All round me looked so perfectly like the scenes with which I had been familiar in my romance-reading days, that, bruised and feeble as I was, I almost expected to find my pillow attended by some of those slight figures in long white drapery with blue eyes, which of old ministered to so many ill-used knights and exhausted pilgrims. But my reveries were broken up by a rough voice in the outer chamber insisting on an entrance into mine, and replied to by a weak and garrulous female one, refusing the admission. The dialogue was something of this order-- "Strong or weak, well or ill, able or not able, I must send him, before twelve o'clock this night, to Paris." "But the poor gentleman's wounds are still unhealed." "Still he must set out. The '_malle poste_' will be at the door; and, if he had fifty wounds on him, he must go. The marquis is halfway to Paris by this time; perhaps more than halfway to the guillotine." This was followed by a burst of sobs and broken exclamtions from the female, whom I discovered, by her sorrowing confessions, to have been a nurse in the family. "Well," was the ruffian's reply; "women of all ages are fools: what is it to you whether this young fellow is shot or hanged? He was taken in arms against the Republic--one and indivisible. All the enemies of France must perish!" The old woman now partially opened the door, to see whether I slept; and I closed my eyes, for the purpose of hearing all that was to be heard without interruption. The speaker, whom I alternately took for the _gendarme_ of the district, and the executioner, gave went to his swelling soul in the national style. "What! leave _me_! leave Jean Jacques Louis Gilet in charge of this wretched aristocrat, while I should be marching with my battalion, and at its head too, if merit meets its reward, to sweep the foes of the Republic from the face of the earth. No; I shall not remain in this paltry place, solicitor of a village, when I ought to be on the highest seat of justice--or playing the part of arresting aristocrats, when I might be commandant of a brigade, marching over the bodies of the crowned tyrants of the earth to glory!" As his harangue glowed, his pace quickened, and his voice grew more vehement; at length, probably impatient of the time which lay between him and the first offices of the Republic, he overpowered the resistance of the nurse, and rushed into the chamber. Throwng himself into a theatrical attitude before a mirror--for what Frenchman ever passes one without a glance of happy recognition?--"Rise, aristocrat!" he cried, in the tone of Talma calling up the shade of Caesar. "Rise, and account to the world for your crimes against the liberty of man!"