eave Paris,
what on earth will become of the Great Northern and the Orleans
Railways, and the funds,--my dividends, rents, and bad debts?"

"And your feverish pulse, sir, your wrinkled liver, and your digestion,
which scarcely ever allows you to close your eyes?"

"Yes! yes,--but my Spanish fives and Mexican bonds?"

"And your bilious eyes and eyelids full of crows' feet, and the gout and
the rheumatism which excruciate you?--those horrid spiders which are
weaving their threads in the muscles of your calves?"

"But my carrier-pigeons, gentlemen, source of my tenderest care; the
brokerage, the speculation for the account, and my good friend, the
Minister of the Interior, and of the _Travaux Publics_; and the snowball
of my fortune, which must stop unproductive till I recover;--how can I
leave all these to fate?"

"Think of your respiration, which is disorganized, and the vital
principle, the torch of life, which flickers up and down in the socket,
and ere many weeks will be extinguished, unless you at once take our
advice."

"What!" continued the votary of wealth,--"what! cannot gold purchase
health, most sapient doctors?"

"No, sir; doctors are paid, that's all, and people cure themselves."

"You persist, then, in saying that I am not even to take my head cook
with me?"

"On no account whatever."

"Then I am defunct already."

"That you will be so, sir, in two months, if you remain here, there
cannot be a doubt."

"Then, good heavens! where can I go? What am I to do without carriages,
without opera nightingales, and, above all things, without a head cook?"

The night succeeding the consultation, the banker felt as if twenty
cork-screws had been driven into his calves, and he made, ere dawn, a
vow that he would leave the capital. This determination taken, the next
point to be decided was in what direction to go,--for it was not a
journey of pleasure he was about to take, but one of health; and for
once his riches were of no further use to him than to provide the means
of transit. His physicians, fashionable men, strange to say, were
sincere, and did not order him to Nice or Lucca, hot-baths, or mineral
waters, or even to the orange-groves of Hyeres, to which, when a rich
man cannot recover, they send him, in order that he may die comfortably
under Nature's warm blanket, the sun, inhaling with his last
inspirations the delicious scent of her flowers. To Spain, where, said
the invalid, they talk so loud an