"I am suffering dreadfully; and am now, while I write, laboring under so violent an attack of asthma, that I cannot doubt but that the air of this country is as bad for me as that of Montrouge. If I am as bad to-morrow, I shall return to pass the week at Cauterets, and on Saturday go on to Pau, where I shall wait for the ladies who are to pass through on Monday, on their way to Bayonne. I know I shall be in a miserable state during the journey." Such were the benefits derived by the Abbe de Voisenon from his four months' sojourn at the baths of Cauterets and Bareges. He returned to Voisenon infinitely worse than when he left it. On the eve of his departure for home, where, as he said some time afterwards, he wished _to be on the same floor with the tombs of his ancestors_, he devoured a monstrous dinner on the Bareges mountains. Finding that the mineral waters of the Pyrenees had failed in reestablishing his health--that is, if he ever had health--the Abbe de Voisenon abandoned physicians and their fruitless prescriptions, to seek elsewhere remedies for the cure of his asthma, which became more and more troublesome as he began to get into years. As he was constantly speaking of his disease to everybody, and as everybody--at least all those who wished to get into his good graces--spoke of it to him, he learned one day that there existed in some garret of Paris a certain abbe deeply learned in all the mysteries of occult chemistry, an adept of the great Albert, the master of masters in empirical art. Like all sorcerers, and all _savants_ of the eighteenth century, this abbe was represented as being in a state of frightful misery and destitution. He who possessed the secrets of plants and minerals, of fire and light, of the generation of beings, had not the wherewithal to procure himself a decent _soutane_, nor even a morsel of bread. Though, by the efforts of his magic, he had reached a dizzy height on the paths of knowledge, it was, alas! a fact but too true, that he was unable to maintain himself more than a month in the same apartment--perhaps on account of his indifference to the interests of his landlords. For all that he was a marvellous being, inventing specifics for the cure of all diseases, and consequently of asthma among the rest. It was even whispered, but secretly and mysteriously, and with a sort of awe--for they were very superstitious, though very atheistical, in the eighteenth century--that all these specifics were comprised in one remedy, namely, the celebrated AURUM POTABILE, or fluid gold. Now every one knows, or at least ought to know, that potable gold, that is, gold in a cold and fluid state, like wine, triumphs over every malady to which the human frame is subject: it is health itself, perpetual youth, and would be no less than immortality had not Paracelsus, who, they say, also possessed the secret of potable gold, unfortunately died at the age of