be recovered sufficiently to dismiss the doctor and change the air.
Meanwhile is there anything you would have added or altered?"

Cesarini had listened to this speech with a mocking sarcasm on his lip,
but an expression of such hopeless wretchedness in his eyes, as they
alone can comprehend who have witnessed madness in its lucid intervals.
He sank down, and his head drooped gloomily on his breast. "No," said
he; "I want nothing but free air or death,--no matter which."

De Montaigne stayed some time with the unhappy man, and sought to soothe
him; but it was in vain. Yet when he rose to depart, Cesarini started
up, and fixing on him his large wistful eyes, exclaimed, "Ah! do not
leave me yet. It is so dreadful to be alone with the dead and the worse
than dead!"

The Frenchman turned aside to wipe his eyes, and stifle the rising at his
heart; and again he sat, and again he sought to soothe. At length
Cesarini, seemingly more calm, gave him leave to depart. "Go," said he,
"go; tell Teresa I am better, that I love her tenderly, that I shall live
to tell her children not to be poets. Stay, you asked if there was aught
I wished changed: yes, this room; it is too still: I hear my own pulse
beat so loudly in the silence, it is horrible! There is a room below, by
the window of which there is a tree, and the winds rock its boughs to and
fro, and it sighs and groans like a living thing; it will be pleasant to
look at that tree, and see the birds come home to it,--yet that tree is
wintry and blasted too! It will be pleasant to hear it fret and chafe in
the stormy nights; it will be a friend to me, that old tree! let me have
that room. Nay, look not at each other,--it is not so high as this; but
the window is barred,--I cannot escape!" And Cesarini smiled.