Fromont attempted to speak, but a gesture from his wife restrained him, and Risler continued: 

“I am no longer your partner, Georges.  I am once more the clerk that I never should have ceased to be.  From this day our partnership articles are cancelled.  I insist upon it, you understand; I insist upon it.  We will remain in that relation to each other until the house is out of difficulty and I can—­But what I shall do then concerns me alone.  This is what I wanted to say to you, Georges.  You must give your attention to the factory diligently; you must show yourself, make it felt that you are master now, and I believe there will turn out to be, among all our misfortunes, some that can be retrieved.”

During the silence that followed, they heard the sound of wheels in the garden, and two great furniture vans stopped at the door.

“I beg your pardon,” said Risler, “but I must leave you a moment.  Those are the vans from the public auction rooms; they have come to take away my furniture from upstairs.”

“What! you are going to sell your furniture too?” asked Madame Fromont.

“Certainly—­to the last piece.  I am simply giving it back to the firm.  It belongs to it.”

“But that is impossible,” said Georges.  “I can not allow that.”

Risler turned upon him indignantly.

“What’s that?  What is it that you can’t allow?”

Claire checked him with an imploring gesture.

“True—­true!” he muttered; and he hurried from the room to escape the sudden temptation to give vent to all that was in his heart.

The second floor was deserted.  The servants, who had been paid and dismissed in the morning, had abandoned the apartments to the disorder of the day following a ball; and they wore the aspect peculiar to places where a drama has been enacted, and which are left in suspense, as it were, between the events that have happened and those that are still to happen.  The open doors, the rugs lying in heaps in the corners, the salvers laden with glasses, the preparations for the supper, the table still set and untouched, the dust from the dancing on all the furniture, its odor mingled with the fumes of punch, of withered flowers, of rice-powder—­all these details attracted Risler’s notice as he entered.

In the disordered salon the piano was open, the bacchanal from ’Orphee aux Enfers’ on the music-shelf, and the gaudy hangings surrounding that scene of desolation, the chairs overturned, as if in fear, reminded one of the saloon of a wrecked packet-boat, of one of those ghostly nights of watching when one is suddenly informed, in the midst of a fete at sea, that the ship has sprung a leak, that she is taking in water in every part.

The men began to remove the furniture.  Risler watched them at work with an indifferent air, as if he were in a stranger’s house.  That magnificence which had once made him so happy and proud inspired in him now an insurmountable disgust.  But, when he entered his wife’s bedroom, he was conscious of a vague emotion.