bought myself fifteen hundred francs of income.  Every morning, as I took my coffee and read the paper, I said to myself:  ’That cursed Mongenod! if it were not for him I should have three thousand francs a year to live on.’  Mongenod became by bete-noire; I inveighed against him even as I walked the streets.  ‘Bordin is there,’ I thought to myself; ’Bordin will put the screws on, and a good thing, too.’  My feelings turned to hatred, and my hatred to imprecations; I cursed the man, and I believed he had every vice.  ’Ah!  Monsieur Barillaud was very right,’ thought I, ‘in all he told me!’”

Monsieur Alain paused reflectively.

“Yes,” he said again, “I thought him very right in all he told me.  At last, one morning, in came my debtor, no more embarrassed than if he didn’t owe me a sou.  When I saw him I felt all the shame he ought to have felt.  I was like a criminal taken in the act; I was all upset.  The eighteenth Brumaire had just taken place.  Public affairs were doing well, the Funds had gone up.  Bonaparte was off to fight the battle of Marengo.  ‘It is unfortunate, monsieur,’ I said, receiving Mongenod standing, ‘that I owe your visit to a sheriff’s summons.’  Mongenod took a chair and sat down.  ‘I came to tell you,’ he said, ‘that I am totally unable to pay you.’  ’You made me miss a fine investment before the election of the First Consul,—­an investment which would have given me a little fortune.’  ‘I know it, Alain,’ he said, ’I know it.  But what is the good of suing me and crushing me with bills of costs?  I have nothing with which to pay anything.  Lately I received letters from my wife and father-in-law; they have bought land with the money you lent me, and they send me a list of things they need to improve it.  Now, unless some one prevents it, I shall sail on a Dutch vessel from Flushing, whither I have sent the few things I am taking out to them.  Bonaparte has won the battle of Marengo, peace will be signed, I may safely rejoin my family; and I have need to, for my dear little wife is about to give birth to a child.’  ‘And so you have sacrificed me to your own interests?’ said I.  ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘for I believed you my friend.’  At that moment I felt myself inferior to Mongenod, so sublime did he seem to me as he said those grand words.  ‘Did I not speak to you frankly,’ he said, ’in this very room?  I came to you, Alain, as the only person who would really understand me.  I told you that fifty louis would be lost, but a hundred I could return to you.  I did not bind myself by saying when; for how could I know the time at which my long struggle with disaster would end?  You were my last friend.  All others, even our old master Bordin, despised me for the very reason that I borrowed money of them.  Oh! you do not know, Alain, the dreadful sensation which grips the heart of an honest man when, in the throes of poverty, he goes to a friend and asks him for succor,—­and all that follows!  I hope you never may know it;