The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 211: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

188 THE COURT OF LONDON On several occasions he had written a letter to the prefect, beseeching that any correspondence which should have arrived for him at Meurice’s Hotel or at the general post- office of Paris might be given up to him; but the verbal answer which the reserved domestic invariably brought back was to the effect ‘‘ that no communications had been re- ceived at all, at either place, addressed to Mr. Jocelyn Loftus.” These announcements the young gentleman knew full well to be false, for he was convinced that Louisa would have unweariedly and incessantly written letter after letter, craving, imploring, and beseeching a response; and it was therefore with as much bitterness of spirit as indignation of feeling that Loftus came to the conclusion that the same arbitrary police power which had violated the sanctity of his private papers on the day of his arrest had likewise taken possession of all correspondence that had subsequently arrived for him from England. Our young hero’s state of mind was not, therefore, very felicitous; and a month had thus passed in deep uncertain- ties, varying excitements, and perplexing anxieties. One night Jocelyn had retired to rest earlier than usual, for his health had begun to fail him in the close captivity of that chamber, and, moreover, he had been giving way with a very painful intensity to the poignancy of his thoughts during the evening. The clocks in the thousand towers of the sovereign city of France were proclaiming the hour of nine when, having extinguished the light, Jocelyn thus sought his couch, exhausted alike in mind and body. A deep slumber fell upon him, and he was gradually borne into the Elysian mazes of a delicious dream. He fancied that he was sleeping on a splendid sofa in a magnificently furnished apartment; he thought he saw himself thus reclining full dressed, as if it were in the day- time that he had lain down in this manner to rest for a short while. The saloon to which imagination had thus waited him was flooded with a golden light, — a more than earthly radiance that penetrated throughout, a celestial lustre that rendered each nook and corner as clear and shadow- less as the centre of the room itself. And now, in the midst of that transcendent glow, it appeared to Jocelyn as if angels were passing through the ambrosial air, beauteous (COU () IDoOOks (E(0)