text:  If this formidable intelligence had awakened the haughtiness of the French government to a sense of public peril what effect must it not have in the counting-house of a man whose existence was trade? While I was on my pillow luxuriating in dreams of French fetes Paul and Virginia carried off to the clouds and Parisian _belles_ dancing cotillons in the bowers and pavilions of a Mahometan paradise Elnathan spent the night at his desk surrounded by his bustling generation of clerks writing to correspondents at every point of the compass and preparing insurances with the great London establishments; which I was to carry with me though unacquainted with the transaction on which so many millions of francs hung trembling