ABSTRACT
A Friend of mine, who is lately gone to Toulouse, has sent me from thence an account of some circumstances which happened not long ago in that part of France, and which she says are still much the subject of conversation. I shall transcribe this narrative, which I believe will interest you. Perhaps a novel-writer, by the aid of a little additional misery, and by giving the circumstances which actually happened a heightened color—by taking his pallet, and dashing with the full glow of red what nature had only tinged with pale violet, might almost spin a volume from these materials. Yet, after all, nothing is so affecting as simplicity, and nothing as forcible as truth. I shall therefore send you the story exactly as I received it; and 217in such parts of it as want interest, I beg you will recollect that you are not reading a tale of fiction; and that in real life incidents are not always placed as they are in novels, so as to produce stage effect. In some parts of the narrative you will meet with a little romance; but perhaps you will wonder that you meet with no more; since the scene is not in the cold philosophic climate of England, but in the warm regions of the south of France, where the imagination is elevated, where the passions acquire extraordinary energy, and where the lire of poetry flashed from the harps of the Troubadours amidst the sullen gloom of the Gothic ages.
