either at the Chinese Baths.  He is too well known here.  All Paris would know of it the same evening.  There would be a scandal of bad taste, much coarse rumour about his death in the clubs and drawing-rooms.  And the old sensualist, the well-bred man, wishes to spare himself this shame, to plunge and be swallowed up in the vague anonymity of suicide, like those soldiers who, after great battles, neither wounded, dead, or living, are simply put down as “missing.”  That is why he has nothing on him which can be recognised, or furnish a hint to the inquiries of the police, why he seeks in this immense Paris the distant quarter where will open for him the terrible but oblivious confusion of the pauper’s grave.  Already, since Monpavon has been walking, the aspect of the boulevard has changed.  The crowd has become more compact, more active, and preoccupied, the houses smaller, marked with signs of commerce.  When the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin are passed, with their overflow from the faubourgs, the provincial physiognomy of the town accentuates itself.  The old beau no longer knows any one, and can congratulate himself on being unknown.

The shopkeepers looking curiously after him, with his fine linen, his well-cut coat, and good figure, take him for some famous actor strolling on the boulevard—­witness of his first triumphs—­before the play begins.  The wind freshens, the twilight softens the distances, and while the long road behind him still glitters, it grows darker now at every step—­like the past, with its retrospections to him who looks back and regrets.  It seems to Monpavon that he is walking into blackness.  He shivers a little, but does not falter, and continues to walk with erect head and chest thrown out.

M. de Monpavon walks to his death!  Now he is entering the complicated labyrinth of noisy streets, where the clatter of the omnibus mingles with the thousand humming trades of the working city, where the heat of the factory chimneys loses itself in the fever of a whole people struggling against hunger.  The air trembles, the gutters steam, the houses shake at the passing of the wagons, of the heavy drays rumbling round the narrow streets.  On a sudden the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted.  Between the black shop of a charcoal-seller and the establishment of a packing-case maker, whose pine boards leaning on the walls give him a little shiver, there is a wide door, surmounted by its sign, the word BATHS on a dirty lantern.  He enters, crosses a little damp garden where a jet of water weeps in a rockery.  Here is the gloomy corner he was looking for.  Who would ever believe that the Marquis de Monpavon had come there to cut his throat?  The house is at the end, low, with green blinds and a glass door, with a sham air of a villa.  He asks for a bath, and while it is being prepared he smokes his cigar at the window, with the noise of the water behind him, looks at the flower-bed of sparse lilac, and the high walls which inclose it.