"When Flechier had told me thus much, he could not speak for sobbing; and
I, myself, could hardly tell how to restrain my tears sufficiently, until
I could go to my own room and be at liberty to give way. He asked my
leave to bring in his friend Le Febvre, who was walking in the square,
awaiting a possible summons to tell his story. I heard afterwards a good
many details, which filled up the account, and made me feel--which brings
me back to the point I started from--how unfit the lower orders are for
being trusted indiscriminately with the dangerous powers of education. I
have made a long preamble, but now I am coming to the moral of my story."

My lady was trying to shake off the emotion which she evidently felt in
recurring to this sad history of Monsieur de Crequy's death. She came
behind me, and arranged my pillows, and then, seeing I had been
crying--for, indeed, I was weak-spirited at the time, and a little served
to unloose my tears--she stooped down, and kissed my forehead, and said
"Poor child!" almost as if she thanked me for feeling that old grief of
hers.

"Being once in France, it was no difficult thing for Clement to get into
Paris. The difficulty in those days was to leave, not to enter. He came
in dressed as a Norman peasant, in charge of a load of fruit and
vegetables, with which one of the Seine barges was freighted. He worked
hard with his companions in landing and arranging their produce on the
quays; and then, when they dispersed to get their breakfasts at some of
the estaminets near the old Marche aux Fleurs, he sauntered up a street
which conducted him, by many an odd turn, through the Quartier Latin to a
horrid back alley, leading out of the Rue l'Ecole de Medecine; some
atrocious place, as I have heard, not far from the shadow of that
terrible Abbaye, where so many of the best blood of France awaited their
deaths. But here some old man lived, on whose fidelity Clement thought