de Marne ought to take possession of it. This would be the ruin of
the hospital. The day Monsieur de Marne received this intelligence he
was delighted; and the more so, as he had just learned that one of
the patients whom he had sent to the hospital had died, in
consequence of a relapse from having been discharged too soon. His
widow, who was left destitute, travelled on foot to Paris, with her
youngest child on her back, to implore the assistance of Monsieur de
Marne. She cried bitterly as she related the last words of her
husband, who said, when he was dying, "If Monsieur de Marne had been
here, he would have had me kept in the hospital, and I should have
recovered."

'As Monsieur de Marne listened, with tears in his eyes, to this
recital, he exclaimed: "That villain of a director, I will be the
ruin of him!" He forgot that it was the hospital he would ruin, and
that he would thus put out perhaps a hundred patients, all as poor
and as sick as poor Jacques, and whose condition, had he recollected
it, would be equally grievous.

'The lawsuit was carried on with great vigour, not by Monsieur de
Marne, who was detained by business in Paris, but by his law-agent,
who, being interested in supporting what he had advanced, pursued it
warmly; and fearing that Monsieur de Marne would relinquish his
right, took care to keep back what was said in the country, of his
folly and madness in trying to ruin a hospital which was such a
public benefit, and the daily melancholy accounts of the state to
which the patients were reduced, because the director, being obliged
to give up a great deal of time and money to the lawsuit, had not
enough for the necessary expenses of the hospital. Had Monsieur de
Marne known all these particulars, his kindly feelings would have
returned--he could not have endured the idea of causing so much evil;
but instead of that, his agent only entertained him with accounts of
the ill doings of the director, and of the designs he had against
him. Every letter he received made him more and more angry; and his
hatred of one man made him, forget the claims of a hundred others, on
whom he should have had compassion.

'At length he gained his lawsuit. He had for some days been
endeavouring to procure admission for a poor woman, into the hospital
of incurables at Paris. "Here are two pieces of good news," said he,
as he read the letters which announced the success of each of his
undertakings; and he wrote immediate