sities of poor human existence.

Life to me was now as stagnant as the ditch round the fortress; all
feeling was as languid as the heavy air of our casemates. The mind lost
all curiosity relative to the external world; and, beyond the casual
knowledge which dropped, with all official mystery, from the lips of our
worthy governor, and which told us that the war still continued, and
that the armies of the Republic were "invincible beyond all power of
human resistance;" we could not have been much more separated from
sympathy, even with the capital itself, if we had been transported to
one of the belts of Jupiter.

But a new alarm now seized me. The extreme indifference with which I had
begun to regard all things, at length struck the eye of one of the
military surgeons, who had been sent from Paris in consequence of the
influx of prisoners. He seemed to take some interest in my consumptive
visage and lack-lustre eye; asked me whether "some of my family had not
died early in life," and offered to dictate my pursuits and regimen. The
French are by nature a kindly people, with this one proviso, that,
though every Frenchman on earth is more or less a _persifleur_, you must
never practise the art upon himself. M. Rossignol Perigord Pantoufle
would have been an incomparable subject for the exercise, for he was
eccentricity from top to toe. But the state of my spirits prevented my
taking any share in the burlesque which too frequently befell this
worthy person; and he attached himself to me as a sort of refuge from
the sly, but stinging, persecution of his fellow-officers. When the
hen-wife plucks the goose's bosom it makes her nestle more closely to
her goslings. It was the calamity of my friend Pantoufle to be born with
what the novelists call a "too feeling heart;" he was always in love
with some one or another, and always jilted. But misfortune was thrown
away upon him; he was still a complete sensitive plant, shivering and
shrinking at every new touch: a dish of _blancmange_ could not have
shaken with a slighter impulse, nor a shape of jelly more easily
dissolved. He was now past fifty; and, never much indebted to nature in
his youth, time, the foe to beauty, had been more than a foe to the
doctor. I never recollect to have seen a figure or physiognomy less
fitted to disturb the female soul. But he made me the confidant of his
woes; and if I did not, like Desdemona, "to him seriously incline," at
least I never laughed, amu