"What Surprises Me Greatly, (Said The Post-Master,
Speaking Of This Melancholy Story To A Friend Of Mine, Two Years
After it happened) I made an excellent bouillon, and poured it
down his throat with my own hands, and yet
He did not recover."
Now, in all probability, this bouillon it was that stopped his
breath. When I was a very young man, I remember to have seen a
person suffocated by such impertinent officiousness. A young man
of uncommon parts and erudition, very well esteemed at the
university of G - ow was found early one morning in a subterranean
vault among the ruins of an old archiepiscopal palace, with his
throat cut from ear to ear. Being conveyed to a public-house in
the neighbourhood, he made signs for pen, ink, and paper, and in
all probability would have explained the cause of this terrible
catastrophe, when an old woman, seeing the windpipe, which was
cut, sticking out of the wound, and mistaking it for the gullet,
by way of giving him a cordial to support his spirits, poured
into it, through a small funnel, a glass of burnt brandy, which
strangled
him in the tenth part of a minute. The gash was so hideous, and
formed by so many repeated strokes of a razor, that the surgeons
believed he could not possibly be the perpetrator himself;
nevertheless this was certainly the case.
At Brignolles, where we dined, I was obliged to quarrel with the
landlady, and threaten to leave her house, before she would
indulge us with any sort of flesh-meat.
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