The portress at Rue Boursault led him to Denis Ramel’s apartment.  Lying on his bed with a kindly smile on his face, the old journalist seemed as if asleep.  The cold majesty of death gave a look of power to his face.  One might almost believe at times, from the scintillating light placed near his bony brow, that its rigid muscles moved.

Denis Ramel! the sure guide of his youth and his counsellor through life!  He recalled his entry on public life, his arrival in Paris, the first articles brought into the old editorial rooms of the Nation Francaise!  If for a moment he had been one of the heads of the State, it was due to the man stretched out before him now!

He gently stooped over the corpse and pressed a farewell kiss on the dead man’s brow.

As he turned round, he saw a man whom he had not at first seen and who had risen.

The man was very pale and greeted him with a timid air.

Vaudrey recognized Garnier, the man whom he had seen previously at
Ramel’s, a cough-racked, patient, dying man.

The consumptive had nevertheless outlived the old man.

“It is good of you to have come, monsieur,” said the workman.  “He loved you dearly.”

“He died suddenly then?”

“Yes, and quite alone, while reading a book.  He was found thus.  They thought he was sleeping.  It is all over, he is to be buried to-morrow.  Will you come, monsieur?—­I did not know who you were when—­you know—­I said—­In fact, it is kind—­let us say no more about it—­I beg your pardon—­There will be a vast gathering at Denis Ramel’s funeral, if there are present only a quarter of those whom he has obliged.”

Vaudrey was heartbroken the next day.  Behind Ramel’s coffin, not a person followed.  Himself, Garnier, and one or two old women from the house on Rue Boursault, who did not go all the way to the cemetery of Saint-Ouen because it was too far, were all that were present.  At the grave Sulpice Vaudrey stood alone with the grave-digger and the workman Garnier.  They buried Ramel in a newly-opened part close to the foot of a railway embankment.

For years Ramel had been forgotten, had even forgotten himself, he had let ambitious men pass beyond him, ingrates succeed and selfish men get to the top!  He no longer existed!  And those very men who had entreated him and called him dear master in the old days, soliciting and flattering him, now no longer knew his name.  Had he disappeared, or did he still live, that forerunner, a sort of Japanese idol, an ancient, a useless being who had known neither how to make his fortune nor his position, while building up that of others?  Nobody knew or cared.  Occasionally when circumstances called for it, they laughed at this romantic figure in politics, living like a porter, poor, lost, and buried under a mass of unknown individuals, after having made ministers and unmade governments.  Yet, at the news of his death, not one of those who were indebted to him for