“How they found me out a patient in a ward of the Hôtel Dieu, rescued and carried me away with them, I have heard full half a dozen times, but I 'm far from being clear enough to repeat the story; and, indeed, when I try to recall the period, the only images which rise up before me are long ranges of white coverlids, pale faces, and groans and cries of suffering, with the dark curly head of a great master of torture peeping at me, and whom, I am told, is the Baron Dupuytren, the Surgeon-in-Chief. After these comes a vision of litters and _charrettes_,--sore joltings and stoppages to drink water--But I shall rave if I go on. Better I should tell you of my pleasant little bedroom here, opening on a small garden, with a tiny fountain trying to sprinkle the wild myrtle and blush-roses around it, and sportively sending its little plash over me, as the wind wafts it into my chamber. My luxurious chair and easy-cushioned sofa, and my table littered with everything, from flowers to French romances; not to speak of the small rustic seat beside the window, where she has been sitting the last hour, and has only quitted to give me time to write this to you. I know it--I see it--all you can say, all that you are saying at this moment, is fifty times more forcibly echoing within my own heart, and repeating in fitful sentences: 'A ruined man--a broken fortune--a mad attachment--a life of struggle, difficulty, and failure!' But why should it be failure? Such a girl for a wife ought in itself to be an earnest of success. Are not her qualities exactly those that do battle with the difficulties of fortune? Self-denial--ambition--courage--an intense, an intuitive knowledge of the world--and then, a purpose-like devotion to whatever she undertakes, that throws an air of heroism over all her actions. “Birth--blood--family connections--what have they done for me, except it be to entail upon me the necessity of selecting a career amidst the two or three that are supposed to suit the well-born? I may be a Life Guardsman, or an unpaid attaché, but I must not be a physician or a merchant. Nor is it alone that certain careers are closed against us, but certain opinions too. I must not think ill of the governing class,--I must never think well of the governed.