His face was haggard, and his
red and swollen eyelids betrayed a long-continued want of sleep.
The fact is, he had suffered terribly during the past week. A man
may be a scapegrace and a spendthrift and may boast of it; he may
have no principle and no conscience; he may be immoral, he may
defy God and the devil, but it is nevertheless true that he
suffers fearful anguish of mind when he is guilty, for the first
time, of a positive crime, forbidden by the laws and punishable
with the galleys. And who can say how many crimes the Marquis de
Valorsay had committed since the day he provided his accomplice,
the Viscount de Coralth, with those fatal cards? And apart from
this there was something extremely appalling in the position of
this ruined millionaire, who was contending desperately against
his creditors for the vain appearance of splendor, with the
despairing energy of a ship-wrecked mariner struggling for the
possession of a floating spar. Had he not confessed to M.
Fortunat that he had suffered the tortures of the damned in his
struggle to maintain a show of wealth, while he was often without
a penny in his pocket, and was ever subject to the pitiless
surveillance of thirty servants? His agony, when he thought of his
precarious condition, could only be compared to that of a miner,
who, while ascending from the bowels of the earth, finds that the
rope, upon which his life depends, is slowly parting strand by
strand, and who asks himself, in terror, if the few threads that
still remain unsevered will be strong enough to raise him to the
mouth of the pit.
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