by which he made considerable gains in silver-hilted swords and watches.  At length, having lost a sum of five-and-twenty thousand crowns at the fair of Saint-Germain, he was led to commit that crime which he has just expiated on the scaffold.  For the purpose of discharging the debt he had contracted, he sent for a banker’s clerk to bring him certain bank bills, which he proposed to purchase.  Having connected himself with two other villains, he attacked the clerk as soon as he arrived, and stabbed him with poniards which he had bought three days before on the Pont Neuf.  Hoping to conceal the share which he had taken in this crime, he went immediately after its perpetration to the Commissaire du Quartier, and told him, with a cool and determined air, that he had been obliged, in his own defence, to kill the clerk, who had attacked him and put him in danger of his life.  The Commissaire looking at him steadfastly, said, “You are covered with blood, but you are not even wounded; I must retain you in custody until I can examine this affair more minutely.”  At this moment the accomplice entered the room.  “Here, sir,” said the Count to the Commissaire, “is one who can bear testimony that the account I have given you of this business is perfectly true.”  The accomplice was quite terrified at hearing this; he thought that Count Horn had confessed his crime, and that there could be no advantage in continuing to deny it; he therefore confessed all that had taken place, and thus the murder was revealed.  The Count was not more than two-and-twenty years of age, and one of the handsomest men in Paris.  Some of the first persons in France solicited in his favour, but the Duke Regent thought it necessary to make an example of him on account of the prevalent excess of crime.  Horn was publicly broken on the wheel with his second accomplice; the other died just before:  they were both gentlemen and of noble families.  When they arrived at the place of punishment, they begged the people to implore the pardon of Heaven upon their sins.  The spectators were affected to tears, but they nevertheless agreed in the just severity of their punishment.  The people said aloud after the execution, “Our Regent has done justice.”

One lady was blaming another, her intimate friend, for loving a very ugly man.  The latter said, “Did he ever speak to you tenderly or passionately?”—­“No,” replied the former.  “Then you cannot judge,” said her friend, “whether I ought to love him or not.”

Madame de Nemours used to say, “I have observed one thing in this country, ‘Honour grows again as well as hair.’”

An officer, a gentleman of talent, whose name was Hautmont, wrote the following verses upon Cardinal Mazarin, for which he was locked up in the Bastille for eighteen months: 

                         Creusons tous le tombeau
                         A qui nous persecute;
                         A ce Jules nouveauu
                         Cherchons un nouveau Brute. 
                         Que le jour serait beau,
                         Si nous voyions sa chute!