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his purse in order to empty it into mine.--I've enough in
conscience, Eugenius, said I.--Indeed, Yorick, you have not,
replied Eugenius; I know France and Italy better than you.--But you
don't consider, Eugenius, said I, refusing his offer, that before I
have been three days in Paris, I shall take care to say or do
something or other for which I shall get clapp'd up into the
Bastile, and that I shall live there a couple of months entirely at
the king of France's expense.--I beg pardon, said Eugenius drily:
really I had forgot that resource.

Now the event I treated gaily came seriously to my door.

Is it folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity--or what
is it in me, that, after all, when La Fleur had gone down stairs,
and I was quite alone, I could not bring down my mind to think of
it otherwise than I had then spoken of it to Eugenius?

- And as for the Bastile; the terror is in the word.--Make the most
of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word
for a tower;--and a tower is but another word for a house you can't
get out of.--Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a year.--
But with nine livres a day, and pen and ink, and paper, and
patience, albeit a man can't get out, he may do very well within,--
at least for a mouth or six weeks; at the end of which, if he is a
harmless fellow, his innocence appears, and he comes out a better
and wiser man than he went in.

I had some occasion (I forget what) to step into the court-yard, as
I settled this account; and remember I walk'd down stairs in no
small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning.--Beshrew the sombre
pencil! said I, vauntingly--for I envy not its powers, which paints
the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind
sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and
blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks
them.--'Tis true, said I, correcting the proposition,--the Bastile
is not an evil to be despised;--but strip it of its towers--fill up
the fosse,--unbarricade the doors--call it simply a confinement,
and suppose 'tis some tyrant of a distemper--and not of a man,
which holds you in it,--the evil vanishes, and you bear the other
half without complaint.

I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy, with a voice
which I took to be of a child, which complained "it could not get
out."--I look'd up and down the passage, and seeing neither man,
woman, nor child, I went out without farther attention.

In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words
repeated twice over; and, looking up, I saw it was a starling hung
in a little cage.--"I can't get out,--I can't get out," said the
starling.

I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through
the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they
approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity.

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