“Burn everything,” said he to him in a faint voice; and seeing him move towards the fireplace, where a fire was burning despite the warmth of the season. “No,” he added, “not here. There are too many of them. Some one might come.” Monpavon took up the writing-table, which was not heavy, and signed to the _valet de chambre_ to go before him with a light. But Jenkins sprang forward: “Stay here, Louis; the duke may want you.” He took hold of the lamp; and moving carefully down the whole length of the great corridor, exploring the waiting-rooms, the galleries, in which the fireplaces proved to be filled with artificial plants and quite emptied of ashes, they wandered like spectres in the silence and darkness of the vast house, alive only over yonder on the right, were pleasure was singing like a bird on a roof which is about to fall in ruins. “There is no fire anywhere. What is to be done with all this?” they asked each other in great embarrassment. They might have been two thieves dragging away a chest which they did not know how to open. At last Monpavon, out of patience, walked straight to a door, the only one which they had not yet opened. “_Ma foi_, so much the worse! Since we cannot burn them, we will drown them. Hold the light, Jenkins.” And they entered. Where were they? Saint-Simon relating the downfall of one of those sovereign existences, the disarray of ceremonies, of dignities, of grandeurs, caused by death and especially by sudden death, only Saint-Simon might have found words to tell you. With his delicate, carefully kept hands, the Marquis de Monpavon did the pumping. The other passed to him the letters after tearing them into small pieces, packets of letters, on satin paper, tinted, perfumed, adorned with crests, coats of arms, small flags with devices, covered with handwritings, fine, hurried, scrawling, entwining, persuasive; and all those flimsy pages went whirling one over the other in eddying streams of water which crumpled them, soiled them, washed out their tender links before allowing them to disappear with a gurgle down the drain. They were love-letters and of every kind, from the note of the adventuress, “_I saw you pass yesterday in the Bois, M. le Duc_,” to the aristocratic reproaches of the last mistress but one, and the complaints of ladies deserted, and the page, still fresh, of recent confidences. Monpavon was in the secret of all these mysteries--put a name on each of them: “That is Mme. Moor. Hallo! Mme. d’Athis!” A confusion of coronets and initials, of caprices and old habits, sullied by the promiscuity of this moment, all engulfed in the horrid closet by the light of a lamp, with the noise of an intermittent gush of water, departing into oblivion by a shameful road. Suddenly Jenkins paused in his work of destruction. Two satin-gray letters trembled as he held them in his fingers.