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 the face were blackened and puckered; the skin became parchment.  The nails, neglected, were often seen, alas! with a black velvet edging.  The waistcoat was tracked and stained with droppings which spread upon its surface like autumn leaves.  The cotton in the ears was seldom changed.  Sadness reigned upon that brow, and slipped its yellowing tints into the depths of each furrow.  In short, the ruins, hitherto so cleverly hidden, now showed through the cracks and crevices of that fine edifice, and proved the power of the soul over the body; for the fair and dainty man, the cavalier, the young blood, died when hope deserted him.  Until then the nose of the chevalier was ever delicate and nice; never had a damp black blotch, nor an amber drop fall from it; but now that nose, smeared with tobacco around the nostrils, degraded by the driblets which took advantage of the natural gutter placed between itself and the upper lip,—­that nose, which no longer cared to seem agreeable, revealed the infinite pains which the chevalier had formerly taken with his person, and made observers comprehend, by the extent of its degradation, the greatness and persistence of the man’s designs upon Mademoiselle Cormon.

Alas, too, the anecdotes went the way of the teeth; the clever sayings grew rare.  The appetite, however, remained; the old nobleman saved nothing but his stomach from the wreck of his hopes; though he languidly prepared his pinches of snuff, he ate alarming dinners.  Perhaps you will more fully understand the disaster that this marriage was to the mind and heart of the chevalier when you learn that his intercourse with the Princess Goritza became less frequent.