The most perennial and the best materialized of human ideas, the idea
by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the
fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel
claws perpetually into his heart. Then, in the midst of this torture,
Fear arose, with all its accompanying sentiments. Two men had his
secret, the secret he did not know himself. Louis XI. or Coyctier
could post men to watch him during his sleep and discover the unknown
gulf into which he had cast his riches,--those riches he had watered
with the blood of so many innocent men. And then, beside his fear,
arose Remorse.

In order to prevent during his lifetime the abduction of his hidden
treasure, he took the most cruel precautions against sleep; besides
which, his commercial relations put him in the way of obtaining
powerful anti-narcotics. His struggles to keep awake were awful--alone
with night, silence, Remorse, and Fear, with all the thoughts that
man, instinctively perhaps, has best embodied--obedient thus to a
moral truth as yet devoid of actual proof.

At last this man so powerful, this heart so hardened by political and
commercial life, this genius, obscure in history, succumbed to the
horrors of the torture he had himself created. Maddened by certain
thoughts more agonizing than those he had as yet resisted, he cut his
throat with a razor.

This death coincided, almost, with that of Louis XI. Nothing then
restrained the populace, and Malemaison, that Evil House, was
pillaged. A tradition exists among the older inhabitants of Touraine
that a contractor of public works, named Bohier, found the miser's