om he had left at Paris
had already brought him under the special notice of the wonderful man
who then governed France, and who sought to unite in its service every
description and variety of intellect. He should return to France, and
then--why, then, the ladder was on the walls of Fortune and the foot
planted on the step! As he spoke, confidently and sanguinely, with the
verve and assurance of an able man who sees clear the path to his goal,
as he sketched with rapid precision the nature of his prospects and his
hopes, all that subtle wisdom which had before often seemed but vague
and general, took practical shape and interest, thus applied to the
actual circumstances of men; the spirit of intrigue, which seemed mean
when employed on mean things, swelled into statesmanship and masterly
genius to the listener when she saw it linked with the large objects of
masculine ambition. Insensibly, therefore, her attention became earnest,
her mind aroused. The vision of a field, afar from the scenes of
her humiliation and despair,--a field for energy, stratagem, and
contest,--invited her restless intelligence. As Dalibard had profoundly
calculated, there was no new channel for her affections,--the source was
dried up, and the parched sands heaped over it; but while the heart lay
dormant, the mind rose sleepless, chafed, and perturbed. Through the
mind, he indirectly addressed and subtly wooed her.

"Such," he said, as he rose to take leave, "such is the career to which
I could depart with joy if I did not depart alone!"

"Alone!" that word, more than once that day, Lucretia repeated to
herself--"alone!" And what career was left to her?--she, too, alone!

In certain stages of great grief our natures yearn for excitement. This
has made some men gamblers; it has made even women drunkards,--it had
effect over the serene calm and would-be divinity of the poet-sage. When
his son dies, Goethe does not mourn, he plunges into the absorption of
a study uncultivated before. But in the great contest of life, in
the whirlpool of actual affairs, the stricken heart finds all,--the
gambling, the inebriation, and the study.

We pause here. We have pursued long enough that patient analysis, with
all the food for reflection that it possibly affords, to which we were
insensibly led on by an interest, dark and fascinating, that grew more
and more upon us as we proceeded in our research into the early history
of a person fated to pervert no ordinar