his melancholy story to a friend of
mine, two years after it happened) I made an excellent bouillon, and
poured it down his throat with my own hands, and yet he did not
recover." Now, in all probability, this bouillon it was that stopped
his breath. When I was a very young man, I remember to have seen a
person suffocated by such impertinent officiousness. A young man of
uncommon parts and erudition, very well esteemed at the university of
G--ow was found early one morning in a subterranean vault among the
ruins of an old archiepiscopal palace, with his throat cut from ear to
ear. Being conveyed to a public-house in the neighbourhood, he made
signs for pen, ink, and paper, and in all probability would have
explained the cause of this terrible catastrophe, when an old woman,
seeing the windpipe, which was cut, sticking out of the wound, and
mistaking it for the gullet, by way of giving him a cordial to support
his spirits, poured into it, through a small funnel, a glass of burnt
brandy, which strangled him in the tenth part of a minute. The gash was
so hideous, and formed by so many repeated strokes of a razor, that the
surgeons believed he could not possibly be the perpetrator himself;
nevertheless this was certainly the case.

At Brignolles, where we dined, I was obliged to quarrel with the
landlady, and threaten to leave her house, before she would indulge us
with any sort of flesh-meat. It was meagre day, and she had made her
provision accordingly. She even hinted some dissatisfaction at having
heretics in her house: but, as I was not disposed to eat stinking fish,
with ragouts of eggs and onions, I insisted upon a leg of mutton, and a
brace of fine partridges, which I found in the larder. Next day, when
we set out in the morning from Luc, it blew a north-westerly wind so
extremely cold and biting, that even a flannel wrapper could not keep
me tolerably warm in the coach. Whether the cold had put our coachman
in a bad humour, or he had some other cause of resentment against
himself, I know not; but we had not gone above a quarter of a mile,
when he drove the carriage full against the corner of a garden wall,
and broke the axle-tree, so that we were obliged to return to the inn
on foot, and wait a whole day, until a new piece could be made and
adjusted. The wind that blew, is called Maestral, in the Provencial
dialect, and indeed is the severest that ever I felt. At this inn, we
met with a young French officer who had