doctor there, Dr. Demestre, who used to
prescribe in all such cases inhalation of the
vapour of brimstone, by which means he
killed a great number of patients. Young
Robertson was frightfully thin; it was
supposed that he would not survive his twenty-
fifth year; his thinness being ascribed by the
faculty to his electrical machine—to the
"electrical atmosphere" in which he lived.
Stirring abroad and horse-exercise were
urged on him as remedies, and therefore
when he set out alone for Paris it was on
horseback that he made the journey.

Among the various things noted by M.
Robertson upon the way, we shall observe
only the device of a village conjuror
inhabiting a boggy district not very far from
Notre Dame de Liesse. He would cause, he
said, the spirit of any dead person to appear
at night out in the open country. Whoever
desired to call a friend back from the spirit
world had only to meet the conjuror at night
upon the moor with staff and lantern. The
staff was to be stuck into the ground and
the lantern set down beside it: while he who
would see the ghost knelt with his back to
them and said a paternoster. Then he turned
round, took up his staff again, and out of the
hole which it had made in the ground the
spirit arose, clothed in fire—that is to say, a
little stream of inflammable gas rose, which
was instantly ignited by the lantern.

Such a conjuror upon a large scale, but
without the fraud, was Monsieur Robertson
to be. That was the fate to which he rode
in Paris.

The Paris that he entered differed largely
from the Paris of to-day. The bustle and
rumble of a great town is indeed always
much the same; but the Paris of seventeen
hundred and eighty-nine was inhabited by a
white-headed race of people. He had seen
in a long life, said M. Robertson, no change
so striking as that made in the aspect of the
streets of Paris by the abolition of hair-
powder, the conversion of white into black,
as regards one of the main features of town
scenery, the heads of the people. M.Robertson
saw many changes, too. He saw the luxuries
enjoyed at Lucienne by the Countess Dubarry.
He saw trains of domestics carrying rich
viands on gold and silver plate to her garden
pavilion, when he was one day permitted to
walk among the flowers. Time passed, and
he saw a screaming, despairing woman
dragged upon a car through the Rue St.
Honoré, unpitied by the crowd, her agony
mocked by epithets that are cast only at
the basest of her sex. That was Madame
Dubarry, passing to the scaffold.

The act of history to which such scenes
belonged had not commenced when Monsieur
Robertson arrived in Paris. Louis the
Sixteenth was in the full glitter of his royal state,
and M. Pascal-Tasquin was the maker of his
harpsichords. M. Pascal was a shrewd and
kindly gentleman, devoted to his own art,
who received the young adventurer, at M.
Villette's recommendation, with much
cordiality. He illustrated all subjects with
figures drawn from his own trade. Life, he
would say, is a harpsichord on which you
must take care to play in tune, and
mind where you put your finger. There are
some people who run through the whole
gamut of fortune and are none the happier;
others find contentment at the second octave.
One should not take alarm at a false note, if
one has any ear; with courage, tact, and a
little talent, anything may be got into the
right tune. Keep out of bad company—it
breaks into the harmony of good intentions,
between scamps and honest people unisons
are quite out of the question. This good old
gentleman promised to watch over the
stranger's interests, and undertook that there
should be no discord between promise and
performance.

Neither was there any.  While awaiting
other means of earning a subsistence, Robertson
painted cameos for a fat, bachelor tradesman
of the Palais-Royal, Monsieur Cabasson,
and was glorified by seeing one of his designs
bordered with diamonds, and mounted on a
costly box. He attended the lectures of
Monsieur Brisson, but as he could not afford to
pay four louis for the course, he postponed the
happiness of attending also at the lectures
and experiments of Monsieur Charles. During
these days good M. Pascal was suggesting
various plans on young Robertson's behalf,
and if they proved impracticable, comforted
him with, "Never mind, if we can't do it in
sol, we shall do it in ut," and at last sent for
him to tell him that his affairs were at last
put into perfect tune, he had only to sit down
and play away. He had in fact obtained for
him the very eligible post of tutor to the son
of that Monsieur Bénézech, who afterwards
was minister of the interior under the Directory,
and who died in the expedition to Saint
Domingo, under General Leclerc. M. Bénézech
had married the Baroness de Boyle, who
brought with her a property worth, it was
said, two hundred thousand francs—between
eight and nine thousand pounds a year. A
brother of M. Bénézech, skilled in mathematics,
taught much of that science to the new
tutor, who, having been duly installed with
his patrons, had the most courteous and
friendly treatment, elegant lodgings, the use
of a carriage whenever he desired it, the
enjoyment of a table delicately served—at which
Mirabeau was a frequent guest—and eighteen
hundred francs—seventy-five pounds a year,
as salary. At this house, Monsieur Robertson
made the acquaintance of Monsieur de
Sauvebœuf, the author of a book of Turkish
and Persian Travel, and by that gentleman
he was introduced at the end of a year, when
he was quitting the Bénézechs, to Madame
Chevalier, whose husband, the last French
Governor in India, had amassed a fortune so
colossal, as to leave at the disposal of his