Old men have a fragile sleep. M. Gillenormand's bed-room joined the drawing-room, and whatever precautions had been taken, the noise awoke him. Surprised by the crack of light which he saw in his door, he had got out of bed and groped his way to the door. He was standing on the threshold, with one hand on the door-handle, his head slightly bent forward and shaking, his body enfolded in a white dressing-gown as straight and creaseless as a winding-sheet: he was surprised, and looked like a ghost peering into a tomb. He noticed the bed, and on the mattress this young bleeding man, of the whiteness of wax, with closed eyes, open mouth, livid cheeks, naked to the waist, marked all over with vermilion, wounded, motionless, and brightly illumined. The grandfather had from head to foot that shudder which ossified limbs can have. His eyes, whose cornea was yellow owing to their great age, were veiled by a sort of glassy stare; his entire face assumed in an instant the earthly angles of a skeleton's head; his arms fell pendent as if a spring had been broken in them, and his stupor was displayed by the outspreading of all the fingers of his two old trembling hands. His knees formed a salient angle, displaying through the opening of his dressing-gown his poor naked legs bristling with white hairs, and he murmured,-- "Marius!" "He has just been brought here, sir," said Basque; "he went to the barricade, and--" "He is dead," the old gentleman exclaimed in a terrible voice. "Oh, the brigand!" Then a sort of sepulchral transfiguration drew up this centenarian as straight as a young man. "You are the surgeon, sir," he said; "begin by telling me one thing. He is dead, is he not?" The surgeon, who was frightfully anxious, maintained silence, and M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with a burst of terrifying laughter. "He is dead, he is dead! He has let himself be killed at the barricade through hatred of me; it was against me that he did it! Ah, the blood-drinker, that is the way in which he returns to me! Woe of my life, he is dead!" He went to a window, opened it quite wide, as if he were stifling, and standing there began speaking to the night in the street.