uchesse had the grace to disappear) released me, and I
flew down stairs like a spirit from purgatory.

From that moment the duchesse honoured me with her most deadly
abhorrence. Equally silly and wicked, her schemes of revenge were as
ludicrous in their execution as remorseless in their design: at one
time I narrowly escaped poison in a cup of coffee--at another, she
endeavoured to stab me to the heart with a paper cutter.

Notwithstanding my preservation from these attacks, this new Messalina
had resolved on my destruction, and another means of attempting it still
remained, which the reader will yet have the pleasure of learning.

Mr. Thornton had called upon me twice, and twice I had returned
the visit, but neither of us had been at home to benefit by these
reciprocities of politesse. His acquaintance with my mysterious hero of
the gambling house and the Jardin des Plantes, and the keen interest
I took, in spite of myself, in that unaccountable person, whom I was
persuaded I had seen before in some very different scene, and under very
different circumstances, made me desirous to increase a connoissance,
which, from Vincent's detail, I should otherwise have been anxious to
avoid. I therefore resolved to make another attempt to find him at home;
and my headache being somewhat better, I took my way to his apartments
in the Faubourg St. Germain.

I love that quartier--if ever I went to Paris again I should reside
there. It is quite a different world from the streets usually known to,
and tenanted by the English--there, indeed, you are among the French,
the fossilized remains of the old regime--the very houses have an air of
desolate, yet venerable grandeur--you never pass by the white and modern
mansion of a nouveau riche; all, even to the ruggedness of the pave,
breathes a haughty disdain of innovation--you cross one of the
numerous bridges, and you enter into another time--you are inhaling
the atmosphere of a past century; no flaunting boutique, French in its
trumpery, English in its prices, stares you in the face; no stiff coats
and unnatural gaits are seen anglicising up the melancholy streets. Vast
hotels, with their gloomy frontals, and magnificent contempt of comfort;
shops, such as shops might have been in the aristocratic days of Louis
Quatorze, ere British vulgarities made them insolent and dear;
public edifices, still redolent of the superb charities of le grand
monarque--carriages with their huge bodies and