if you will have it so. Our countesses, moreover, were adored by their
husbands; these gentlemen were enslaved by the charm possessed by every
woman who loves; and, with even supererogatory simplicity, afforded us
that just sufficient spice of danger which increases pleasure. Ah! how
quickly the wind swept away our talk and our happy laughter!

When we reached Pouilly, I scanned my new friend with much interest, and
truly, it was not difficult to imagine him the hero of a very serious
love affair. Picture to yourselves a young man of middle height, but
very well proportioned, a bright, expressive face, dark hair, blue eyes,
moist lips, and white and even teeth. A certain not unbecoming pallor
still overspread his delicately cut features, and there were faint dark
circles about his eyes, as if he were recovering from an illness. Add,
furthermore, that he had white and shapely hands, of which he was as
careful as a pretty woman should be; add that he seemed to be very well
informed, and was decidedly clever, and it should not be difficult for
you to imagine that my traveling companion was more than worthy of a
countess. Indeed, many a girl might have wished for such a husband, for
he was a Vicomte with an income of twelve or fifteen thousand livres,
"to say nothing of expectations."

About a league out of Pouilly the coach was overturned. My
luckless comrade, thinking to save himself, jumped to the edge of a
newly-ploughed field, instead of following the fortunes of the vehicle
and clinging tightly to the roof, as I did. He either miscalculated in
some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do not know, but the coach
fell over upon him, and he was crushed under it.

We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the moans wrung
from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give me a commission--a
sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a dying man's last wish.
Poor boy, all through his agony he was torturing himself in his young
simplicity of heart with the thought of the painful shock to his
mistress when she should suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He
begged me to go myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a
key which he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in
the flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had scarcely
given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his home at L