"See, dear Madame Darcourt, this cane saved my life in the prisons of Brindisi, when those Neapolitan ruffians tried to assassinate me. Look to it that it never leaves me, let it be buried with me! My boy will not know the price I set on it, and it would only be lost before he is old enough to use it." And Madame Darcourt, who saw that he was still somewhat delirious, replied, in order to soothe him, that it should be done as he wished. "See," my father said,--"the head is gold." "Certainly it is," she replied. "Well, then, as I cannot leave my children sufficiently well off to deprive them of the money that knob might fetch--little though it may be--take the cane to Duguet's, the goldsmith's opposite, who will melt it down into a nugget,--then let him bring the nugget to me directly he has done it." Madame Darcourt was about to venture a remark, but he entreated her so insistently to do what he asked, that she consented, and took the cane to Duguet. She returned immediately, as she only had to run across the street. "Well?" my father asked. "All right, you shall have your nugget at six o'clock to-morrow evening, General." "To-morrow at six in the evening," repeated my father. "That will do; it is probable I shall not be dead by then." Next day Duguet brought the nugget over, and the dying man gave it to my mother: he was exceedingly weak by then, but his mind was perfectly clear, and he was able to hear what was said to him and to talk. At ten at night, feeling death near at hand, he asked for Abbé Grégoire. Abbé Grégoire was not only a good priest, he was an excellent friend of my father. It was not a confession that the dying man wanted to make, for in all his life my father had not done a single bad action with which he could reproach himself; maybe in the depths of his heart he harboured feelings of hatred towards Berthier and Napoleon. But how could the last hours of a dying man concern these men at the pinnacle of fame and fortune? Moreover, all feelings of hatred were forgotten in the two hours before his death, which were spent in trying to comfort those he was to leave alone in the world, when he had departed from it. Once, he asked to see me; but, as they were preparing to fetch me from my cousin's, where I had been sent, he forbade them. "No," he said,--"poor child, he is asleep, do not disturb him." Finally, after bidding farewell to Madame Darcourt and the abbé, he turned towards my mother and, keeping his last breath for her, he died in her arms as midnight struck. CHAPTER XII My love for my father--His love for me--I am taken away to my cousin Marianne's--Plan of the house--The forge--The apparition--I learn the death of my father--I wish to go to heaven to kill God--Our situation at the death of my father--Hatred of Bonaparte. The night my father died I had been carried out of the house by Maman Zine and deposited with my other cousin, Marianne, who lived with her father in the rue de Soissons.