suicide or are
meditating it. The funereal ideas they are turning over in their minds
appear upon their foreheads in gray and cloudy tints, their smile has
something fatalistic in it, their motions are solemn. These unhappy
beings seem to want to suck the last juices of the life they mean to
leave; their eyes see things invisible, their ears are listening to a
death-knell, they pay no attention to the minor things about them. These
alarming symptoms Marie perceived one evening at Lady Dudley's. Raoul
was sitting apart on a sofa in the boudoir, while the rest of the
company were conversing in the salon. The countess went to the door, but
he did not raise his head; he heard neither Marie's breathing nor the
rustle of her silk dress; he was gazing at a flower in the carpet, with
fixed eyes, stupid with grief; he felt he had rather die than abdicate.
All the world can't have the rock of Saint Helena for a pedestal.
Moreover, suicide was then the fashio