How did the scourge, like an electric spark, pass from London to Paris? It cannot be explained. This fantastic death often fixes on a spot of the ground, on a house, and leaves the neighbourhood of that infested spot untouched; then it retraces its steps and picks up what it has forgotten. One night, I felt myself attacked: I was seized with a shivering, together with cramp in my legs; I did not want to ring, for fear of frightening Madame de Chateaubriand. I got up; I heaped all I could find in my room on the bed, got back under the blankets, and a copious perspiration pulled me through. But I remained shattered, and it was in this condition of discomfort that I was obliged to write my pamphlet on the 12,000 francs of Madame la Duchesse de Berry. [Sidenote: The 12,000 francs of Madame.] I should not have been too sorry to go, carried off under the arm of the eldest son of Vishnu, whose distant glance killed Bonaparte upon his rock at the entrance to the Indian Sea. If all mankind, stricken with this general contagion, came to die, what would happen? Nothing: the world, depopulated, would continue its solitary course, without need of any other astronomer to count its steps than Him who has measured them from all eternity; it would present no change to the eyes of the inhabitants of the other planets; they would see it fulfilling its accustomed functions; upon its surface, our little works, our cities, our monuments would be replaced by forests restored to the sovereignty of the lions; no void would manifest itself in the universe. And nevertheless there would be lacking that human intelligence which knows the stars and rises to a knowledge of their Author. What art thou then, O immensity of the works of God, in which, if the genius of man, which is equal to the whole of nature, came to disappear, it would be no more missed than the smallest atom withdrawn from Creation? PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _May_ 1832.