.' 'I know it, Alain,' he said, 'I know it. But what is
the good of suing me and crushing me with bills of costs? I have nothing
with which to pay anything. Lately I received letters from my wife and
father-in-law; they have bought land with the money you lent me, and
they send me a list of things they need to improve it. Now, unless some
one prevents it, I shall sail on a Dutch vessel from Flushing, whither I
have sent the few things I am taking out to them. Bonaparte has won the
battle of Marengo, peace will be signed, I may safely rejoin my family;
and I have need to, for my dear little wife is about to give birth to a
child.' 'And so you have sacrificed me to your own interests?' said I.
'Yes,' he answered, 'for I believed you my friend.' At that moment I
felt myself inferior to Mongenod, so sublime did he seem to me as he
said those grand words. 'Did I not speak to you frankly,' he said,
'in this very room? I came to you, Alain, as the only person who would
really understand me. I told you that fifty louis would be lost, but a
hundred I could return to you. I did not bind myself by saying when; for
how could I know the time at which my long struggle with disaster would
end? You were my last friend. All others, even our old master Bordin,
despised me for the very reason that I borrowed money of them. Oh! you
do not know, Alain, the dreadful sensation which grips the heart of an
honest man when, in the throes of poverty, he goes to a friend and asks
him for succor,--and all that follows! I hope you never may know it;
it is far worse than the anguish of death. You have written me letters
which, if I had written them to you in a like situation, you would have
thought very odious. You expected of me that which it was out of my
power to do. But you are the only person to whom I shall try to justify
myself. In spite of your severity, and though from being a friend you
became a creditor on the day when Bordin asked for my note on your
behalf (thus abrogating the generous compact you had made with me there,
on that spot, when we clasped hands and mingled our tears),--well, in
spite of all that, I have remembered that day, and because of it I have
come here to say to you, You do not know misery, therefore do not judge
it. I have not had one moment when I could answer you. Would you have
wished me to come here and cajole you with words? I could not pay you;
I did not even have enough for the bare necessities of those whose lives