“The couriers who pursued me did not know me.  I had hardly ever shown my face to any but thee, and to thee only in the presence and by the order of my husband.  They conducted themselves in the pursuit by the description that had been given them of my person.  On the frontiers of Egypt they met with a woman of the same stature with me, and possessed perhaps of greater charms.  She was weeping and wandering.  They made no doubt but that this woman was the Queen of Babylon and accordingly brought her to Moabdar.  Their mistake at first threw the king into a violent passion; but having viewed this woman more attentively, he found her extremely handsome and was comforted.  She was called Missouf.  I have since been informed that this name in the Egyptian language signifies the capricious fair one.  She was so in reality; but she had as much cunning as caprice.  She pleased Moabdar and gained such an ascendancy over him as to make him choose her for his wife.  Her character then began to appear in its true colors.  She gave herself up, without scruple, to all the freaks of a wanton imagination.  She would have obliged the chief of the magi, who was old and gouty, to dance before her; and on his refusal, she persecuted him with the most unrelenting cruelty.  She ordered her master of the horse to make her a pie of sweetmeats.  In vain did he represent that he was not a pastry-cook; he was obliged to make it, and lost his place, because it was baked a little too hard.  The post of master of the horse she gave to her dwarf, and that of chancellor to her page.  In this manner did she govern Babylon.  Everybody regretted the loss of me.  The king, who till the moment of his resolving to poison me and strangle thee, had been a tolerably good kind of man, seemed now to have drowned all his virtues in his immoderate fondness for this capricious fair one.  He came to the temple on the great day of the feast held in honor of the sacred fire.  I saw him implore the gods in behalf of Missouf, at the feet of the statue in which I was inclosed.  I raised my voice, I cried out, ’The gods reject the prayers of a king who is now become a tyrant, and who attempted to murder a reasonable wife, in order to marry a woman remarkable for nothing but her folly and extravagance.’  At these words Moabdar was confounded and his head became disordered.  The oracle I had pronounced, and the tyranny of Missouf, conspired to deprive him of his judgment, and in a few days his reason entirely forsook him.

“Moabdar’s madness, which seemed to be the judgment of Heaven, was the signal to a revolt.  The people rose and ran to arms; and Babylon, which had been so long immersed in idleness and effeminacy, became the theater of a bloody civil war.  I was taken from the heart of my statue and placed at the head of a party.  Cador flew to Memphis to bring thee back to Babylon.  The Prince of Hircania, informed of these fatal events, returned with his army and made a third party in Chaldea.  He attacked