It was late in the afternoon, the galleries were deserted, the glow of the setting sun cast melancholy shadows over the plastic statues of stone and granite wrought by the hands of the ancient Egyptians and long forgotten Greeks. There was even vaster melancholy in his heart. The gods and goddesses he worshipped in his youth seemed to be mocking him—Bacchus and Apollo, Orpheus and the bearded, horny Pan—they all seemed to jeer at him. He could not withhold a groan. He fathomed the despair of Moses, the son of Amram, as he stood on the top of the Pisgah and yearningly gazed at the land of Canaan—the land for which he had fought that others might enter but he could not enter. That was the irony of life, the jest of the gods. He, too, like Moses of old, had dragged himself to the top of Pisgah to have his last glance at his promised land! A thousand sad thoughts flitted through his brain. He limped along the vast halls and paused before Venus de Milo. A hectic flush came into his face. He looked up at the armless goddess with the covetousness of a virgin youth beholding a maiden of rare beauty. Settling down on the cold stone bench in front of the statue, both of his hands resting on the head of his cane, his half-blind eyes blurred with tears, he gazed yearningly at the parted lips of her exquisite mouth. Was she just smiling, or was she, too, smiling at him? His eyes closed for a moment, with unbearable pain in his heart. Ah, if he could only die at this very moment! he reflected. That would be a poetical, pagan, fitting death for him. His whole life passed before him like a vision. All his life he had worshipped beauty—the divine figure before him was the symbol of beauty—her seductive, tantalizing, heavenly smile, her sweet sensuous lips set his blood boiling. Tears rolled down his wan cheeks, his enfeebled frame shook with grief and mortification. He must live perforce and look on as the great, avenging, mocking God was finishing his diabolic jest . . . . He struggled to his feet and staggered through the vast corridors, without turning his eyes in the direction of the artistic masterpieces of all ages . . . After that visit at the Louvre Albert was unable to leave his room. His forebodings were prophetic. That palace of art—the Salle de la Venus de Milo—was his Mount of Nebo, from which he had caught the last glimpse of his promised land. II. One day Marguerite entered his room with the announcement that some one wished to see him. At first he made no reply. He lay stretched on a low couch with the immobility of a corpse and his upper eyelids met the lower in two fine pencilled lines like the eyes of the dead. His hair and beard, framing skin of deathly pallor, were also lifeless. His beautifully shaped right hand, thin almost to the point of transparency, rested limply on his coverlet. Marguerite repeated: “Albert, there is some one who wants to see you.”