And while they moralised upon the nothingness of his life, his corpse, the remains of nothing, was receiving the honours of death. Carriage after carriage drew up at the church; liveries brown and liveries blue came and disappeared; long-frocked footmen bowed to the pavement with a pompous banging of doors and steps; the groups of journalists respectfully made way, now for the Duchess Padovani, stately and proud, now for Madame Ancelin, blooming in her crape, now for Madame Eviza, whose Jewish eyes shone through her veil with blaze enough to attract a constable--all the ladies of the Académie, assembled in full congregation to practise their worship, not so much by a service to the memory of Loisillon, as by contemplation of their living idols, the ‘deities’ made and fashioned by the cunning of their little hands, the work upon which, as women, they had employed the superabundance of their energy, artfulness, ambition, and pride. Some actresses had come too, on the pretext that the deceased had been the president of some sort of Actors’ Orphanage, but moved in reality by the frantic determination ‘not to be out of it,’ which belongs to their class. Their expressions of woe were such that they might have been taken for near relations. A carriage suddenly drawing up set down a distracted group of black veils, whose sorrow was distressing to witness. The widow, at last? No, it is Marguerite Oger, the great sensational actress, whose appearance excites all round the square a prolonged stir and much pushing about. From the porch a journalist ran forward to meet her, and taking her hands besought her to bear up. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I ought to be calm; I will,’ Whereupon, drying her tears and forcing them back with her handkerchief, she entered, or it should rather be said ‘went on,’ into the darkness of the nave, with its background of glimmering tapers, fell down before a desk on the ladies’ side in a prostration of self-abandonment, and rising with a sorrowful air said to another actress at her side, ‘How much did they take at the Vaudeville last night?’ ‘168L. 18s.,’ answered her friend, with the same accent of grief.