After he had lost his official income, his expenses exceeded his revenue by something like four hundred pounds.

A less expensive style of living in London never seems to have presented itself as an alternative.

So, like many an Englishman before and since, he resolved to go abroad to economise.
His old friend Deyverdun was now settled in a comfortable house at Lausanne, overlooking the Lake of Geneva.

They had not met for eight years.

But the friendship had begun a quarter of a century before, in the old days when Gibbon was a boarder in Pavillard's house, and the embers of old associations only wanted stirring to make them shoot up into flame.