l Louvois, who recommended roast pigeons as a cure for
grief--observing that, "whenever he heard of the loss of any of his
friends, he ordered a pair, and found himself always much comforted after
eating them"--I was beginning to sink into that easy oblivion of the
rules of life, which, without actual sleep, has all the placid enjoyment
of slumber; when a voice pronounced my name, and I was startled and half
suffocated by the embrace of a figure who rushed from an opposite box,
and in a torrent of French poured out a torrent of raptures on my
arriving in London.

When I contrived at last to disengage myself, I saw Lafontaine; but so
hollow-cheeked and pale-visaged, that I could scarcely recognize my showy
friend in the skeleton knight who stood gesticulating his ultra-happiness
before me.

At length he drew, with a trembling touch and a glistening eye, from his
bosom a letter, which he placed in my hand with a squeeze of eternal
friendship. "Read," said he, "read, and then wonder, if you can, at my
misery and my gratitude." The letter was from Mariamne, and certainly a
very pretty one--gay and tender at once; gracefully alluding to some
little fretfulness on her part, or his, I could scarcely tell which; but
assuring him that all this was at an end--that she foreswore the world
henceforth, and was quite his own. All this was expressed with an elegance
which I was not quite prepared to find in the fair one, and with a tone of
sincerity for which I was still less prepared; yet with the coquette in
every line.

I should have been glad to see him at any time, but now I received him as
a resource from solitude, or rather from those restless thoughts which
made solitude so painful to me. Another bottle, perhaps, made me more
sensitive, and him more willing to communicate; and before it was
finished, he had opened his whole heart and emptied his letter-case, and I
had consulted him on the _im_probabilities of my ever being able to
succeed in the object which had so strangely, yet so totally, occupied all
my feelings.

It was clear, from her correspondence, that his pretty Jewess had played
him much as the angler plays the trout which he has secured on his hook.
She evidently enjoyed the display of her skill in tormenting: every second
letter was almost a declaration of breaking off the correspondence
altogether; or, what was even worse, mingled with those menaces, there
were from time to time allusions to my opinions, and