He was
of course discharged on payment of the twenty _sous_ to the tailor.
Although generally considered mean, I have much pleasure in stating that I
have known him perform many acts of charity, frequently giving a dinner to
some one of his reduced countrymen, (of whom there are too many in Paris,)
and occasionally assisting them with small sums of money. It has been
stated that the dread of an operation which became necessary for a
complaint under which he laboured, was the cause of his suicide; this I
much doubt, since I have never met with a man of greater fortitude and
stronger nerve. I am rather disposed to think that the depressed state of
his finances, severing the only hold he had on his dissolute associates,
and the attention paid too often to wealth, though accompanied by vice,
having disappeared, he found himself pennyless and despised; he was
without religious consolation; his health declined, his spirits were
broken; he was, and felt himself, alone in the world, without friends and
without commiseration, and in a moment of desperation he put a period to
his reckless existence.
Your correspondent, _Enort_, has certainly viewed the sunny side of his
character; and that too I am disposed to think, with a burning glass. I
have passed many hours in his society, pleased with his wit and
epigrammatic sallies, but strive in vain to call to my recollection "the
spontaneous flow of his Latin, his quotations from the ancient and modern
poets, and his masterly and eloquent developement of every subject that
his acute intellect chose to dilate upon.
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