“When I told her that my aunt had taken up her residence in Paris, it immediately occurred to her, how pleasant it would be to go there too; and, although I concurred in the opinion for very different reasons, it was at length decided we should do so; and the only difficulty now existed as to the means, for although the daily papers teem with ’four ways to go from London to Paris;’ they all resolved themselves into one, and that one, unfortunately to me, the most difficult and impracticable —­by money.

“There was, however, one last resource open—­the sale of my commission.  I will not dwell upon what it cost me to resolve upon this—­the determination was a painful one, but it was soon come to, and before five-o’clock that day, Cox and Greenwood had got their instructions to sell out for me, and had advanced a thousand pounds of the purchase.  Our bill settled—­the waiters bowing to the ground (it is your ruined man that is always most liberal)—­the post-horses harnessed, and impatient for the road, I took my place beside my wife, while my valet held a parasol over the soubrette in the rumble, all in the approved fashion of those who have an unlimited credit with Coutts and Drummond; the whips cracked, the leaders capered, and with a patronizing bow to the proprietor of the ‘Clarendon,’ away we rattled to Dover.

“After the usual routine of sea sickness, fatigue, and poisonous cookery, we reached Paris on the fifth day, and put up at the ‘Hotel de Londres,’ Place Vendome.

“To have an adequate idea of the state of my feelings as I trod the splendid apartments of this princely Hotel, surrounded by every luxury that wealth can procure, or taste suggest, you must imagine the condition of a man, who is regaled with a sumptuous banquet on the eve of his execution.  The inevitable termination to all my present splendour, was never for a moment absent from my thoughts, and the secrecy with which I was obliged to conceal my feelings, formed one of the greatest sources of my misery.  The coup, when it does come, will be sad enough, and poor Mary may as well have the comfort of the deception, as long as it lasts, without suffering as I do.  Such was the reasoning by which I met every resolve to break to her the real state of our finances, and such the frame of mind in which I spent my days at Paris, the only really unhappy ones I can ever charge my memory with.

“We had scarcely got settled in the hotel, when my aunt, who inhabited the opposite side of the ‘Place,’ came over to see us and wish us joy.  She had seen the paragraph in the Post, and like all other people with plenty of money, fully approved a match like mine.