From the Horse guards I had yet obtained nothing, but promises of "being remembered on the first vacancy;" Clotilde was still a sufferer, and my time, like that of every man without an object, began to be a deplorable encumbrance. In short, my vision of high life and its happiness was fairly vanishing hour by hour. I occasionally met Lafontaine; but, congenial as our tempers might be, our natures had all the national difference, and I sometimes envied, and as often disdained, his buoyancy. Even he, too, had his fluctuations; and a letter from Mariamne, a little more or less petulant, raised and sank him like the spirits in a thermometer. But one day he rushed into my apartment with a look of that despair which only foreigners can assume, and which actually gave me the idea that he was about to commit suicide. Flinging himself into a chair, and plunging his hand deep into his bosom, from which I almost expected to see him draw the fatal weapon, he extracted a paper, and held it forth to me. "Read!" he exclaimed, with the most pathetic tones of Talma in tragedy--"read my ruin!" I read, and found that it was a letter from his domineering little Jewess, commanding him to throw up his commission on the spot, and especially not to go to France, on penalty of her eternal displeasure. My looks asked an explanation. "There!" cried the hero of the romance, "there!--see the caprice, the cruelty, the intolerable tyranny of that most uncertain, intractable, and imperious of all human beings!" I had neither consolation nor contradiction to offer. He then let me into his own secret, with an occasional episode of the secrets of others--the substance of the whole being, that a counter revolution was preparing in France; that, after conducting the correspondence in London for some time, he had been ordered to carry a despatch, of the highest importance, to the secret agency in Paris; and that the question was now between love and honour--Mariamne having, by some unlucky hint dropped from her father, received intimation of the design, and putting her _veto_ on his bearing any part in it in the most peremptory manner. What was to be done? The unfortunate youth was fairly on the horns of the dilemma, and he obviously saw no ray of extrication but the usual Parisian expedient of the pistol. While he alternately raved and wept, the thought struck me--"Why might I not go in his place?" I was growing weary of the world, however little I knew of it. I had no Mariamne either to prohibit or to weep for me. The only being for whom I wished to live was lost to me already. I offered myself as the carrier of the despatch without delay.