e a deplorable
encumbrance. In short, my vision of high life and its happiness was fairly
vanishing hour by hour. I occasionally met Lafontaine; but, congenial as
our tempers might be, our natures had all the national difference, and I
sometimes envied, and as often disdained, his buoyancy. Even he, too, had
his fluctuations; and a letter from Mariamne, a little more or less
petulant, raised and sank him like the spirits in a thermometer.

But one day he rushed into my apartment with a look of that despair which
only foreigners can assume, and which actually gave me the idea that he
was about to commit suicide. Flinging himself into a chair, and plunging
his hand deep into his bosom, from which I almost expected to see him draw
the fatal weapon, he extracted a paper, and held it forth to me. "Read!"
he exclaimed, with the most pathetic tones of Talma in tragedy--"read my
ruin!" I read, and found that it was a letter from his domineering little
Jewess, commanding him to throw up his commission on the spot, and
especially not to go to France, on penalty of her eternal displeasure. My
looks asked an explanation. "There!" cried the hero of the romance,
"there!--see the caprice, the cruelty, the intolerable tyranny of that most
uncertain, intractable, and imperious of all human beings!" I had neither
consolation nor contradiction to offer.

He then let me into his own secret, with an occasional episode of the
secrets of others--the substance of the whole being, that a counter
revolution was preparing in France; that, after conducting the
correspondence in London for some time, he had been ordered to carry a
despatch, of the highest importance, to the secret agency in Paris; and
that the question was now between love and honour--Mariamne having, by
some unlucky hint dropped from her father, received intimation of the
design, and putting her _veto_ on his bearing any part in it in the most
peremptory manner. What was to be done? The unfortunate youth was fairly
on the horns of the dilemma, and he obviously saw no ray of extrication
but the usual Parisian expedient of the pistol.

While he alternately raved and wept, the thought struck me--"Why might I
not go in his place?" I was growing weary of the world, however little I
knew of it. I had no Mariamne either to prohibit or to weep for me. The
only being for whom I wished to live was lost to me already. I offered
myself as the carrier of the despatch without delay.

I never