by
Charles the Bold."

The Latin inscription made me laugh.

"This inscription," said I, "contains an insulting jest; it is almost
burlesque, for the gravity of an inscription should not allow of
laughter."

The doctor, like a patriotic Swiss, would not allow it, but I think it
was false shame on his part. The inscription ran as follows, and the
impartial reader can judge of its nature:

"Deo. opt. Max. Caroli inclyti et fortisimi Burgundie duds
exercitus Muratum obsidens, ab Helvetiis cesus, hoc sui
monumentum reliquit anno MCDLXXVI."

Till then I had had a great idea of Morat. Its fame of seven centuries,
three sieges sustained and repulsed, all had given me a sublime notion of
it; I expected to see something and saw nothing.

"Then Morat has been razed to the ground?" said I to the doctor.

"Not at all, it is as it always has been, or nearly so."

I concluded that a man who wants to be well informed should read first
and then correct his knowledge by travel. To know ill is worse than not
to know at all, and Montaigne says that we ought to know things well.

But it was the following comic adventure which made me spend the night at
Morat:

I found at the inn a young maid who spoke a sort of rustic Italian. She
struck me by her great likeness to my fair stocking-seller at Paris. She
was called Raton, a name which my memory has happily preserved. I offered
her six francs for her favours, but she refused the money with a sort of
pride, telling me that I had made a mistake and that she was an honest
girl.

"It may be so," said I, and I ordered my horses to be put in. When the
honest Raton saw me on the point of leaving, she said, with an air that
was at once gay and timid, that she wanted two louis, and if I liked to
give her them and pass the night with her I should be well content.

"I will stay, but remember to be kind."

"I will."

When everybody had gone to bed, she came into my room with a little
frightened manner, calculated to redouble my ardour, but by great good
luck, feeling I had a necessity, I took the light and ran to the place
where I could satisfy it. While there I amused myself by reading
innumerable follies one finds written in such places, and suddenly my
eyes lighted on these words:--

"This tenth day of August, 1760, the wretched Raton gave me the
what-d'-you-call-it: reader, beware."

I was almost tempted to believe in miracles, for I could not think there
were two Rato