Having related the story of my life as it happened, incident by incident, and brought it down to that point at which stories are wont to end, I find that I have little to add respecting others.  My narrative from first to last has been purely personal.  The one love of my life was Hortense—­the one friend of my life, Oscar Dalrymple.  The catalogue of my acquaintances would scarcely number so many names as I have fingers on one hand.  The two first are still mine; the latter, having been brought forward only in so far as they re-acted upon my feelings or modified my experiences, have become, for the most part, mere memories, and so vanish, ghost-like, from the page.  Franz Mueller is studying in Rome, having carried off a prize at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, which entitles him to three years at the Villa Medici, that Ultima Thule of the French art-student’s ambition.  I hear that he is as full of whim and jest as ever, and the very life of the Cafe Greco.  May I some day hear his pleasant laugh again!  Dr. Cheron, I believe, is still practising in Paris; and Monsieur de Simoncourt, I have no doubt, continues to exercise the profession of Chevalier d’Industrie, with such failures and successes as are incidental to that career.

As for my early amourettes, they have disappeared from my path as utterly as though they had never crossed it.  Of Madame de Marignan, I have neither heard, nor desired to hear, more.  Even Josephine’s pretty face is fast fading from my memory.  It is ever thus with the transient passions of our premiere jeunesse. We believe in them for the moment, and waste laughter and tears, chaplets and sackcloth, upon them.  Presently the delusion passes; the earnest heart within us is awakened; and we know that till now we have been mere actors in “a masquerade of dreams.”  The chaplets were woven of artificial flowers.  The funeral was a mock funeral—­the banquet a stage feast of painted fruits and empty goblets!  Alas! we cannot undo that foolish past.  We may only hope to blot it out with after records of high, and wise, and tender things.  Thus it is that the young man’s heart is like the precious palimpsest of old.  He first of all defiles it with idle anacreontics in praise of love and wine; but, erasing these by-and-by with his own pious hand, he writes it over afresh with chronicles of a pure and holy passion, and dedicates it to the fair saint of all his orisons.

Dalrymple and his wife are now settled in Italy, having purchased a villa in the neighborhood of Spezzia, where they live in great retirement.  In their choice of such retirement they are influenced by more than one good reason.  In the first place, the death of the Vicomte de Caylus was an event likely to be productive of many unpleasant consequences to one who had deprived the French government of so distinguished an officer.  In the next, Dalrymple is a poor man, and his wife is no longer rich; so that Italy agrees with their means as well as with their tastes.  Lastly, they love each other so well that they never weary of their solitude, nor care to barter away their blue Italian skies and solemn pine-woods for the glittering unrest of society.