"I will do nothing that is not perfectly
agreeable to you," I reply evasively.

"It is a powerful indigestion (une forte
indigestion)," continues the portress,
indicatively laying one trembling fore-finger on the
region of her malady. " And I am curing
myself with a Light Tea." Here the
fore-finger changes its direction and points to a
large white earthenware teapot, with an
empty mug by the side of it. To save the
portress the trouble of replenishing her
drinking vessel, I pour out a dose of the
Light Tea. It is a liquid of a faint straw
colour, totally unlike any English tea that
ever was made; and it tastes as a quart
of hot water might taste after a wisp of
hay had been dipped into it. The portress
swallows three mugsful of her medicine
in my presence, smiling and shivering;
looking rapturously at the magnificent new
mirror with its attendant flower-pots and
tapers, and rejecting with grimaces of comic
disgust, all overtures of medical help on my
part, even to the modest offering of one
small pill. An hour or two later, I descend
to the lodge again to see how she is.
She has been persuaded to go to bed; is
receiving, in bed, a levée of friends; is answering,
in the same interesting situation, the
questions of all the visitors of the day to all
the lodgers in the house; has begun a fresh
potful of the light tea; is still smiling; still
shivering; still contemptuously sceptical on
the subject of drugs. In the evening I go
down again. The tea-pot is not done with
yet, and the hay-flavoured hot water is still
pouring inexhaustibly into the system of the
little portress. She happens now to be issuing
directions relative to the keeping awake
of Mon Mari, who, for this night at least,
must watch by the gate-string. He is to
have a pint of strong coffee and a pipe; he is
to have the gas turned on very strong; and
he is to be further excited by the presence of
a brisk and wakeful friend. The next morning,
just as I am thinking of making inquiries
at the lodge, who should enter my room
but the dyspeptic patient herself, cured, and
ready to digest anything but a doctor's advice
or a small pill. Mon Mari, I hear, has not
fallen asleep over the gate-string for more
than half-an-hour, every now and then;
and the portress has had a long night's rest.
She does not, however, consider this unusual
occurrence as reckoning in any degree among
the agencies which have accomplished her
rapid recovery. It is the light tea alone that
has done it; and, if I still doubt the inestimable
virtues of the hot hay-water cure, then
of all the prejudiced gentlemen the portress
has ever heard of, I am the most deplorably
obstinate in opening my arms to error and
shutting my eyes to truth.

Such is the little domestic world about
me, in some of the more vivid lights in which
it presents itself to my own peculiar view.
As for the great Parisian world outside, my
experience of it is bounded by the prospect I
obtain of the Champs Elysées from my
bedroom window. If I had been in health, I
might have found everything to interest me,
and much to write about, in the wonderfully
gay view, with its ever-changing human
interest, on which I can look, whenever I like,
from morning to night. But the same cause
which attaches me to my apartment and
familiarly connects me with my porter and
portress, also contributes to narrow the range of
my observation when I look out of window.
Fashionable Paris spins and prances by me
every afternoon, in all its glory; but what
interest have healthy princes and counts and
blood-horses, and blooming ladies, plunged in
abysses of circumambient crinoline, for me, in
my sick situation? They all fly by me in one
confused phantasmagoria of gay colours and
rushing forms, which I look at with lazy eyes.
The sights I watch with interest are those
only which seem to refer in some degree to
my own invalid position. My sick man's
involuntary egotism clings as close to me when
I look outward at the great highway, as when
I look inward at my own little room: thus,
the only objects which I now notice
attentively from my window, are, oddly enough,
chiefly those which I should have missed
altogether, or looked at with indifference if
I had occupied my bachelor apartment in
the enviable character of a healthy man.

For example, out of the various vehicles
which pass me by dozens in the morning, and
by hundreds in the afternoon, only two
succeed in making anything like a lasting
impression on my mind. I have only vague
ideas of dust, dashing, and magnificence in
connection with the rapid carriages, late in
the day, and of bells, rumbling, and hollow
yelping of carters' voices in connection with
the deliberate waggons early in the morning;
but I have, on the other hand, a very distinct
remembrance of one sober brown omnibus,
belonging to a Maison de Santé, and of a
queer little truck which carries baths and
hot water to private houses, from a bathing
establishment near me. The omnibus, as it
passes my window at a solemn jog-trot, is
full of patients getting their airing. I can
see them dimly, and I fall into curious fancies
about their various cases, and wonder what
proportion of the afflicted passengers are
near the time of emancipation from their
sanitary prison on wheels. As for the little
truck, with its empty zinc bath and barrel of
warm water, I am probably wrong in
sympathetically associating it as frequently as I
do with cases of illness. It is doubtless often
sent for by healthy people, too luxurious in
their habits to walk abroad for a bath. But
there must be a proportion of cases of illness
to which the truck ministers; and when I
see it going faster than usual, I assume that
it must be wanted by some person in a fit;
grow suddenly agitated by the idea, and
watch the empty bath and the hot-water