"Taking a hint from the plot of a comedy we had seen at the Théâtre Français--then the only one in Paris in which regular tragedies and comedies could be acted, and which had an exclusive right to represent the plays of Corneille, Racine, Molière, and Voltaire--Boisguiller borrowed the gown, hat, and trinket-box of a Jew who was patronized by the officers of his regiment, and by adopting a false beard, a pair of horn spectacles, and painting a few wrinkles round his eyes, made his disguise complete. He then set out for the residence of M. du Platel in the twilight of an October evening. "I was too nervous and too excited to have done this in person; so Boisguiller, whose coolness--impudence he was pleased to term it--was invincible, became my ambassador. "He was not a chevalier then, not having won his cross of St. Louis. He contrived to introduce himself to Isabelle, and while she was looking over the trinkets in his box, to whisper my name in her ear, and to slip into her hand a note from me, to which he begged an answer ere he went away. "'You are a friend of Gervais,' she whispered; 'and in disguise?' "His friend and companion--Boisguiller, an officer of the French Guards.' "'I thank you, monsieur, from my soul! Oh, tell Gervais it is true about this marriage--all too true, too true! Despite my love for him, a love of which I told them in my agony, my parents sell me to that odious and pitiless old man. Sell me,' she continued, while her blue eyes sparkled with grief and anger, and her soft cheek glowed with a feverish red, 'even as a Circassian girl is sold in a Turkish bazaar! I have been taken--torn from my convent, and am kept here till my purchaser arranges his household. Oh, vile system! How my soul revolts at the life, the hopeless future, to which I am doomed!' "'And you will meet Gervais?' "'But once, and then all is over, and for ever!' "'When--where will you meet him?' urged my friend. "'In the garden of the Luxembourg, near the white marble lions, at noon to-morrow; and failing that, on the next day at the same hour.' "Exulting in his diplomacy, Boisguiller hurried back to me, relinquished his disguise and resumed his uniform, talking the while with noisy admiration of the beauty and high spirit of Mademoiselle du Platel. Spirit? _mon Dieu!_ he little knew how, by all the appliances of domestic and parental tyranny it had been crushed and broken. "With a soul inspired by tenderness and anxiety, I repaired at the appointed hour to the place of rendezvous--the avenue to the garden nursery, containing specimens of every kind of fruit then cultivated in the provinces of France; and there I leaned, so great was my emotion, against the base of one of the white marble lions, and my heart fluttered at the sight of every female figure. But the clocks of Paris struck the hour in vain; it passed away; another hour succeeded, and there came no Isabelle.