oticed that there was a faint scent about it, as if it were permeated
with the remains of incense, or rather, as if it were still pervaded by
those delicate, sweet scents of by-gone years, which seemed to be only
the memory of perfumes, the soul of evaporated essences.

When I got it home, I wished to have a small chair of the same period
covered with it; and as I was handling it in order to take the necessary
measures, I felt some paper beneath my fingers, and when I cut the
lining, some letters fell at my feet. They were yellow with age, and the
faint ink was the color of rust, and outside the sheet, which was folded
in the fashion of years long past, it was addressed in a delicate hand:
_To Monsieur l'Abbe d'Argence_

The first three lines merely settled places of meeting, but here is the
third:

"My Friend; I am very unwell, ill in fact, and I cannot leave my bed.
The rain is beating against my windows, and I lie dreaming comfortably
and warmly on my eider-down coverlet. I have a book of which I am very
fond, and which seems as if it really applied to me. Shall I tell you
what it is? No, for you would only scold me. Then, when I have read a
little, I think, and will tell you what about.

"Having been in bed for three days, I think about my bed, and even in my
sleep I meditate on it still, and I have come to the conclusion that the
bed constitutes our whole life; for we were born in it, we live in it,
and we shall die in it. If, therefore, I had Monsieur de Crebillon's
pen, I should write the history of a bed, and what exciting and
terrible, as well as delightful moving occurrences would not such a book
contain! What lessons and what subjects for moralizing could one not
draw from it, for everyone?

"You know my bed, my friend, but you will never guess how many things I
have discovered in it within the last three days, and how much more I
love it, in consequence. It seems to me to be inhabited, haunted, if I
may say so, by a number of people I never thought of, who, nevertheless,
have left something of themselves in that couch.

"Ah! I cannot understand people who buy new beds, beds to which no
memories or cares are attached. Mine, ours, which is so shabby, and so
spacious, must have held many existences in it, from birth to the grave.
Think of that, my friend; think of it all; review all those lives, a
great part of which was spent between these four posts, surrounded by
these hangings embroidered by human fig