frequently placed by the political and fashionable life of the great world between married people, she believed him slightly indisposed, nervous more than anything else; and had so little suspicion of a catastrophe that at the very hour when the doctors were mounting the great, dimly lit staircase at the other end of the palace, her private apartments were being lit up for a girls’ dance, one of those bals blancs which the ingenuity of the idle world had begun to make fashionable in Paris.

This consultation was like all others:  solemn and sinister.  Doctors no longer wear their great periwigs of the time of Moliere, but they still assume the same gravity of the priests of Isis, of astrologers bristling with cabalistic formulae pronounced with sage noddings of the head, to which, for comical effect, there is only wanting the high pointed cap of former days.  In this case the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from its setting.  In the vast bed-chamber, transformed, heightened, as it were, in dignity by the immobility of the owner, these grave figures came forward round the bed on which the light was concentrated, illuminating amid the whiteness of the linen and the purple of the hangings a face worn into hollows, pale from lips to eyes, but wrapped in serenity as in a veil, as in a shroud.  The consultants spoke in low tones, cast furtive glances as each other, or exchanged some barbarous word, remaining impassive, without even a frown.  But this mute and reticent expression of the doctor and magistrate, this solemnity with which science and justice hedge themselves about to hide their frailty or ignorance, had no power to move the duke.

Sitting up in bed, he continued to talk quietly, with the upward glance of the eye in which it seems as if thought rises before it finally takes wing, and Monpavon coldly followed his cue, hardening himself against his own emotion, taking from his friend a last lesson in “form”; while Louis, in the background, stood leaning against the door leading to the duchess’s apartment, the spectre of a silent domestic in whom detached indifference is a duty.

The most agitated, nervous man present was Jenkins.  Full of obsequious attentions for his “illustrious colleagues,” as he called them, with his lips pursed up, he hung round their consultation and attempted to take part in it; but the colleagues kept him at a distance and hardly answered him, as Fagon—­the Fagon of Louis XIV—­might have addressed some empiric summoned to the royal bedside.  Old Bouchereau especially had black looks for the inventor of the Jenkins pearls.  Finally, when they had thoroughly examined and questioned their patient, they retired to deliberate among themselves in a little room with lacquered ceilings and walls, filled by an assortment of bric-a-brac the triviality of which contrasted strangely with the importance of the discussion.

Solemn moment!  Anguish of the accused awaiting the decision of his judges—­life, death, reprieve, or pardon!