POSTSCRIPT.--The history stops now in the month of August, and the historian in the fore part of October,--only a month lies between the two. 41. DOG-POST-DAY. Letter.--Two new Incisions of Fate.--His Lordship's Confession of Faith. One must excuse a man, who, like horses, increases his speed as night and home draw near, from a tenth intercalary day; at the end of a life and of a book, man makes few digressions. I have already said, that nothing presses the spiritual and spinal marrow out of a man more than when his misfortune allows him no action; fate still held our Victor fast with one hand, in order to beat him sore with the other, when in these weeks of sorrow the water-wheel of time filled up _two_ new lachrymatories out of the hearts of men, and emptied them into eternity. First came the dismal tidings, like a funeral knell, to Victor's ear, that the sometime friend of his youth, Flamin, was about to expiate a step which, but for the falling out with him, he never would have taken, with his death. Some days after the canicular holidays,--precisely when, a year previous, the poor prisoner had entered on his new office with so many philanthropic hopes,--that rumor came forth like a pestilential cloud out of the session-chambers. Victor flew, incredulous and yet trembling, to the Apothecary, in order to get, by inquiry, a refutation. The latter candidly unfolded before him--for the very reason that he despised and wanted to shame the Court-Physician--all the _rapport_-lists of the court and the reports of the _cercles_, and recited to him so much as this out of them: it was not otherwise. Victor heard, what he already presupposed, that the Prince had on now the leading-strings or curb-bit of his own wife, and that she came nearer to him in consequence of Clotilda's withdrawal, and, with her _ear_-[171] and _ring_-finger, moved the bridle, threaded through the _nose_-ring, as if she were in fact nothing less than his--mistress; which is a new and mournful example, how easily in these times a fine married lady steals the privileges of a concubine. Zeusel found it natural, "that she, as the friend of the Minister, who, as well as his son Matthieu, had been the friend of the Chamberlain, should seek to avenge the death of the latter upon Flamin, and that the Minister, in order the better to get his hand into the handle of the Parcæ's scissors, and cut in twain the thread of the Regency-Councillor's life, himself ordained and maintained the continued absence of his son, that the latter might not in any way protect the unhappy favorite." In all this there was not a true word,--Victor knew better; but so much the worse. O, does not everything betray that Matthieu has drawn the Princess, by hints respecting Flamin's birth, into his faithless interests, in order, like magicians, to destroy at a distance, and by few characters? Would the