He disappeared. How often Landri was destined to see again in memory that horseman, so proud of mien, riding away across the fields! "Adieu, father!" he cried in response; and it was indeed an adieu that they exchanged,--although they were to meet again,--adieu of the father to the son, of the son to the father. And neither knew it! "He is too anxious about his friend," said Landri to himself as he left the train, an hour later, on the platform of the Gare du Nord. "I will go there first. Then to Métivier's. Place de la Madeleine--that's on my way to luncheon at the club. My father will have his telegram all the earlier. Mon Dieu! if only I have no terrible news to send him!" As so often happens, the unhappy youth dreaded the very thing that he ought most earnestly to have desired. He had a slight sense of relief when he noticed, on reaching Rue de Solferino, that the straw was still spread in front of the house. M. de Claviers' friend was still alive. But the bulletin, posted in the concierge's lodge, contained one line, more ominous than that of the preceding day: "A very restless night. Increasing weakness." Beside it was a register on which were inscribed long columns of signatures "with currents of air," as the free-mason-colonel was wont to say in his coarse and picturesque "_fichards_'" slang. Our death-beds and our burials sum up, in a synopsis, as it were, our whole social individuality. "Jaubourg-Saint-Germain" was taking his departure as if he really deserved that biting epigram. Who, pray, in Paris is sufficiently interested in the real motives of our actions to seek them beyond our gestures? The son of a stock-broker, Jaubourg had frequented a circle very different from that of his birth, for reasons which were not vanity. All his shrewdness had exerted itself to dissemble them. Moreover, if he had been a great lover he had been this also,--the social status makes itself felt even in the tender passion,--a wealthy bourgeois training among patricians. All sorts of little indications adjusted themselves to that rôle in his case. He had chosen for his abode the first floor of an old parliamentary house, spared when Boulevard Saint-Germain was laid out. The immeasurably high-studded rooms presented a seignorial aspect, in harmony with the very beautiful furniture and the tapestries that Charles Jaubourg had collected therein,--as at Grandchamp. But the furniture and tapestries did not constitute a true ensemble. The aristocratic stage-setting, which was so alive in the château de Claviers, took on here the factitious aspect of a museum. It was the work of a man who had employed the leisure acquired by the toil of his parents in not resembling them. He proceeded thus from the small to the great.