the worse his gesticulations became, I began to strike him hard, and as my blows had no effect, I cried aloud with all my might. Unluckily, they were descending the hill of Vaubuin and they could not stop the coach; the struggle therefore lasted ten minutes or more, and without in the least knowing what danger I was combating, I was just about to succeed in getting the better of my enemy, by turning him over under my knee, when the door opened and the conductor came to my rescue. Paillet and Ronsin were sleeping as I should have slept if my travelling-companion had not waked me up by his overpowering friendliness. I told the conductor what had happened and blamed him for having put me along with a somnambulist or a madman, begging him to put me in any other corner of the coach convenient to him, when, to my intense astonishment, whilst the traveller was readjusting his toilet, which had been considerably damaged by my struggle with him, without uttering any sort of complaint against me, the conductor began apostrophising him in the severest terms, made him get down out of the coach, and told him that, as there only remained three-quarters of a league from where we were to the _hôtel des Trois-Pucelles_, where the coach stopped, he must have the goodness to do it on foot, unless he would consent to mount up on the roof, where he could not disturb anybody else. The gentleman of the auburn locks hoisted himself on the roof, without opening his lips, and the diligence started off again. Although I was now alone once more and consequently more at my ease inside the coach, I was too much excited by the struggle I had just gone through, to think of going to sleep again. I could hear the conductor, in the cabriolet, relate my story to my two fellow travelling-companions, and apparently he presented it to them under a gayer light than that in which I had looked at it myself, for they roared with laughter. I did not know what there could be to laugh at in an interchange of fisticuffs with a somnambulist or a maniac. A quarter of an hour after the gentleman had been installed on the imperial, and I reinstated in the carriage, I heard by the heavy sound of the coach wheels that we were crossing under the drawbridge. We had reached our destination. Five minutes after we had left the coach, Paillet and Ronsin told me why they had laughed, and it sounded so ridiculous that I rushed off in search of my gentleman of the cough lozenges almost before they had finished; but I searched the imperial in vain in every corner and cranny:--he had disappeared. This nocturnal struggle upset me so greatly that I felt dazed the whole of the day. [1] Translator's note.--Member of the Society of Law Clerks. CHAPTER VI First dramatic impressions--The _Hamlet_ of Ducis_--The Bourbons en 1815_--Quotations from it