In his lifetime--it was already permissible to speak thus of him--Jaubourg had been the typical society man, who does not surrender; the worldling whose courageous courtesy spares others the contact and the spectacle of his degeneration. That degeneration was complete to-day, ominously undeniable and irreparable. But as a matter of habit the Parisian had mustered energy to make a last toilet. His face was washed and shaved, his sparse gray locks brushed, his hands cared for. He had put on a dressing-jacket of soft silk. Puerile yet pathetic details, which indicated his desire not to leave a too perverted image of himself in the memory of his visitor, the only one whom he had admitted during the last half-week. He had expressly forbidden Joseph to notify the few relations--very distant they were--that he still possessed. He had trembled lest they should suspect a condition of affairs which he had made it a point of honor to conceal for twenty-nine years. Yes, every effort of his life had had but one aim: to leave his fortune to the son he had had by another man's wife, without causing the world or that other man to wonder. The world--he had succeeded in hoodwinking it almost absolutely by such prodigies of diplomacy! The stories told by two or three members of his family, such as Madame Privat, had not gone outside a very small circle, and intimates with the perspicacity of a Bressieux are rare. The friendship which Jaubourg had manifested for M. de Claviers since his widowhood, and which, by a strange but very human anomaly, was sincere, would have put that noble-minded man's suspicions to sleep, if he had conceived any. But that great heart did not know what it was to distrust! It was he whom Jaubourg by his will had made his sole legatee, without informing him or anyone else. His reflections had led him to this roundabout method of assuring to Landri his three millions at least. He had, as we have seen, carried his scrupulosity to the point of being persistently cold in his treatment of the young man, who, like everybody else, must never know the truth. The adulterine father had anticipated everything, everything except the death-agony among the hallucinations of memory! On his death-bed he was to destroy this masterpiece of his prudence, and, we must add, of a chivalry instigated perhaps by a tacit rivalry with the magnanimous friend whom his passion had caused him to betray. He had failed therein, for the first time, in yielding to the unspeakable craving to see once more, before taking his departure forever, that son who bore another's name and who was so dear to him. Few men have the strength to die absolutely alone. Jaubourg had alleged to himself the pretext of talking to the young man of the project of marriage with Mademoiselle de Charlus, to which he attached very great importance. He had not foreseen the loss of energy under the attacks of his malady, or the animal cry of nature in rebellion.