One person alone never vouchsafed to bestow the slightest glance of encouragement upon my little imp of Africa, and this was comte Jean, who even went so far as to awe him into silence either by a frown or a gesture of impatience; his most lively tricks could not win a smile from the count, who was either thoughtful or preoccupied with some ambitious scheme of fortune. Zamor soon felt a species of instinctive dread of this overpowering and awe-inspiring genius, whose sudden appearance would chill him in his wildest fits of mirthful mischief, and send him cowering to a corner of the room; where he would remain huddled together, and apparently stupefied and motionless, till the count quitted the apartment. At the moment of my writing this, Zamor still resides under my roof. During the years he has passed with me he has gained in height, but in none of the intellectual qualities does he seem to have made any progress; age has only stripped him of the charms of infancy without supplying others in their place; nor can I venture to affirm, that his gratitude and devotion to me are such as I have reason to expect they should be;* for I can with truth affirm, that I have never ceased to lavish kindness on him, and to be, in every sense of the word, a good mistress to him. * This wretch, whom the comtesse du Barry loaded with her favours and benefits, conducted her to the scaffold.--EDITOR (i.e., author) There was one member of my establishment, however, whom I preferred to either Dorine or Zamor and this was Henriette, who was sincerely attached to me, and who, for that very reason, was generally disliked throughout the castle. I bad procured a good husband for her, on whom I bestowed a post which, by keeping both himself and his wife in the close vicinity of the castle, prevented my kind friend from quitting me. However, my poor Henriette was not fated to enjoy a long connubial felicity, for her husband, being seized with a violent fever, in a fit of delirium threw himself from a window into the court below, and was taken up dead. Slander availed herself even of this fatal catastrophe to whisper abroad, that the death of the unhappy man arose from his deep sense of his wife’s misconduct and infidelity. This I can positively assert was not the case, for Henriette was warmly and truly attached to him, and conducted herself as a wife with the most undeviating propriety. The fact was, that Henriette had drawn upon herself a general hatred and ill will, because she steadily refused all gossiping invitations, where my character would have been pulled to pieces, and the affairs of my household discussed and commented upon: there, indeed, she had sinned beyond all hope of pardon.