but I can pay you well. I would not die yet, for that young
man's sake." And he sat upright in his bed, and fixed his dim eyes
anxiously on his visitor.

"What are your symptoms, your disease?"

"Fire, fire, fire in the heart, the entrails: I burn!"

"How long is it since you have taken food?"

"Food! only this broth. There is the basin, all I have taken these six
hours. I had scarce drunk it ere these pains began."

The stranger looked at the basin; some portion of the contents was yet
left there.

"Who administered this to you?"

"Who? Jean! Who else should? I have no servant,--none! I am poor, very
poor, sir. But no! you physicians do not care for the poor. I AM RICH!
can you cure me?"

"Yes, if Heaven permit. Wait but a few moments."

The old man was fast sinking under the rapid effects of poison. The
stranger repaired to his own apartments, and returned in a few moments
with some preparation that had the instant result of an antidote. The
pain ceased, the blue and livid colour receded from the lips; the old
man fell into a profound sleep. The stranger drew the curtains round the
bed, took up the light, and inspected the apartment. The walls of both
rooms were hung with drawings of masterly excellence. A portfolio
was filled with sketches of equal skill,--but these last were mostly
subjects that appalled the eye and revolted the taste: they displayed
the human figure in every variety of suffering,--the rack, the wheel,
the gibbet; all that cruelty has invented to sharpen the pangs of death
seemed yet more dreadful from the passionate gusto and earnest force of
the designer. And some of the countenances of those thus delineated were
sufficiently removed from the ideal to show that they were portraits; in
a large, bold, irregular hand was written beneath these drawings, "The
Future of the Aristocrats." In a corner of the room, and close by an old
bureau, was a small bundle, over which, as if to hide it, a cloak was
thrown carelessly. Several shelves were filled with books; these
were almost entirely the works of the philosophers of the time,--the
philosophers of the material school, especially the Encyclopedistes,
whom Robespierre afterwards so singularly attacked when the coward
deemed it unsafe to leave his reign without a God.

("Cette secte (les Encyclopedistes) propagea avec beaucoup de zele
l'opinion du materialisme, qui prevalut parmi les grands et parmi
les beaux esprits; on lui doit en partie cet