“Then, it is all over?” said Jansoulet, overwhelmed.  “There is no longer any hope?”

Monpavon signed to him to listen.  A carriage rolled heavily along the avenue on the quay.  The visitors’ bell rang sharply several times in succession.  The marquis counted aloud:  “One, two, three, four.”  At the fifth he rose: 

“No more hope now.  Here comes the other,” said he, alluding to the Parisian superstition that a visit from the sovereign was always fatal to dying persons.  From every side the lackeys hastened up, opened the doors wide, ranged themselves in line, while the porter, his hat cocked forward and his staff resounding on the marble floor, announced the passage of two august shadows, of whom Jansoulet only caught a confused glimpse behind the liveried domestics, but whom he saw beyond a long perspective of open doors climbing the great staircase, preceded by a footman bearing a candelabrum.  The woman ascended, erect and proud, enveloped in a black Spanish mantilla; the man supported himself by the baluster, slower in his movements and tired, the collar of his light overcoat turned up above a rather bent back, which was shaken by a convulsive sob.

“Let us be off, Nabob.  Nothing more to be done here,” said the old beau, taking Jansoulet by the arm and drawing him outside.  He paused on the threshold, with raised hand, making a little gesture of farewell in the direction of the man who lay dying upstairs.  “Good-bye old fellow!” The gesture and the tone were polite, irreproachable, but the voice trembled a little.

The club in the Rue Royale, which was famous for its gambling parties, rarely saw one so desperate as the gaming of that night.  It commenced at eleven o’clock and was still going on at five in the morning.  Enormous sums were scattered over the green cloth, changing hands, moved now to one side, now to the other, heaped up, distributed, regained.  Fortunes were engulfed in this monster play, at the end of which the Nabob, who had started it to forget his terrors in the hazards of chance, after singular alternations and runs of luck enough to turn the hair of a beginner white, retired with winnings amounting to five hundred thousand francs.  On the boulevard the next day they said five millions, and everybody cried out on the scandal, especially the Messenger, three-quarters filled by an article against certain adventurers tolerated in the clubs, and who cause the ruin of the most honourable families.

Alas! what Jansoulet had won hardly represented enough to meet the first Schwalbach bills.

During this wild play, of which Mora was, however, the involuntary cause, and, as it were, the soul, his name was not once uttered.  Neither Cardailhac nor Jenkins put in an appearance.  Monpavon had taken to his bed, stricken more deeply than he wished it to be thought.  Nobody had any news.

“Is he dead?” Jansoulet said to himself as he left the club; and he felt a desire to make a call to inquire before going home.  It was no longer hope that urged him, but that sort of morbid and nervous curiosity which after a great fire leads the smitten unfortunate people, ruined and homeless, back to the wreck of their dwellings.