What could I do?  I had no book to read.  And yet, unless I found out some method of diverting my mind, I felt certain that I was in the condition to imagine all sorts of horrors; to rack my brain with forebodings of every possible and impossible danger; in short, to pass the night in suffering all conceivable varieties of nervous terror.

I raised myself on my elbow, and looked about the room—­which was brightened by a lovely moonlight pouring straight through the window—­to see if it contained any pictures or ornaments that I could at all clearly distinguish.  While my eyes wandered from wall to wall, a remembrance of Le Maistre’s delightful little book, “Voyage autour de ma Chambre,” occurred to me.  I resolved to imitate the French author, and find occupation and amusement enough to relieve the tedium of my wakefulness, by making a mental inventory of every article of furniture I could see, and by following up to their sources the multitude of associations which even a chair, a table, or a wash-hand stand may be made to call forth.

In the nervous unsettled state of my mind at that moment, I found it much easier to make my inventory than to make my reflections, and thereupon soon gave up all hope of thinking in Le Maistre’s fanciful track—­or, indeed, of thinking at all.  I looked about the room at the different articles of furniture, and did nothing more.

There was, first, the bed I was lying in; a four-post bed, of all things in the world to meet with in Paris—­yes, a thorough clumsy British four-poster, with the regular top lined with chintz—­the regular fringed valance all round—­the regular stifling, unwholesome curtains, which I remembered having mechanically drawn back against the posts without particularly noticing the bed when I first got into the room.  Then there was the marble-topped wash-hand stand, from which the water I had spilled, in my hurry to pour it out, was still dripping, slowly and more slowly, on to the brick floor.  Then two small chairs, with my coat, waistcoat, and trousers flung on them.  Then a large elbow-chair covered with dirty-white dimity, with my cravat and shirt collar thrown over the back.  Then a chest of drawers with two of the brass handles off, and a tawdry, broken china inkstand placed on it by way of ornament for the top.  Then the dressing-table, adorned by a very small looking-glass, and a very large pincushion.  Then the window—­an unusually large window.  Then a dark old picture, which the feeble candle dimly showed me.  It was a picture of a fellow in a high Spanish hat, crowned with a plume of towering feathers.  A swarthy, sinister ruffian, looking upward, shading his eyes with his hand, and looking intently upward—­it might be at some tall gallows at which he was going to be hanged.  At any rate, he had the appearance of thoroughly deserving it.