nine o’clock at
night before
It was in the old French of Rabelais 's time , and for aught I know might have been wrote by him : -- it was moreover in a Gothic letter , and that so faded and gone off by damps and length of time , it cost me infinite trouble to make anything of it . -- I threw it down ; and then wrote a letter to Eugenius ; -- then I took it up again , and embroiled my patience with it afresh ; -- and then to cure that , I wrote a letter to Eliza . -- Still it kept hold of me ; and the difficulty of understanding it increased but the desire . I got my dinner ; and after I had enlightened my mind with a bottle of Burgundy ; I at it again , -- and , after two or three hours poring upon it , with almost as deep attention as ever Gruter or Jacob Spon did upon a nonsensical inscription , I thought I made sense of it ; but to make sure of it , the best way , I imagined , was to turn it into English , and see how it would look then ; -- so I went on leisurely , as a trifling man does , sometimes writing a sentence , -- then taking a turn or two , -- and then looking how the world went , out of the window ; so that it was nine o'clock at night before I had done it . -- I then began and read it as follows . -- NOW , as the notary 's wife disputed the point with the notary with too much heat , -- I wish , said the notary , -LRB- throwing down the parchment -RRB- that there was another notary here only to set down and attest all this . -- -- And what would you do then , Monsieur ?