the poet replied that such a letter could not fail in its effect, and that it would make him the happiest of mortals. Handsome Pauline Borghese immediately opened her escritoire, and being in one of the happy moods when sentences shape themselves on paper, in her petition to his Grace of Otranto she spoke of M. Dubois as a man of superior gifts, apt at many things, and in whom she took the greatest interest. ‘An hour afterwards the protégé was at the door of the dispenser of favours, but being unknown to the ushers, and not specially recommended to them, it may easily be imagined that he got no further than the ministerial ante-chamber, and that he was obliged to remit his letter to the hands of those who did not care a jot. As a matter of course, it was flung with many others into the basket set apart for such epistles, which as often as not went straight from the receptacle into the stove of the ante-chamber. Nevertheless, when Fouché returned that evening from the Council of Ministers, and the basket was, as usual, set in front of him, by the merest accident his eye fell on the paper displaying the imperial arms. Naturally, he opened it at once, read it from the first line to the last, and immediately ordered four gendarmes to accompany his carriage at nine in the morning. Among his _entourage_ it was taken for granted that he was proceeding to Saint-Cloud for some communication of great importance; hence the surprise of his servants was intense when they were ordered to take him to a mean street in the neighbourhood of the Halles. It was there that our favourite of the Muses had established his aerial quarters on the sixth floor. ‘There was neither porter nor number to the entrance of that residence, and inquiries had to be made of the baker of the quarter as to the domicile of M. Dubois, a man of letters. ‘“There is,” answered the baker’s wife, “a person of that name, very poor, who inhabits an attic in the place. I do not know whether he is a public scribe, but he owes me two quarters’ rent.” ‘And issuing from her shop, she begins to bawl out the name at the top of her voice. The poor poet puts his head out of the window of his garret, and espying below a carriage escorted by gendarmes, comes there and then to the conclusion that the boldness of his remarks with regard to a universal peace has been badly received by Jupiter the Thunderer, and that they have come to arrest him in order to make him expiate his audacity at Bicêtre.