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me with her attentions, with as much determination as she had before avoided even a glance in my direction. She turned all smiles, and affability, to inquire if I had a carriage in waiting to convey me to my residence, and on my replying in the negative, insisted on my taking the vacant seat in her own, to which I most willingly consented. It was during the short drive from the Hôtel Cardinal to the Place Dauphine, where she resided, that I was enabled to judge more fully of her extraordinary vivacity and tact, and above all of her wonderful aptitude for business, for before we parted she had extorted from me a promise to induce my mother to present her statement to the queen, which promise I religiously kept, although I obtained nought but a flat refusal for my pains, followed by many a bitter reproach for meddling with the affairs of this aventurière.' This was the first and last time I ever beheld the countess, and when she became a public character through her participation in the affair of the necklace, I had reason to rejoice that such was the case, for had she but imagined that I was fit to serve her purpose, I feel that it is not unlikely that I might have lost the right of regarding with scorn the infatuation of the cardinal prince. So great was the power of will possessed by this woman, that there must have been inordinate selfconceit in the man who would have dared to pretend to defy it." "

"What was the opinion of M. de Talleyrand concerning the affair of the necklace. Did he believe Madame de la Motte really guilty of the theft?"

"Much less than is supposed by the public, and certainly infinitely less so, than her condemnation bore. I once ventured to ask him if he knew any of the particulars connected with this extraordinary business, and his reply, although guarded, gave me a suspicion, that although he did not believe her innocent, he felt convinced that her guilt was shared by some whose birth and influence near the throne shielded them from exposure.

"There is a degree of mystery throughout the whole transaction,' replied he, in answer to my inquiries, which is, perhaps, destined never to be cleared up. Had Madame de la Motte possessed the cunning of the arch-fiend himself, she could not have been guilty of one-tenth part of the baseness which was imputed to her in the act of accusation; there were impediments both social and commercial to many of the manoeuvres, and which were proved against her on her trial. You can form no conception of the excitement produced by this event. The whole kingdom was divided for her sake into two sects, the unbelieving and the credulous; those who believed her guilty, and those who knew her to be innocent. For myself I have heard so much on either side, that my opinion is scarcely stable even now. It is a singular fact that all the persons who visited her were fully convinced of her innocence, and fought like lions in her defence.

"The Abbé de Kel, the almoner of the Bastille, and confessor of Madame de la Motte, told me himself, that his firm opinion in the case was this: That had she not been unfortunate enough to have already obtained the recognition of her title she would not have been condemned. Monsieur de Breteuil, the great enemy of the cardinal and favourite of the queen, was most active in procuring materials to inculpate this unfortunate woman, and this circumstance having got abroad, greatly contributed to excite suspicion against Marie Antoinette. But the circum

stance which in reality formed the basis of her ruin, was the denial of the cardinal that he had ever furnished her with money. This must have been false, for long before her arrest she was living in splendour, had an hôtel in the Place Dauphine, with servants and equipages, was richly attired and covered with jewels, and all this, forsooth, upon her husband's limited income, and her own pittance of eight hundred livres! I remember being told that the furniture of her hôtel equalled in richness that of the palace at Trianon. Mention was made of polished steel mirrors, set in gold, and of a famous bed, the hangings of which were worked in seed pearl, and which was bought for an enormous sum by Madame du Barry, the late king's mistress.

"Another mystery, which completely baffles all speculation, is the total disappearance of the necklace itself, the object of all this turmoil. It was a jewel so well known among the commerce of Paris that every single stone would have been recognised. There was scarcely a person of any note in the capital who had not seen it, as it had laid at Boehmer's, the jeweller, for more than a year, open to the inspection of any one who chose to ask for the sight of it. I recollect to have seen it not a long while before it created so much disturbance. Boehmer had been employed to furnish the wedding jewels for one of my relations, and the morning that he came to deliver them he brought the necklace, for us to view as a curiosity. Neither in the workmanship nor the size of the stones did it give any notion of the immense value which was set upon it. I believe, however, that this consisted in the stones being all brilliants of the first water, and as a collection, the most perfect and free from blemish (so Boehmer told my aunt) in the whole world.

"There is one more story connected with the jewel, which greatly complicates the mystery of the whole transaction, and which is known but to few persons. During the time that I held the Portefeuille of Foreign Affairs, I received a letter from our ambassador at one of the northern courts, wherein he announced to me, with great excitement, the arrival at his court of the Count de My and his wife. They had been presented by himself to the sovereign; for although they might, strictly speaking, have been considered emigrés, not having returned to France during the reign of Napoleon, yet, as the count was not at that time the head of his family, and had never meddled in politics, he had a right to claim the protection of the ambassador of his country. The lady had chosen for her débût at court the occasion of a royal birthday, and she had made her appearance laden with all her jewels, and, upon her neck,' wrote the baron, she wore a necklace of the exact pattern of that, concerning which all Europe had been roused before the revolution-that is to say, the only difference being, that the three scroll ornaments which are so remarkable, and to which I could swear as being the same, are held by a chain of small rose diamonds instead of the rivière, by which they were joined before.'

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The letter gave us all great diversion at home, from the excitement in which it was written; but the emperor, to whom I of course communicated the fact, took it more gravely, and begged me to ask for a drawing of the necklace, which the ambassador found means to obtain, and which was found to correspond with that preserved among the pièces du procès in the Archives; moreover, on its being submitted to young

Boehmer, he declared his full and entire conviction that the jewel was the same, from the remarkable circumstance of a mistake having occurred in the execution of the middle ornament, one side of the scroll containing two small diamonds more than the other, and which he remembered had much distressed his father, but which could never have been discovered save by a member of the trade. It was then remembered, and by the emperor himself first of all, that the lady's mother had been attached to the person of Marie Antoinette, and that she had retired from court and gone to reside abroad soon after the trial of Madame de la Motte !

"So you see there is another link in the chain of evidence which historians, when writing any future history of the Diamond Necklace, would do well to examine.'

"This is all the information I could ever obtain from the prince," added C. in conclusion, "concering the fameux collier; but this last anecdote so excited my curiosity, that I immediately set to work and procured every pamphlet of note which had been written on the subject, and by the help of this new light was enabled to penetrate much of the darkness by which the affair is enveloped to the generality of the world. If you take any interest in the matter it is really worth your while to do the same. What is still further worthy of remark is the fact that the family of the lady in question did not return to France even after the Restoration, and have continued to dwell abroad ever since. The name is one of the highest in France, and it excites astonishment to find it enrolled in the service of a foreign country."

Louis Dixhuit was evidently aware of the history, for I remember once being struck with a conversation reported to me by the Marquis de F. The young Count de B, one of the most notorious, bites at court, said one day in the presence of the king, "I wonder why the My family do not come back to claim their hereditary charges at court? What pleasure can they find in the horrid country they have chosen ?—I could not live there for a single hour."

"Perhaps you could not," retorted Louis Dixhuit, in his penny trumpet voice and with his childish titter, "but the Count de M--y can,—for it is a woody country, and unlike France, on y brùle la bûche et jamais La

MOTTE.'

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The Marquis de F—— had applied to me to know the meaning of the pun. The ambassador's letter immediately flashed on my memory, but I did not choose to have the affair discussed with my name, so held my peace.

of

DEAR

THE OUTCAST.

A TALE.

BY THE MEDICAL STUDENT.

Hotel de l'Orient, Marseilles, July 6, 183-.

The nar

of -

I TAKE the opportunity of the packet's return to send you the papers my uncle which I spoke of. You no doubt thought I was off with them for good, to the disappointment of your curiosity; but the fact of their being among my baggage is altogether owing to my hurried departure on the morning after our last meeting. As I have slender recollection of much that passed that evening, and am not aware whether or not I explained to you their origin, I may as well do it now. rative is the production of my uncle, the late Dr. Eand refers to a period of about thirty years back, when he was endea vouring to conjure up a practice in England. Why he should have ever written it, I cannot account, except from the difficulty of altogether keeping a secret. He died very suddenly, and these papers, tied up with others of a similar description-old love-letters, &c., came into my possession. You will observe that the names are in cypher, but this is not of much importance, and you can understand the narrative quite as well by supposing names for the personages, such as Jenkins or Snooks, if your taste lie one way, or Howard or Cavendish, if the other. I may mention to you that though a member of the doctor's family, and brought up for the most part in his house, I never heard of the circumstances till the papers came into my possession.

*

*

It would be tedious to detail the various steps through which my acquaintance with Mr. Emmanuel Jaques, a gentleman of Jewish lineage and persuasion, advanced to intimate friendship. I was endeavouring to establish a practice in a small town a few miles from London, and he inhabited a retired cottage in its vicinity. When I first knew him, an elderly man, by name Conrad Hermann, and a girl about fourteen, called Rachel, resided with him; an aged Hebrew female domestic and a kitchen girl formed the other occupants of the house. They lived an exceedingly retired life, and drew their support from some sources with which it was long before I became rightly acquainted.

At the time I thus introduce them to you, Mr. Jaques was about twenty-four years of age, and was upon the whole, a young man of the strangest and most striking appearance in person, manner, and habits, that I have ever observed. No man could appear more calculated for a complete enjoyment of the pleasures of society, and yet he seemed debarred from them by some strange invisible chain-some mental barrier that kept him back from any advances toward his fellow beings. He was possessed of remarkable beauty of features, with the peculiarities that are generally held to indicate a Jewish origin descernible upon them.

* One of our Mediterranean possessions.

He had, moreover, in all things very much the aspect of a gentleman; was always remarkably clean and neat in his apparel, but used perfumes to excess. The skin of his hands and the upper part of his face was extremely fair, though on close inspection, you would find it seemed not the common white of the skin, but a sort of dry white, like that of a waxen bust in a perruquier's window. The colour on his cheek was delicate and rosy, like the complexion of a female child, yet had also a dry, sapless appearance; a pair of very expressive dark eyes, and hair of a jetty curl, lent their aid to make him what he really was, the finest faced man I have ever seen.

But mark! Upon this beautiful face sat an expression the most unique and constant-that of painful depression varying in its range of poignancy from melancholy, or even a kind of resigned pensiveness, to the writhing features and upward strained eyes which seemed to indicate mental anguish unbearable yet hopeless-complete despair, unspoken, because altogether beyond human appreciation or sympathy-and this latter was as the rule-the former was the exception. A person on first observing this, would have concluded it to be the despair of religious fanaticism with regard to futurity, for nothing save the idea of a perpetuity of torture-the most extreme which omniscience could invent or omnipotence effect-and that, too, unavoidable, indeed, foreknown and fated from everlasting, could be conceived capable of producing a look so præterhuman in its misery and hopelessness-so sublime in its bleak elevation above the common smiles and tears of mankind. was not so.

But it

I have suffered myself from that hideous mental malady Infidelity (and what studiously addicted young man has not between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five ?). I have suffered from it, and know the agony of being without hope-of believing that there is no state after death-that in the grave there is no more of the sweet consciousness of existence of the noble faculty of thinking-no more of the exquisite stimulus of passion, of the soft bliss of emotion-nothing to be perceived -nothing remembered-nothing felt-nothing known—all blank, blank -for ever blank. I have known this, and though when suffering under it-ay, and under the additional pressures of poverty and disappointment, and no faith in a Providence to help, I have been able to smile with one and laugh with another, and to give little outward evidence of inward suffering, save in this supposition also. Yet believing this to be the extremest misery a well-cultivated and sane mind can suffer from, I had no hesitation in ascribing it as the cause giving origin to the awful despondency of Jaques-but I was in error. Surely his must have been indeed a dread affliction. I never saw in his features that look of ordinary feeling, of apathetic intelligence-neither joy nor sorrow, which every one is accustomed to see on all countenances. The best expression they commonly wore, was pensive resignation to a great and hopeless evil. I never observed him laugh or smile in mirth-the most ludicrous scene was able to elicit no more from him than an inane look, as if he were gazing through it at something beyond. The brightest weather, the most beautiful scenery, failed to put him in spirits. Music could not do it-lighter strains he heard as if he heard them not-and sadder or more solemn melted him to tears, and then with the big drops falling from among his fingers, or steeping his handkerchief as he bowed down, lean

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