In 1833 Mademoiselle Fischer, who sometimes worked into the night when business was good, at about one o’clock one morning perceived a strong smell of carbonic acid gas, and heard the groans of a dying man. The fumes and the gasping came from a garret over the two rooms forming her dwelling, and she supposed that a young man who had but lately come to lodge in this attic--which had been vacant for three years--was committing suicide. She ran upstairs, broke in the door by a push with her peasant strength, and found the lodger writhing on a camp-bed in the convulsions of death. She extinguished the brazier; the door was open, the air rushed in, and the exile was saved. Then, when Lisbeth had put him to bed like a patient, and he was asleep, she could detect the motives of his suicide in the destitution of the rooms, where there was nothing whatever but a wretched table, the camp-bed, and two chairs. On the table lay a document, which she read: “I am Count Wenceslas Steinbock, born at Prelia, in Livonia. “No one is to be accused of my death; my reasons for killing myself are, in the words of Kosciusko, _Finis Polonioe_! “The grand-nephew of a valiant General under Charles XII. could not beg. My weakly constitution forbids my taking military service, and I yesterday saw the last of the hundred thalers which I had brought with me from Dresden to Paris. I have left twenty-five francs in the drawer of this table to pay the rent I owe to the landlord. “My parents being dead, my death will affect nobody. I desire that my countrymen will not blame the French Government. I have never registered myself as a refugee, and I have asked for nothing; I have met none of my fellow-exiles; no one in Paris knows of my existence. “I am dying in Christian beliefs. May God forgive the last of the Steinbocks! “WENCESLAS.” Mademoiselle Fischer, deeply touched by the dying man’s honesty, opened the drawer and found the five five-franc pieces to pay his rent. “Poor young man!” cried she. “And with no one in the world to care about him!” She went downstairs to fetch her work, and sat stitching in the garret, watching over the Livonian gentleman. When he awoke his astonishment may be imagined on finding a woman sitting by his bed; it was like the prolongation of a dream. As she sat there, covering aiguillettes with gold thread, the old maid had resolved to take charge of the poor youth whom she admired as he lay sleeping.