at Paris? La Fleur laid his hand upon his breast, and said 'twas a petite demoiselle at Monsieur Le Compte de B****'s—La Fleur had a heart made for society; and, to speak the truth of him, let as few occasions slip him as his master-so that some how or other, but how heaven knows he had connected himself with the demoiselle upon the landing of the staircase, during the time I was taken up with my Passport; and as there was time enough for me to win the Count to my intereft, La Fleur had contrived to make it do to win the maid to his-the family, it seems, was to be at Paris that day, and he had made a party with her, and two or three more of the Count's household, upon the boulevards. Happy people! that once a week at least are sure to lay down all your cares together; and dance and sing and sport away the weights of grievance, which bow down the spirit of other nations to the earth. LA Fleur had left me something to amuse myself with for the day more than I had bargained for, or could have entered either into his head or mine. He had brought the little print of butter upon a currant leaf; and as the morning was warm, and he had a good step to bring it, he had begged a sheet of waste paper to put betwixt the currant leaf and his hand-As that was plate sufficient, I bade him lay it upon the table as it was; and as I resolved to stay within all day, I ordered him to call upon the traiteur to bespeak my dinner, and leave me to breakfast by myself. When I had finished the butter, I threw the currant leaf out of the window, and was going to do the same by the waste paper-but stopping to read a line first, and that drawing me on to a second and third-I thought it better worth; so I shut the window, and drawing a chair up to it, I sat down to read it. It was in the old French of Rabelais's time, and, for ought I know, might have been wrote by him-it was moreover in a Gothic letter, and that so faded and gone off by damps and length of time, it cost me infinite trouble to make any thing of it-I threw it down; and then wrote a letter to Eugenius-then I took it up again, and embroiled my patience with it afresh-and then to cure that, I wrote a letter to Eliza-Still it kept hold of me; and the difficulty of understanding it increased but the desire. I got my dinner; and after I had enlightened my mind with a bottle of Burgundy, I at it again-and after two or three hours poring upon it, with almost as deep attention as ever Gruter or Jacob Spon did upon a nonsensical inscription, I thought I made sense of it; but to make sure of it, the best way, I imagined, was to turn it into English, and see how it would look then so I went on leisurely, as a trifling man does, sometimes writing a sentence-then taking a turn or twoand then looking how the world went, out of the window; so that it was nine o'clock at night before I had done itI then began, and read it as follows -Now as the notary's wife disputed the point with the notary with too much heat-I wish, said the notary, throwing down the parchment, that there was another notary here only to set down and attest all this And what would you do then, Monsieur? said she, rising hastily up-the notary's wife was a little fume of a woman, and the notary thought it well to avoid a hurricane by a mild reply-I would go, answered he, to bed-You may go to the devil, answered the notary's wife. Now there happening to be but one bed in the house, the other two rooms |