Landri, without quite understanding why, had never cared overmuch for that canvas, which he preserved as a relique. His mother had bequeathed it to him expressly, in a will made during the last days of the terrible illness of which she died. Obsessed by the anxiety which consumed him, he suddenly detested that picture, and hurriedly walked away from it. That _grande dame_, in her festival costume, who had reigned over that life of extravagance while bearing her part in it, had no moral aid to offer him! Nor had the grandfathers and grandmothers, whose old-time faces covered all the walls of the salons once inhabited by them according to the same principle of unbridled expenditure. The marquis's guests were beginning to crowd the rooms, and the young man contemplated those family portraits over their heads: young women and old women of bygone centuries, lords and prelates, ambassadors and field-marshals, commanders of the Saint-Esprit and Grand Crosses of Saint-Louis. Those faces, by their presence alone, seemed to entreat the inheritor of their name to labor to spare them that last great outrage--to be carried away from the ancestral dwelling, to become simply a Rigaud or a Largillière, a Nattier or a Tocqué, a Drouet or a Vigée-Lebrun, in some random collection. To spare them that outrage--but how? And Landri felt that his uncertainty increased.--Yes, what was his duty? But what if Chaffin were sincere, if his outlook were just, if, in order to save his father from a final crash, it were necessary, man-fashion, to sacrifice those portraits and everything else,--the Gobelins and that series by Boucher, the _Noble Pastorale_, and Natoire's Mark Antony, and the Beauvais tapestries, and the gilded wainscotings of Foliot and Cagny, and the carpets from La Savonnerie, and the bronzes, and the hangings, and all that array of beautiful objects, whose frivolous magnificence inevitably demanded such assemblages as that of this evening? Passing from inanimate things to people, Landri studied one after another, first in the salons, afterward in the dining-hall, the familiar faces of M. de Claviers' guests and of M. de Claviers himself. On the day when those Férussacs and Hautchemins and Traverses and Sicards and Saint-Larys and all the rest, and Louis de Bressieux and Florimund de Charlus, should learn of their host's downfall, would they pity him much more than his secretary did? Their egoisms, their fickleness, their indifference seemed to become visible to the son's grief-stricken imagination.