he Fauxbourg
St. Germain. A young man of merit and accomplishments, but unaided by
the powerful pretensions of suitable fortune, cherished a passion for
the young lady, to whom he had frequent access, on account of his being
distantly related to her. His affection was requited with return; and
before the parent suspected the attachment, the lovers were solemnly
engaged. The indications of pure love are generally too unguarded to
escape the keen, observing eye of a cold, mercenary mother. She charged
her daughter with her fondness, and forbade her distracted lover the
house. To close up every avenue of hope, she withdrew with her wretched
child into Italy, where they remained for two years; at the expiration
of which, the mother had arranged for her daughter a match more
congenial to her own pride and avarice, with an elderly gentleman, who
had considerable fortune and property in the vicinity of Bourdeaux.
Every necessary preparation was made for this cruel union, which it was
determined should be celebrated in Paris, to which city they returned
for that purpose. Two days before the marriage was intended to take
place, the young lover, wrought up to frenzy by the intelligence of the
approaching nuptials, contrived, by bribing the porter whilst the mother
was at the opera with her intended son-in-law, to reach the room of the
beloved being from whom he was about to be separated for ever. Emaciated
by grief, she presented the mere spectre of what she was when he last
left her. As soon as he entered the room, he fell senseless at her feet,
from which state he was roused by the loud fits of her frightful maniac
laughter. She stared upon him, like one bewildered. He clasped her with
one hand, and with the other drew from his pocket a vial containing
double distilled laurel water: he pressed it to her lips, until she had
swallowed half of its contents; the remainder he drank himself.--The
drug of death soon began to operate.--Clasped in each other's arms, pale
and expiring, they reviewed their hard fate, and, in faint and lessening
sentences, implored of the great God of mercy, that he would pardon them
for what they had done, and that he would receive their spirits into
his regions of eternal repose; that he would be pleased, in his divine
goodness, to forgive the misjudging severity which had driven them to
despair, and would support the unconscious author of it, under the heavy
afflictions which their disastrous deaths would