Finally he turned his fastidious attention to my glazed and staring darling, leaning cautiously over her and doing everything he could but touch her with his hands. He lifted his bag onto the patient's bed and from its maw extracted a brown jar which he presented to me. "It is a paste," he said, patting at his gray hair which rose like dandelion seed around his burned bald pate. "You will use it to keep the air out of her sores."

"She has no sores."

But he was already closing his bag.

"What about your account?" I asked the question only to impress my general poshness.

"My compliments," he answered, "to your friend the count."

"Well, what will I say is wrong with her?"

"Smallpox," he said, and ran down the stairs as quickly as he could.

The doctor was an idiot. His advice was free but his paste was so cruel and irritating that we had to tie Mathilde's hands to the bed to keep her from scratching herself. When he returned the second day I was my true and natural self. That is, I advised him I would treat her better myself.

"I will have you thrown out of this house," he said. "Your wife has a contagious disease and is a risk to the public."

I told him he could do that as soon as he pleased but he might begin by talking to the count. He went. I then departed by the servants' stairs, finding my way through the pig yard to Francis Bailey's Barclay Street drugstore, and there I asked the chemist for two bottles of olive oil. To hurry him along I said my wife had smallpox and I needed the oil quickly.

"Take it and go," he said, handing it out and getting away from me. "You need not wait to pay for it."

Thus the maman and I bathed Mathilde's poor body until her calves were glowing and her sainted ribs were shining in the gloom. This done she slept, and stayed asleep for four long hours at the end of which time she woke and declared herself refreshed.

Mathilde remained ill for another week, but never again did she seem so close to death, and from time to time, usually around noon but sometimes in the evening, the French lover would come tapping on our door. I did not trust him for a moment, not even (particularly not) when I learned that it was he who carried our bundled linen downstairs where he forbade it to be touched until he had dropped it into the boiling copper and paddled it himself.

In any case Mathilde showed his lordship no encouragement at all. It was me, mon Perroquet, she thanked for saving her and I held up her maman's little mirror so she could examine the recovery of her skin which would, in a very short time, show no more injury than a single small indentation in the splendid shadow of her nose.

You will say one cannot cure smallpox with olive oil.

In fact, one can. I did.

TO THE MARQUIS DE TILBOT,

Dear Monsieur, You always said I was ill-suited to my occupation and yet you understood my nature well enough, and with this knowledge strung me along from year to year, and I will not say I have not had an interesting life because of it.

To serve you, Monsieur, is one thing, but M. de Garmont knows not my history or abilities. He insults my honor. He entirely lacks your grace and spirit. He has threatened me, and made himself foolish in attempting to seduce my wife. For this last I would not be blamed for murdering him, so this letter is a less painful way, for himself, of sundering the connection.

I did not seek this new country you have exiled me to but, like Port Jackson many years ago, it does present me with a chance and this one I am too old to throw away.

That is to say, I must give my notice.

Yours faithfully,

J. Larrit, Esq.

DETERMINED TO IMMEDIATELY free myself from Garmont, I was urgently in need of employment. I therefore visited printers on both Broadway and Chatham Street but I had no etchings or letters of reference and the best offer I received was from Barnett Bros. who said they would inspect my work if I could provide a sample. I tried but did not please them. I then pretended I was also a compositor and was dismissed inside the hour without the thrashing that was offered in lieu of wages.

Finally I threw myself on the mercy of our hard-faced landlady who led me into a small dark parlor above whose mantel hung a likeness of a pair of pink-cheeked boys.

Here she seated her bony little self and studied Mathilde's instruments one by one. Finally, with her raw red hand, she pushed a single note across her desk to me. This instrument had been drawn by Mr. Hill, the nail manufacturer, in payment for a portrait of his daughter.

"You must raise your wife up from her bed."

"She needs her rest mum."

"So she will need her room all paid for."

"Yes, mum."

"So," she said, "this bill is written on the Bank of Zion on Pearl Street. Take her there. Don't let her accept scrip. She must not take any notes issued by any bank at all."

"No dollar bills?"

"When you have been in New York longer you will understand that there are many dollar bills that are worth no more than twenty cents. For now you must stick to gold and silver. Is her fever gone? Never mind. Say nothing about fever at the bank."

"Mum's the word," said I.

"That's the spirit, Mr. Larrit, you'll be out of debt in no time." And then, to my great surprise, she laid her fingers upon my cheek and I felt a little widow's hand, all filled with busy blood. "Go," she said. "Before they close their doors."

It was a dull gray Monday and the city was already counting its takings, whipping its horses, removing the jewelry from its cases. We set off for Pearl Street but managed to tour the perimeter of City Hall, arriving in Chatham Street where we had the surprise of seeing Mr. Eckerd's Tragedy of the Revolution already advertised.

On board the ship there had been much talk about the healthy breezes on Manhattan. They must have meant the winds blowing from the arses of the New York pigs. Beekman Street stank like a shit heap, worse than the faubourg Saint-Antoine. We headed south, past Theater Alley, into a smudgy charcoal sort of maze in which the high-haunched New York pigs mingled with New York clerks, their collars all turned down and a great deal of vanity showing on their wispy chins. I mean the clerks. Mathilde was soon distressed and very hot, so then I carried her, and this attracted a group of white-eyed black children who guided us to Pearl and Wall and declared themselves insulted when I could not pay their bill.

The banking chamber of the Bank of Zion was supported by the most boastful columns, but if the name had made me think it would be the home of Jewish bankers I was a fool. On coming beneath its rotunda, we beheld a great symbol laid in mosaic on the floor, this being a triangle and a laurel and three stars which later proved to be the sign of American Protestants who believed their voyage had been more than equal to the Israelites'. Around this circle, like a great ice rink in its size and smoothness, were more columns, between which were placed some pale and ugly clerks, one of whom read Mathilde's instrument, once, then twice, then silently retreated from his pen without a beg-your-pardon.

We were left to wait five minutes and were finally interrogated by what the New Yorkers call a baas, a short man in a frock coat and side whiskers who crossed the wide floor beneath the rotunda to ask whose instrument this was. There was then a lot of argy-bargy. A good quarter hour of it.

"The gentleman wishes to load his trousers with a weight of silver?" etc., etc.

"The gentleman does."

This baas then affected to laugh at our peasant ways, and I gave him the great smirking pleasure of observing how we divvied up our loot in three. It was clear it was past their closing time but only after we had shared our load did we permit ourselves to be escorted out. My pockets were so heavy I feared my trousers would fall down in front of him.