Her expenses were immense—­not only for herself but for others, for she poured out her hospitality with a noble hand.  She ran into debt, and was swindled by the moneylenders; her steward cheated her, her servants pilfered her; her distress was at last acute.  She fell into fits of terrible depression, bursting into dreadful tears and savage cries.  Her habits grew more and more eccentric.  She lay in bed all day, and sat up all night, talking unceasingly for hour upon hour to Dr. Meryon, who alone of her English attendants remained with her, Mrs. Fry having withdrawn to more congenial scenes long since.  The doctor was a poor-spirited and muddle-headed man, but he was a good listener; and there he sat while that extraordinary talk flowed on—­talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of an abolished past—­stories of Mr. Pitt and of George III., vituperations against Mr. Canning, mimicries of the Duchess of Devonshire—­mingled phantasmagorically with doctrines of Fate and planetary influence, and speculations on the Arabian origin of the Scottish clans, and lamentations over the wickedness of servants; till the unaccountable figure, with its robes and its long pipe, loomed through the tobacco-smoke like some vision of a Sibyl in a dream.  She might be robbed and ruined, her house might crumble over her head; but she talked on.  She grew ill and desperate; yet still she talked.  Did she feel that the time was coming when she should talk no more?

Her melancholy deepened into a settled gloom when the news came of her brother James’s death.  She had quarrelled with all her English friends, except Lord Hardwicke—­with her eldest brother, with her sister, whose kind letters she left unanswered; she was at daggers drawn with the English consul at Alexandria, who worried her about her debts.  Ill and harassed, she hardly moved from her bedroom, while her servants rifled her belongings and reduced the house to a condition of indescribable disorder and filth.  Three dozen hungry cats ranged through the rooms, filling the courts with frightful noises.  Dr. Meryon, in the midst of it all, knew not whether to cry or laugh.  At moments the great lady regained her ancient fire; her bells pealed tumultuously for hours together; or she leapt up, and arraigned the whole trembling household before her, with her Arab war-mace in her hand.  Her finances grew more and more involved—­grew at length irremediable.  It was in vain that the faithful Lord Hardwicke pressed her to return to England to settle her affairs.  Return to England, indeed!  To England, that ungrateful, miserable country, where, so far as she could see, they had forgotten the very name of Mr. Pitt!  The final blow fell when a letter came from the English authorities threatening to cut off her pension for the payment of her debts.  Upon that, after dispatching a series of furious missives to Lord Palmerston, to Queen Victoria, to the Duke of Wellington, she renounced