Minoret, who in tenderness to his wife had refused her
nothing, and had given her a life of luxury, found himself after her
death almost a poor man. Robespierre gave him an appointment as
surgeon-in-charge of a hospital.
Though the name of Minoret obtained during the lively debates to which
mesmerism gave rise a certain celebrity which occasionally recalled
him to the minds of his relatives, still the Revolution was so great a
destroyer of family relations that in 1813 Nemours knew little of
Doctor Minoret, who was induced to think of returning there to die,
like the hare to its form, by a circumstance that was wholly
accidental.
Who has not felt in traveling through France, where the eye is often
wearied by the monotony of plains, the charming sensation of coming
suddenly, when the eye is prepared for a barren landscape, upon a
fresh cool valley, watered by a river, with a little town sheltering
beneath a cliff like a swarm of bees in the hollow of an old willow?
Wakened by the "hu! hu!" of the postilion as he walks beside his
horses, we shake off sleep and admire, like a dream within a dream,
the beautiful scene which is to the traveler what a noble passage in a
book is to a reader,--a brilliant thought of Nature.
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