I was
literally burning. I lighted my candle, and was alarmed by the
spectacle my poor self presented. I was red from my feet to my
head,--as red as a boiled lobster, neither more nor less. So I
went to the hospital this morning, as early as I could go, and
here I am,--Henry IV.'s ward, bed No. 10. The doctors were
astonished at my case; they say it is _purpura_. I should say it
was! The purple of the Roman emperors was not, I am very sure, as
purple as my envelope.... My disease is now in a stage of
reaction, and the doctors do not know what to do, I cannot walk
thirty paces without stumbling. I have thousands of trumpets
blowing flourishes in my ears. I have been bled, re-bled,
mustard-plastered, all in vain. I have swallowed down my poor
throat more arsenic than any three melodramatists of the
Boulevards. I do not know how all this is going to end. The
physician tells me that he will cure me, but that it will take
time. To-day they are going to put all sorts of things on my body,
and among them leeches to remove my giddiness.... I am greatly
fatigued by my life here, and I pass some; very gloomy days,--and
they are the gloomier, because there is not a single day but I see
in the ward next to mine men die thick as flies. A hospital may be
very poetical, but it is, too, a sad, sad place."

Many and many a time afterwards did he return to the hospital, all sad
as it was. His garret was sadder in _purpura's_ hour. Want had taken up
its abode with him. He wanted bread often. His clothes went and came
with painful regularity from his back to the pawnbroker's. His father
refused to do anything for him. "He saw me without bread to put in my
mouth, and offered me not a crumb, although he had money belonging to me
in his hands. He saw me in boots full of holes, and gave me to
understand that I was not to come to see him in such plight." Such was
the poor fellow's distress, that he was almost glad when the _purpura_,
with its intolerable pains, returned, that he might crawl to the
hospital, where he could say, that, "bad as the hospital-fare is, it is
at least certain, and is, after all, ten times better than that I am
able to earn. I can eat as many as two or three plates of soup, but then
I am obliged to change my costume to do so, for it is only by cheating
that one can get it." But all the time he was in the hospital he was
tormented by th