to it in saintly adoration. Patient
anatomists of human nature cannot too often enunciate the truths before
which all educations, laws, and philosophical systems must give way.
Let us repeat continually: it is absurd to force sentiments into one
formula: appearing as they do, in each individual man, they combine with
the elements that form his nature and take his own physiognomy.

Madame Granson, as she stood on that fatal spot, saw a woman approach
it, who exclaimed,--

"Was it here?"

That woman wept as the mother wept. It was Suzanne. Arriving that
morning at the hotel du More, she had been told of the catastrophe. If
poor Athanase had been living, she meant to do as many noble souls,
who are moneyless, dream of doing, and as the rich never think of
doing,--she meant to have sent him several thousand francs, writing up
the envelope the words: "Money due to your father from a comrade who
makes restitution to you." This tender scheme had been arranged by
Suzanne during her journey.

The courtesan caught sight of Madame Granson and moved rapidly away,
whispering as she passed her, "I loved him!"

Suzanne, faithful to her nature, did not leave Alencon on this occasion
without changing the orange-blossoms of the bride to rue. She was the
first to declare that Madame du Bousquier would never be anything but
Mademoiselle Cormon. With one stab of her tongue she revenged poor
Athanase and her dear chevalier.

Alencon now witnessed a suicide that was slower and quite differently
pitiful from that of poor Athanase, who was quickly forgotten by
society, which always makes haste to forget its dead. The poor Chevalier
de Valois died in life; his suicide was a daily occurrence for fourteen
years. Three months after the du Bousquier marriage society remarked,
not without astonishment, that the linen of the chevalier was frayed and
rusty, that his hair was irregularly combed and brushed. With a frowsy
head the Chevalier de Valois could no longer be said to exist! A few
of his ivory teeth deserted, though the keenest observers of human life
were unable to discover to what body they had hitherto belonged, whether
to a foreign legion or whether they were indigenous, vegetable or
animal; whether age had pulled them from the chevalier's mouth, or
whether they were left forgotten in the drawer of his dressing-table.
The cravat was crooked, indifferent to elegance. The negroes' heads grew
pale with dust and grease. The wrinkles of th