night, when the soul
quits her corporeal shackles, and roams in pure fancy through the world
of thought, seeing sights of beauty, and scenes of paradisaical
splendour, which the dull organs of bodily vision can never attain unto.
Why! the happiest portion of my life is that which I have passed in the
land of dreams: one third of my existence has been spent there--and I
have friends, and well-known faces, and peaceful valleys, and bright
streams, and strains of ethereal music, which are still and ever vivid
in my waking mind, but at night call me to themselves, and wrap me in a
state of enjoyment which certainly this poor weak body of mind never
could be capable of experiencing. I have positively new, altogether new
and unheard-of ideas--I do not mean irrational ones, nor those
phantasmagoric combinations that haunt the diseased brains of some
wretched mortals--but reasonable, possible, natural ideas of form and
substance, which I am persuaded have their types in some corner or other
of the universe, and which it may perhaps be hereafter my too happy
destiny to witness, and to dwell amongst for ever and for aye. I would
not exchange my dreams for all the realities of----

"_Monsieur! veut-il dejeuner au salon?_" said the slip-shod _garcon_ of
the hotel, tapping me on the shoulder. "The company have all taken their
seats, and I have kept a chair for Monsieur. Does Monsieur prefer
Burgundy or claret? The _vin ordinaire_ is not sufferable: _au reste_,
here is the _carte_, and Monsieur has only to choose."

"'Tis a reality, my friend, that I was not then exactly thinking of--but
breakfast I must, and will. But just tell me, for a minute, where these
people come from, that I see down in the Place there, at that
corner--the old gentleman in nankeen, with the green shade over his
eyes, and the fat little dame by his side; and those young ladies at the
door of the large hotel opposite, and the spruce _militaire_ there at
the window, and that knot of men in long brown surtouts, one of whom is
gesticulating so vehemently."

"_Excusez_, Monsieur, those _gentlemen_ are great politicians," (_grand_
again, thought I!) "and one of them is deputy for the Department--M. de
Beauparler: he has just been voting against the Ministry, sir; he is a
great friend of M. Lafitte, sir; oh, sir! _c'est le plus grand orateur
de notre pays!_ You ought to hear him, sir. As for the young ladies,
sir, they are _les Demoiselles Leroy_: it was their fat