"While this ludicrous, horrible caricature moved like a magic lantern with confused haste before my eyes, I felt Mademoiselle Laurence breathing more and more uneasily. A cold paroxysm froze her whole body, and her sweet limbs writhed as if with unbearable agony. At last, however, supple as an eel, she glided from my arms, stood suddenly in the middle of the room, and began to dance, while the mother with the drum and the dwarf with the triangle continued their deadened soft music. She danced just as formerly on Waterloo Bridge and in the squares of London. There were the same mysterious pantomimes, the same outbreaks of passionate leaping, the same Bacchante-like throwing of the head backwards, often also the same leaning towards the earth, as if she wished to hear somebody speaking beneath, then also the trembling, the pallor, the benumbed stiffness, and again the listening with ear bent to the earth. Again also she rubbed her hands as if washing herself. At last she appeared again to cast her intense, sorrowful, imploring glance upon me, but now only in the features of her death-pale countenance could I recognise that glance--not in her eyes, for they were shut. In ever softer sounds the music died away; the mother with the drum and the dwarf, gradually growing pale and breaking like mist, vanished at last altogether; but Mademoiselle Laurence still stood and danced with closed eyes. This dance with closed eyes in the silent nocturnal chamber gave this sweet being so ghostly an appearance that a disagreeable feeling seized me; I shuddered, and was heartily glad when she finished her dance, and as easily as she had slipped away again glided into my arms. "In truth, this scene was not pleasant to me. But we accustom ourselves to everything. And it is even possible that what was mysterious in this woman lent her a more peculiar charm, that an awful tenderness mingled with my emotions. In any case, after some weeks I ceased to wonder in the least when the low sounds of the drum and triangle were heard at night, and my dear Laurence suddenly started up and danced a solo with closed eyes. Her husband, the old Buonapartist, commanded in the neighbourhood of Paris, and his duties allowed him to pass the day only in the city. Of course he became my most intimate friend, and he wept when later on he bade me farewell. He travelled with his wife to Sicily, and I have seen neither of them again since." When Maximilian had finished this narrative, he hastily seized his hat and slipped out of the room. DON QUIXOTE. [The following admirable account of _Don Quixote_--here given chiefly in Mr. Fleishman's translation--was written in 1837, as the introduction to an _edition de luxe_ of Cervantes's masterpiece.]