had relieved him of his hundred thousand roubles, but such is the lot of
gamesters; no craft can be more wretched than theirs.

A week before I left Riga (where I stayed two months) Campioni fled by
favour of the good Prince Charles, and in a few days the Baron de St.
Heleine followed him without taking leave of a noble army of creditors.
He only wrote a letter to the Englishman Collins, to whom he owed a
thousand crowns, telling him that like an honest man he had left his
debts where he had contracted them. We shall hear more of these three
persons in the course of two years.

Campioni left me his travelling carriage, which obliged me to use six
horses on my journey to St. Petersburg. I was sorry to leave Betty, and I
kept up an epistolary correspondence with her mother throughout the whole
of my stay at St. Petersburg.

I left Riga with the thermometer indicating fifteen degrees of frost, but
though I travelled day and night, not leaving the carriage for the sixty
hours for which my journey lasted, I did not feel the cold in the least.
I had taken care to pay all the stages in advance, and Marshal Braun,
Governor of Livonia, had given me the proper passport. On the box seat
was a French servant who had begged me to allow him to wait on me for the
journey in return for a seat beside the coachman. He kept his word and
served me well, and though he was but ill clad he bore the horrible cold
for two days and three nights without appearing to feel it. It is only a
Frenchman who can bear such trials; a Russian in similar attire would
have been frozen to death in twenty-four hours, despite plentiful doses
of corn brandy. I lost sight of this individual when I arrived at St.
Petersburg, but I met him again three months after, richly dressed, and
occupying a seat beside mine at the table of M. de Czernitscheff. He was