As Soon As The Honest Creature Had Taken Away, And Gone Down To Sup
Himself, I Then Began To Think A Little Seriously About My
Situation.
-
- And here, I know, Eugenius, thou wilt smile at the remembrance of
a short dialogue which passed betwixt us the moment I was going to
set out: - I must tell it here.
Eugenius, knowing that I was as little subject to be overburden'd
with money as thought, had drawn me aside to interrogate me how
much I had taken care for. Upon telling him the exact sum,
Eugenius shook his head, and said it would not do; so pull'd out
his purse in order to empty it into mine. - I've enough in
conscience, Eugenius, said I. - Indeed, Yorick, you have not,
replied Eugenius; I know France and Italy better than you. - But you
don't consider, Eugenius, said I, refusing his offer, that before I
have been three days in Paris, I shall take care to say or do
something or other for which I shall get clapp'd up into the
Bastile, and that I shall live there a couple of months entirely at
the king of France's expense. - I beg pardon, said Eugenius drily:
really I had forgot that resource.
Now the event I treated gaily came seriously to my door.
Is it folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity - or what
is it in me, that, after all, when La Fleur had gone down stairs,
and I was quite alone, I could not bring down my mind to think of
it otherwise than I had then spoken of it to Eugenius?
- And as for the Bastile; the terror is in the word. - Make the most
of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word
for a tower; - and a tower is but another word for a house you can't
get out of. - Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a year. -
But with nine livres a day, and pen and ink, and paper, and
patience, albeit a man can't get out, he may do very well within, -
at least for a mouth or six weeks; at the end of which, if he is a
harmless fellow, his innocence appears, and he comes out a better
and wiser man than he went in.
I had some occasion (I forget what) to step into the court-yard, as
I settled this account; and remember I walk'd down stairs in no
small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning. - Beshrew the sombre
pencil! said I, vauntingly - for I envy not its powers, which paints
the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind
sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and
blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks
them. - 'Tis true, said I, correcting the proposition, - the Bastile
is not an evil to be despised; - but strip it of its towers - fill up
the fosse, - unbarricade the doors - call it simply a confinement,
and suppose 'tis some tyrant of a distemper - and not of a man,
which holds you in it, - the evil vanishes, and you bear the other
half without complaint.
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