“Suicide,” he said, and folded the letter across. Then, with a callousness that surprised himself, he went to the bed and pulled aside the heavy blue brocade curtains, which were drawn closely together as they had been before. He saw what he had expected to see: the young painter, prone and still, with fixed open eyes and a sneer on his stiff lips. Luc stood gazing; his serene brows contracted with an expression of pity, anger, and regret. He stooped and laid his hand on the dulled hair of the young suicide, damp with the death-agony. The coverlet was slightly disturbed by the last struggle of departing life, the dead man’s limbs slightly contracted, as if he had died in the convulsion of a shudder. His left hand and arm lay across his breast, showing that his final action had been to draw the curtains about him. Luc thought of the bitter sarcasm of the letter, and the hand he laid on the painter’s forehead quivered. There was no mark of any violence; the young painter had evidently made an end of himself with poison. Luc moved away from the bed; he checked an almost mechanical impulse to lay the melancholy crucifix hanging above the bed on the dead man’s breast, and, moving to the canvases piled against the wall, turned the first two or three round. They were marked and defaced by a knife, which had completely disfigured the original paintings. Luc looked no more. A sword lay across a chair, and near it an open snuff-box filled with gold pieces. The Marquis felt a blankness of all sensation save weariness and aversion. He left the room and called the servant of the house, and soon the chamber of the dead was filled with people, with question, curiosity, wonder. Nothing, it appeared, was known of the dead man. He had come a few days before by the coach from Paris; he had given his name as Henri de Bèze; the day before he had paid for his week’s lodging. He had received no letters while in Versailles, nor, as far as could be known, had he sent any. No one had visited him, but he had been much from the house. Nor did a search among his effects provide any further information. If he had had any papers, he had destroyed them. He had died with his story, which might have been common or tragical, wrapped at least in the dignity of silence. There was enough money in the snuff-box to pay for his decent burial. A manifest suicide, and one who had died without absolution or any of the offices of the Church, his grave would be in the lonely strip of land outside consecrated ground where play-actors and vagabonds and Jews were laid. Luc returned to his own room, his head sick with fatigue, and seated himself by the window. In the commotion, his departure for Paris had been delayed; he wondered if he should return to-day. A slackness had fallen on his thoughts.