The Irish doctor, upon being admitted to that distressing scene, had no success with his fatherly ways, his fine superficial phrases. Not at any price would the Levantine take the pearls with arsenical base, to give tone to her system. The Nabob was horrified. What was he to do? Send her back to Tunis with the children? That was hardly possible. He was definitively in disgrace there. The Hemerlingues had triumphed. A last insult had filled the measure to overflowing: on Jansoulet's departure the bey had commissioned him to have several millions of gold coined after a new pattern at the Paris Mint; then the commission had been abruptly withdrawn and given to Hemerlingue. Jansoulet, being publicly insulted, retorted with a public manifesto, offering all his property for sale, his palace on the Bardo presented to him by the former bey, his villas at La Marse, all of white marble, surrounded by magnificent gardens, his counting rooms, the most commodious and most sumptuously furnished in the city, and instructing the intelligent Bompain to bring his wife and children to Paris in order to put the seal of finality to his departure. After such a display, it would be hard to return; that is what he tried to make Mademoiselle Afchin understand, but she replied only by prolonged groans. He strove to comfort her, to amuse her, but what form of distraction could be made to appeal to that abnormally apathetic nature? And then, could he change the skies of Paris, give back to the wretched Levantine her marble-tiled _patio_, where she used to pass long hours in a cool, delicious state of drowsiness, listening to the plashing of the water in the great alabaster fountain with three basins one above the other, and her gilded boat, covered with a purple awning and rowed by eight supple, muscular Tripolitan oarsmen over the lovely lake of El-Baheira, when the sun was setting? Sumptuous as were the apartments on Place Vendome, they could not supply the place of those lost treasures. And she plunged deeper than ever in her despair. One habitue of the house succeeded, however, in drawing her out of it, Cabassu, who styled himself on his cards "professor of massage;" a stout dark thick-set man, redolent of garlic and hair-oil, square-shouldered, covered with hair to his eyes, who knew stories of Parisian seraglios, trivial anecdotes within the limited range of Madame's intellect. He came once to rub her, and she wished to see him again, detained him. He was obliged to abandon all his other customers and to become the _masseur_ of that able-bodied creature, at a salary equal to that of a senator, her page, her reader, her body-guard. Jansoulet, overjoyed to see that his wife was contented, was not conscious of the disgusting absurdity of the intimacy.