"_Hospital Saint Louis, 23 May, 1842_. "MY DEAR FRIEND,--Here I am again at the hospital. Two days after I sent you my last letter I woke up feeling as if my whole body were on fire. I felt as if I were enveloped in flames. I was literally burning. I lighted my candle, and was alarmed by the spectacle my poor self presented. I was red from my feet to my head,--as red as a boiled lobster, neither more nor less. So I went to the hospital this morning, as early as I could go, and here I am,--Henry IV.'s ward, bed No. 10. The doctors were astonished at my case; they say it is _purpura_. I should say it was! The purple of the Roman emperors was not, I am very sure, as purple as my envelope.... My disease is now in a stage of reaction, and the doctors do not know what to do, I cannot walk thirty paces without stumbling. I have thousands of trumpets blowing flourishes in my ears. I have been bled, re-bled, mustard-plastered, all in vain. I have swallowed down my poor throat more arsenic than any three melodramatists of the Boulevards. I do not know how all this is going to end. The physician tells me that he will cure me, but that it will take time. To-day they are going to put all sorts of things on my body, and among them leeches to remove my giddiness.... I am greatly fatigued by my life here, and I pass some; very gloomy days,--and they are the gloomier, because there is not a single day but I see in the ward next to mine men die thick as flies. A hospital may be very poetical, but it is, too, a sad, sad place."