etails of such a violent suicide I was
unable to endure. The prince, unshaken by horror as he had remained
unshaken by alarm, assisted me with the most respectful gallantry to
regain the dining-room.

There we found our patient, still, indeed, deadly pale, but vastly
recovered and already seated on a chair. He held out both his hands with
a most pitiful gesture of interrogation.

"He is dead," said the prince.

"Alas!" cried the young man, "and it should be I! What do I do, thus
lingering on the stage I have disgraced, while he, my sure comrade,
blameworthy indeed for much, but yet the soul of fidelity, has judged
and slain himself for an involuntary fault? Ah, sir," said he, "and you
too, madam, without whose cruel help I should be now beyond the reach of
my accusing conscience, you behold in me the victim equally of my own
faults and virtues. I was born a hater of injustice; from my most tender
years my blood boiled against Heaven when I beheld the sick, and against
men when I witnessed the sorrows of the poor; the pauper's crust stuck
in my throat when I sat down to eat my dainties, and the cripple child
has set me weeping. What was there in that but what was noble? and yet
observe to what a fall these thoughts have led me! Year after year this
passion for the lost besieged me closer. What hope was there in kings?
what hope in these well-feathered classes that now roll in money? I had
observed the course of history; I knew the burgess, our ruler of to-day,
to be base, cowardly, and dull; I saw him, in every age, combine to pull
down that which was immediately above and to prey upon those that were
below; his dulness, I knew, would ultimately bring about his ruin; I
knew his days were numbered, and yet how was I to wait? how was I to let
the poor child shiver in the rain? The better days, indeed, were coming,
but the child would die before that. Alas, your highness, in surely no
ungenerous impatience I enrolled myself among the enemies of this unjust
and doomed society; in surely no unnatural desire to keep the fires of
my philanthropy alight, I bound myself by an irrevocable oath.

"That oath is all my history. To give freedom to posterity, I had
forsworn my own. I must attend upon every signal; and soon my father
complained of my irregular hours and turned me from his house. I was
engaged in betrothal to an honest girl; from her also I had to part, for
she was too shrewd to credit my inventions and too innocent t