Here have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into hell and purgatory, and passage through _limbos infantum et patrum_, man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place, and that below, the youngest daughter of our _maître d'hôtel_, who had not only the name, but also the charms of _Corday_, with two white roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred, and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead; i. e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the same hour, man does not, like Garrick,[3] follow the former; he does not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the regained one,--like Dante, hell better than purgatory. In short, the silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash Wednesday and there a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is not this as absurd as all his other doings? Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the space he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged them to his burning lips. He perceived his paleness in the glass; and to explain it, he imparted the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.