The death of Marie-Anne had destroyed all his hopes of happiness; and realizing the emptiness of his life, he did his best to fill the void with bustle and excitement. He threw himself headlong into politics, striving to find in power and in satisfied ambition some relief from his despondency. It is only just to say that Mme. Blanche had remained superior to circumstances; and that she had played the role of a happy, contented woman with consummate skill. Her frightful sufferings and anxiety never marred the haughty serenity of her face. She soon won a place as one of the queens of Parisian society; and plunged into dissipation with a sort of frenzy. Was she endeavoring to divert her mind? Did she hope to overpower thought by excessive fatigue? To Aunt Medea alone did Blanche reveal her secret heart. “I am like a culprit who has been bound to the scaffold, and then abandoned by the executioner, who says, as he departs: ‘Live until the axe falls of its own accord.’” And the axe might fall at any moment. A word, a trifle, an unlucky chance--she dared not say “a decree of Providence,” and Martial would know all. Such, in all its unspeakable horror, was the position of the beautiful and envied Duchesse de Sairmeuse. “She must be perfectly happy,” said the world; but she felt herself sliding down the precipice to the awful depths below. Like a shipwrecked mariner clinging to a floating spar, she scanned the horizon with a despairing eye, and saw only angry and threatening clouds. Time, perhaps, might bring her some relief. Once it happened that six weeks went by, and she heard nothing from Chupin. A month and a half! What had become of him? To Mme. Blanche this silence was as ominous as the calm that precedes the storm. A line in a newspaper solved the mystery. Chupin was in prison. The wretch, after drinking more heavily than usual one evening, had quarrelled with his brother, and had killed him by a blow upon the head with a piece of iron. The blood of the betrayed Lacheneur was visited upon the heads of his murderer’s children. Tried by the Court of Assizes, Chupin was condemned to twenty years of hard labor, and sent to Brest. But this sentence afforded the duchess no relief. The culprit had written to her from his Paris prison; he wrote to her from Brest. But he did not send his letters through the post. He confided them to comrades, whose terms of imprisonment had expired, and who came to the Hotel de Sairmeuse demanding an interview with the duchess. And she received them. They told all the miseries they had endured “out there;” and usually ended by requesting some slight assistance. One morning, a man whose desperate appearance and manner frightened her, brought the duchess this laconic epistle: