Bernard Jansoulet, as he lay among this wreckage, his shirt opened over his chest, pale and covered with blood, was indeed a man come to the shipwreck of his life, bruised and tossed aside along with the pitiful ruins of his artificial luxury dispersed and broken up, in the whirlpool of Paris.  Paul, with aching heart, contemplated the scene sadly, that face with its short nose, preserving in its inertia the savage yet kindly expression of an inoffensive creature that tried to defend itself before it died and had not time to bite.  He reproached himself bitterly with his inability to be of any service to him.  Where was that fine project of leading Jansoulet across the bogs, of guarding him against ambushes?  All that he had been able to do had been to save a few millions for him, and even these had come too late.

The windows had just been thrown open upon the curved balcony over the boulevard, now at the height of its noisy and brilliant stir.  The theatre was surrounded by, as it were, a plinth of gas-jets, a zone of fire which brought the gloomiest recesses into light, pricked out with revolving lanterns, like stars journeying through a dark sky.  The play was over.  People were coming out.  The black and dense crowd on the steps was dispersing over the white pavements, on its way to spread through the town the news of a great success and the name of an unknown author who to-morrow would be triumphant and famous.  A splendid evening, so that the windows of the restaurants were lighted up in gaiety and files of carriages passed through the streets at a late hour.  This tumult of festivity which the poor Nabob had loved so keenly, which seemed to go so well with the dizzy whirl of his existence, roused him to life for a moment.  His lips moved, and into his dilated eyes, turned towards de Gery, there came before he died a pained expression, beseeching and protesting, as though to call upon him as witness of one of the greatest and most cruel acts of injustice that Paris has ever committed.