Recollections of My Childhood and Youth

Second Longer Stay Abroad

Hamburg--My Second Fatherland--Ernest Hello--Le Docteur Noir-- Taine--Renan--Marcelin--Gleyre--Taine's Friendship--Renan at Home-- Philarète Chasles' Reminiscences--Le Théâtre Français--Coquelin --Bernhardt--Beginnings of Main Currents--The Tuileries--John Stuart Mill--London--Philosophical Studies--London and Paris Compared-- Antonio Gallenga and His Wife--Don Juan Prim--Napoleon III--London Theatres--Gladstone and Disraeli in Debate--Paris on the Eve of War-- First Reverses--Flight from Paris--Geneva, Switzerland--Italy--Pasquale Villari--Vinnie Ream's Friendship--Roman Fever--Henrik Ibsen's Influence--Scandinavians in Rome.

I.

The first thing that impressed me was Hamburg, and by that I mean the European views prevalent there. At that time, doubtless mainly for national reasons, Denmark hated Hamburg. Different Danish authors had recently written about the town, and in as depreciatory a strain as they could. The description of one amounted to an assertion that in Hamburg people only talked of two things, money and women; that of another commenced: "Of all the places I have ever seen in my life, Hamburg is the most hideous."

The situation of the town could not be compared with that of Copenhagen, but the Alster quarter was attractive, the architecture and the street life not uninteresting. What decided me, however, was not the externals of the town, but the spirit I noticed pervading the conversation. The idea underlying things was that a young man must first and foremost learn to keep himself well and comfortably; if he could not do this in Hamburg, then as soon as possible he must set off to some place across the sea, to Rio, or New York, to the Argentine, or Cape Colony, and there make his way and earn a fortune. The sons of the families I was invited to visit, or heard talked about, had long been away; in the houses I went to, the head of the family had seen other parts of the world. The contrast with Copenhagen was obvious; there the young sons of the middle classes were a burden on their families sometimes until they were thirty, had no enterprise, no money of their own to dispose of, were often glued, as it were, to the one town, where there was no promotion to look forward to and no wide prospect of any sort.

It was a long time since I had been so much struck by anything as by an expression that a Hamburg lady, who had been to Copenhagen and had stayed there some time, used about the young Danish men, namely, that they had l'apparence chétive. I tried to persuade her that life in Copenhagen had only accidentally appeared so wretched to her; but I did not convince her in the least. She demonstrated to me, by numerous examples, to what an extent enterprise was lacking in Denmark, and I was obliged to restrict myself to explaining that the tremendous pressure of political pettiness and weakness had brought a general slackness with it, without people feeling or suspecting it, and had robbed nearly every one of daring and success. The result of the conversation was that Denmark was shown to me in a fresh light.

A Hamburg merchant who had lived for a long time in Mexico invited me to dinner, and at his house I had the same impression of apparent happiness, comfort, enterprise and wide outlook, in contrast to the cares and the narrowness at home, where only the few had travelled far or collected material which might by comparison offer new points of view and give one a comprehensive experience of life. My psychological education in Danish literature, with its idolising of "thoroughness" had imprinted on my mind that whoever thoroughly understood how to observe a man, woman and child in a Copenhagen backyard had quite sufficient material whence to brew a knowledge of human nature. It now dawned upon me that comparative observation of a Mexican and a North German family, together with their opinions and prejudices, might nevertheless considerably advance one's knowledge of human nature, should such comparisons constantly obtrude themselves upon one.

The same man let fall an observation which set me thinking. When the conversation turned upon the strained relations between France and Prussia since the battle of Königgratz, and I expressed myself confident that, in the event of a war, France would be victorious, as she generally was victorious everywhere, he expressed well-supported doubts. Prussia was a comparatively young state, extremely well organised and carefully prepared for war; antiquated routine held great sway in the French army; the Emperor himself, the esteem in which he was held, and his management were on the down grade. These were words that I had never heard in Denmark. The possibility of France being defeated in a war with Prussia was not even entertained there. This merchant showed me an original photograph of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian, taken on the spot a moment before the word to fire was given, and a second taken immediately afterwards. The calm bearing of the Emperor and the two generals compelled admiration. This was the first time I had seen photography taken into the service of history.

In the Hamburg Zoological Gardens I was fascinated by the aquarium, with its multitudes of aquatic animals and fish. There, for the first time in my life, I saw an elephant, and did not tire of gazing at the mighty beast. I was struck by the strange caprice with which the great Being we call Nature goes to work, or, more correctly, by the contrast between the human point of view and Nature's mode of operations. To us, the elephant's trunk was burlesque, its walk risibly clumsy; the eagle and the kite seemed to us, as they sat, to have a severe appearance and a haughty glance; the apes, picking lice from one another and eating the vermin, were, to our eyes, contemptible and ridiculous at the same time; but Nature took everything equally seriously, neither sought nor avoided beauty, and to her one being was not more central than another. That must be deemed Nature's central point which is equidistant from the lowest and from the highest being; it was not impossible, for instance, that the harefish, a great, thick, odd-looking creature, was the real centre of terrestrial existence, in the same way as our celestial sphere has its centre, through which a line reaches the pole of the zodiac in the constellation of the Dragon. And I smiled as I thought of R. Nielsen and his pupils always speaking as if they stood on the most intimate footing with the "central point" of existence, and pouring contempt on others who, it was to be supposed, could not approach it.

I was very unfavourably impressed in Hamburg by German drama and German dramatic art.

At the town theatre, Hebbel's Judith was being performed, with Clara Ziegler in the leading part. At that time this lady enjoyed a considerable reputation in Germany, and was, too, a tall, splendid-looking female, with a powerful voice, a good mimic, and all the rest of it, but a mere word-machine. The acting showed up the want of taste in the piece. Holofernes weltered knee-deep in gore and bragged incessantly; Judith fell in love with his "virility," and when he had made her "the guardian of his slumbers" murdered him, from a long disremembered loyalty to the God of Israel.

At the Thalia Theatre, Raupach's The School of Life was being produced, a lot of silly stuff, the theme of it, for that matter, allied to the one dealt with later by Drachmann in Once upon a Time. A Princess is hard-hearted and capricious. To punish her, the King, her father, shuts a man into her bedroom, makes a feigned accusation against her, and actually drives her out of the castle. She becomes a waiting-maid, and passes through various stages of civil life. The King of Navarra, whose suit she had haughtily rejected, disguised as a goldsmith, marries her, then arrays himself in silks and velvets, to tempt her to infidelity. When she refuses, he allows every possible injustice to be heaped upon her, to try her, makes her believe that the King, on a false accusation, has had her husband's eyes put out, and then himself goes about with a bandage before his eyes, and lets her beg. She believes everything and agrees to everything, until at last, arrived at honour and glory, she learns that it has all been only play-acting, trial, and education.

This nonsense was exactly on a par with taste in Germany at the time, which was undeniably considerably below the level of that in France and Denmark, and it was acted by a group of actors, some very competent, at the chief theatre of Hamburg. Slowly though business life pulsated in Denmark, we were superior to Germany in artistic perception.

The low stage of artistic development at which Hamburg had then arrived could not, however, efface the impression its superiority over Copenhagen in other respects had made upon me. Take it all together, my few days in Hamburg were well spent.

II.

And then I set foot once more in the country which I regarded as my second fatherland, and the overflowing happiness of once more feeling French ground under my feet returned undiminished and unchanged. I had had all my letters sent to Mlle. Louise's address, so fetched them shortly after my arrival and saw the girl again. Her family invited me to dinner several times during the very first week, and I was associated with French men and women immediately upon my arrival.

They were well-brought-up, good-natured, hospitable bourgeois, very narrow in their views. Not in the sense that they took no interest in politics and literature, but in that questions for them were decided once and for all in the clerical spirit. They did not regard this as a party standpoint, did not look upon themselves as adherents of a party; their way of thinking was the right one; those who did not agree with them held opinions they ought to be ashamed of, and which they probably, in private, were ashamed of holding and expressing.

Mlle. Louise had a cousin whom she used to speak of as a warm-hearted man with peculiar opinions, eager and impetuous, who would like to make the acquaintance of her friend from the North. The aunts called him a passionate Catholic, and an energetic writer in the service of the Church Militant. Shortly after my arrival, I met him at dinner. He was a middle-aged, pale, carelessly dressed man with ugly, irregular features, and a very excitable manner. With him came his wife, who though pale and enthusiastic like himself, yet looked quite terrestrial. He introduced himself as Ernest Hello, contributor to Veuillot's then much talked of Romish paper, L'Univers, which, edited with no small talent by a noted stylist, adopted all sorts of abusive methods as weapons in every feud in which the honour of the Church was involved. It was against Veuillot that Augier had just aimed the introduction to his excellent comedy, Le Fils de Giboyer, and he made no secret of the fact that in the Déodat mentioned in the piece he had had this writer of holy abuse in his mind. Hello was in everything Veuillot's vassal.

He was one of the martial believers who despised and hated the best free research men, and who knew himself in a position to confute them. He possessed some elements of culture, and had early had thoroughly drilled into him what, in comparison with the views of later times on History and Religion, was narrow and antiquated in Voltaire's education, and for this reason regarded, not only Voltaire's attack on the Church, but all subsequent philosophy inimical to the Church, as belonging to a bygone age. He was a fanatic, and there was a sacristy odour about all that he said. But there was in his disposition an enthusiastic admiration for weakness in fighting against external strength, and for courage that expressed itself in sheer defiance of worldly prudence, that made him feel kindly towards the young Dane. Denmark's taking up arms, with its two million inhabitants, against a great power like Prussia, roused his enthusiasm. "It is great, it is Spartan!" he exclaimed. It must certainly be admitted that this human sympathy was not a prominent characteristic, and he wearied me with his hateful verdicts over all those whom I, and by degrees, all Europe, esteemed and admired in France.

As an instance of the paradoxicalness to which Huysmans many years later became addicted, the latter tried to puff up Hello as being a man of remarkable intellect; and an instance of the want of independence with which the new Catholic movement was carried on in Denmark is to be found in the fact that the organ of Young Denmark, The Tower, could declare: "Hello is one of the few whom all men of the future are agreed to bow before.... Hello was,--not only a Catholic burning with religious ardour,--but a genius; these two things explain everything."

When Hello invited me to his house, I regarded it as my duty to go, that I might learn as much as possible, and although his circle was exceedingly antipathetic to me, I did not regret it; the spectacle was highly instructive.

Next to Hello himself, who, despite his fanaticism and restlessness, impressed one as very inoffensive at bottom, and not mischievous if one steered clear of such names as Voltaire or Renan, the chief member of his circle was the black doctor, (le Docteur noir,) so much talked of in the last years of the Empire, and who is even alluded to in Taine's Graindorge. His real name was Vries. He was a negro from the Dutch West Indies, a veritable bull, with a huge body and a black, bald physiognomy, made to stand outside a tent at a fair, and be his own crier to the public. His conversation was one incessant brag, in atrocious French. Although he had lived seventeen years in France, he spoke almost unintelligibly.

He persuaded himself, or at least others, that he had discovered perpetual motion, vowed that he had made a machine which, "by a simple mechanism," could replace steam power and had been declared practicable by the first engineers in Paris; but of course he declined to speak freely about it. Columbus and Fulton only were his equals; he knew all the secrets of Nature. He had been persecuted--in 1859 he had been imprisoned for eleven months, on a charge of quackery--because all great men were persecuted; remember our Lord Jesus Christ! He himself was the greatest man living. Moi vous dire le plus grand homme d'universe. Hello and the ladies smiled admiringly at him, and never grew tired of listening to him. This encouraged him to monopolise the conversation: He, Vries, was a man possessed of courage and wisdom; he understood Phrenology, Allopathy, Homoeopathy, Engineering Science, Metereology --like Molière's doctors and Holberg's Oldfux. His greatest and most special gift was that of curing cancer. Like writing-masters, who hang out specimens of how people wrote when they came to them, and of their caligraphy after they had benefited by their instruction, he had his cancer patients photographed before and after his treatment, looking ghastly the first time, and as fresh as a flower the second, and these pictures hung on view in his house. No wonder, therefore, that Napoleon III--so Vries said--had his portrait in an album containing, besides, only portraits of European sovereigns.

He pretended that he had made many important prophecies. This was a bond between him and Hello, who claimed the same extraordinary power, and had foretold all sorts of singular events. He performed miraculous cures; this appealed to Hello, who was suspicious of all rational Science and ready to believe any mortal thing. He could read everybody's characters in their faces. This was a pretext for the most barefaced flattery of Hello, his wife, and their friends of both sexes, and of course everything was swallowed with alacrity. To me he said: "Monsieur is gentle, very calm, very indulgent, and readily forgives an injury."

Hideous though he was, his powerful brutality had a great effect on the ladies of the circle. They literally hung upon his words. He seized them by the wrists, and slid his black paws up their bare arms. The married women whispered languishingly: "You have a marvellous power over women." The husbands looked on smilingly.

Now when Hello and he and their friends and the ladies began to talk about religious matters and got steam up, it was a veritable witches' Sabbath, and no mistake, every voice being raised in virulent cheap Jack denunciation of freedom, and common sense. Satan himself had dictated Voltaire's works; now Voltaire was burning in everlasting fire. Unbelievers ought to be exterminated; it would serve them right. Renan ought to be hanged on the first tree that would bear him; the Black Doctor even maintained that in Manila he would have been shot long ago. It was always the Doctor who started the subject of the persecution of heretics. Hello himself persecuted heretics with patronising scorn, but was already ready to drop into a hymn of praise to the Madonna.

I had then read two of Hello's books, Le Style and M. Renan, L'Allemagne et l'Athéisme au 19me Siècle. Such productions are called books, because there is no other name for them. As a matter of fact, idle talk and galimatias of the sort are in no wise literature. Hello never wrote anything but Roman Catholic sermons, full of theological sophistries and abuse of thinking men. In those years his books, with their odour of incense, made the small, flat inhabitants of the sacristy wainscotting venture out of their chinks in the wall in delight; but they obtained no applause elsewhere.

It was only after his death that it could occur to a morbid seeker after originality, with a bitter almond in place of a heart, like Huysmans, to make his half-mad hero, Des Esseintes, who is terrified of the light, find satisfaction in the challenges to common sense that Hello wrote. Hello was a poor wretch who, in the insane conviction that he himself was a genius, filled his writings with assertions concerning the marvellous, incomprehensible nature of genius, and always took up the cudgels on its behalf. During the Empire, his voice was drowned. It was only a score of years later that the new Catholic reaction found it to their advantage to take him at his word and see in him the genius that he had given himself out to be. He was as much a genius as the madman in the asylum is the Emperor.

III.

A few days after my arrival, I called upon Taine and was cordially received. He presented me with one of his books and promised me his great work, De l'Intelligence, which was to come out in a few days, conversed with me for an hour, and invited me to tea the following evening. He had been married since I had last been at his house, and his wife, a young, clear-skinned lady with black plaits, brown eyes and an extremely graceful figure, was as fresh as a rose, and talked with the outspoken freedom of youth, though expressing herself in carefully selected words.

After a few days, Taine, who was generally very formal with strangers, treated me with conspicuous friendliness. He offered at once to introduce me to Renan, and urgently advised me to remain six months in Paris, in order to master the language thoroughly, so that I might enlighten Frenchmen on the state of things in the North, as well as picture the French to my fellow-countrymen. Why should I not make French my auxiliary language, like Turgenieff and Hillebrandt!

Taine knew nothing of German belles lettres. As far as philosophy was concerned, he despised German Aesthetics altogether, and laughed at me for believing in "Aesthetics" at all, even one day introducing me to a stranger as "A young Dane who does not believe in much, but is weak enough to believe in Aesthetics." I was not precisely overburdened by the belief. But a German Aesthetic, according to Taine's definition, was a man absolutely devoid of artistic perception and sense of style, who lived only in definitions. If you took him to the theatre to see a sad piece, he would tear his hair with delight, and exclaim: "Voilà das Tragische!"

Of the more modern German authors, Taine knew only Heine, of whom he was a passionate admirer and whom, by reason of his intensity of feeling, he compared with Dante. A poem like the Pilgrimage to Kevlaar roused his enthusiasm. Goethe's shorter poems, on the other hand, he could not appreciate, chiefly no doubt because he did not know German sufficiently well. He was not even acquainted with the very best of Goethe's short things, and one day that I asked him to read one poem aloud, the words in his mouth rang very French.

Lieber dur Laydénn möcht ee mee schlag'e, als so feel Frödenn des Laybengs airtrah'ge, was intended to be--

Lieber durch Leiden,
Möcht ich mich schlagen
Als so viel Freuden
Des Lebens ertragen.

Goethe's prose he did not consider good, but heavy and prolix, and lacking in descriptive power. He would praise Voltaire's prose at his expense. "You perceive the figure and its movements far more clearly," he said. The German romanticists disgusted him; their style, also, was too inartistic for him (ils ne savent pas écrire, cela me dégoûte d'eux).

I frequently met friends at his house, amongst others, Marcelin, who had been his friend from boyhood, and upon whom, many years later, he wrote a melancholy obituary. This man, the proprietor of that supremely worldly paper, La Vie Parisienne, was a powerful, broad-shouldered, ruddy-cheeked man, who looked the incarnation of health and very unlike one's preconception of the editor of the most frivolous and fashionable weekly in Paris. He was a draughtsman and an author, had studied the history of the last few centuries in engravings, and himself owned a collection of no fewer than 300,000. What Taine had most admired in him was the iron will with which, left, at nineteen years of age, penniless, and defectively educated, as head of his family, he had kept his mother and brothers and sisters by his work. Next to that Taine admired his earnestness. Marcelin, who was generally looked upon as belonging to gay Paris, was a solitary-minded man, an imaginative recreator of the peoples of the past, as they were and went about, of their ways and customs. He it was who opened Taine's eyes to the wealth of contributions to history locked up in collections of engravings, more especially perhaps as regarded people's external appearance, and what the exterior revealed. Another friend who came to Taine at all sorts of times was Gleyre, the old painter, who had been born in French Switzerland, but was otherwise a Parisian. And he was not the only deeply idealistic artist with whom Taine was connected in the bonds of friendship. Although a fundamental element of Taine's nature drew him magnetically to the art that was the expression of strength, tragic or carnal strength, a swelling exuberance of life, there was yet room in his soul for sympathy with all artistic endeavour, even the purely emotional. That which drew him to the idealistic painters was, at bottom, the same quality as drew him to Beethoven and Chopin.

Gleyre's best-known picture is the painting in the Louvre, somewhat weak in colouring, but showing much feeling, a Nile subject representing a man sitting on the banks of the river and watching the dreams of his youth, represented as beautiful women, fleeing from him on a decorated dahabeah, which is disappearing. The title is Lost Illusions. There is more strength in the painting, much reproduced in engraving, of a Roman army, conquered by Divico the Helvetian, passing under the yoke --a picture which, as an expression of the national pride of the Swiss, has been placed in the Museum at Lausanne.

Still, it was the man himself, rather than his pictures, that Taine thought so much of. Intellectually, Taine was in his inmost heart an admirer of the Italian and the English Renaissance, when most pagan and most unrestrained; his intellectual home was the Venice of the sixteenth century; he would have been in his right place at one of the festivals painted by Veronese, and should have worn the rich and tasteful costume of that period. But socially, and as a citizen, he was quite different, was affectionate and subdued and calm, excessively conventional; temperate in all his judgments, as in his life.

If I succeeded in winning his good-will, it was most emphatically not because I had written a book about him, which, for that matter, he could not understand; he barely glanced through it; he read, at most, the appreciative little review that Gaston Paris did me the honour to write upon it in the Revue Critique. But it appealed to him that I had come to France from pure love of knowledge, that I might become acquainted with men and women and intellectual life, and that I had spent my youth in study.

He grew fond of me, advised me as a father or an elder brother might have done, and smiled at my imprudences--as for instance when I almost killed myself by taking too strong a sleeping draught--(vous êtes imprudent, c'est de votre âge). He sometimes reproached me with not jotting down every day, as he did, whatever had struck me; he talked to me about his work, about the projected Essay on Schiller that came to nothing on account of the war, of his Notes sur l'Angleterre, which he wrote in a little out-of-the-way summer-house containing nothing save the four bare whitewashed walls, but a little table and a chair. He introduced into the book a few details that I had mentioned to him after my stay in England.

When we walked in the garden at his country-house at Châtenay, he sometimes flung his arm round my neck--an act which roused great astonishment in the Frenchmen present, who could scarcely believe their eyes. They knew how reserved he usually was.

It quite irritated Taine that the Danish Minister did nothing for me, and introduced me nowhere, although he had had to procure me a free pass to the theatre. Again and again he reverted to this, though I had never mentioned either the Minister or the Legation to him. But the revolutionary blood in him was excited at what he regarded as a slight to intellectual aristocracy. "What do you call a man like that? A Junker?" I said no. "Never mind! it is all the same. One feels that in your country you have had no revolution like ours, and know nothing about equality. A fellow like that, who has not made himself known in any way whatever, looks down on you as unworthy to sit at his table and does not move a finger on your behalf, although that is what he is there for. When I am abroad, they come at once from the French Embassy to visit me, and open to me every house to which they have admittance. I am a person of very small importance in comparison with Benedetti, but Benedetti comes to see me as often as I will receive him. We have no lording of it here."

These outbursts startled me, first, because I had never in the least expected or even wished either to be received by the Danish Minister or to be helped by him; secondly, because it revealed to me a wide difference between the point of view in the Romance countries, in France especially, and that in the North. In Denmark, I had never had the entrée to Court or to aristocratic circles, nor have I ever acquired it since, though, for that matter, I have not missed it in the least. But in the Romance countries, where the aristocratic world still occasionally possesses some wit and education, it is taken as a matter of course that talent is a patent of nobility, and, to the man who has won himself a name, all doors are open, indeed, people vie with one another to secure him. That a caste division like that in the North was quite unknown there, I thus learnt for the first time.

IV.

Through Taine, I very soon made the acquaintance of Renan, whose personality impressed me very much, grand and free of mind as he was, without a trace of the unctuousness that one occasionally meets in his books, yet superior to the verge of paradox.

He was very inaccessible, and obstinately refused to see people. But if he were expecting you, he would spare you several hours of his valuable time.

His house was furnished with exceeding simplicity. On one wall of his study hung two Chinese water-colours and a photograph of Gérôme's Cleopatra before Caesar; on the opposite wall, a very beautiful photograph of what was doubtless an Italian picture of the Last Day. That was all the ornamentation. On his table, there always lay a Virgil and a Horace in a pocket edition, and for a long time a French translation of Sir Walter Scott.

What surprised me most in Renan's bearing was that there was nothing solemn about it and absolutely nothing sentimental. He impressed one as being exceptionally clever and a man that the opposition he had met with had left as it found him. He enquired about the state of things in the North. When I spoke, without reserve, of the slight prospect that existed of my coming to the front with my opinions, he maintained that victory was sure. (Vous l'emporterez! vous l'emporterez!) Like all foreigners, he marvelled that the three Scandinavian countries did not try to unite, or at any rate to form an indissoluble Union. In the time of Gustavus Adolphus, he said, they had been of some political importance; since then they had retired completely from the historical stage. The reason for it must very probably be sought for in their insane internecine feuds.

Renan used to live, at that time, from the Spring onwards, at his house in the country, at Sèvres. So utterly unaffected was the world-renowned man, then already forty-seven years of age, that he often walked from his house to the station with me, and wandered up and down the platform till the train came.

His wife, who shared his thoughts and worshipped him, had chosen her husband herself, and, being of German family, had not been married after the French manner; still, she did not criticise it, as she thought it was perhaps adapted to the French people, and she had seen among her intimate acquaintances many happy marriages entered into for reasons of convenience. They had two children, a son, Ary, who died in 1900 after having made a name for himself as a painter, and written beautiful poems (which, however, were only published after his death), and a daughter, Noémi (Madame Psichari) who, faithfully preserving the intellectual heritage she has received from her great father, has become one of the centres of highest Paris, a soul of fire, who fights for Justice and Truth and social ideas with burning enthusiasm.

V.

A source of very much pleasure to me was my acquaintance with the old author and Collège de France Professor, Philarète Chasles. Grégoire introduced me to him and I gradually became at home, as it were, in his house, was always a welcome visitor, and was constantly invited there. In his old age he was not a man to be taken very seriously, being diffusive, vague and vain. But there was no one else so communicative, few so entertaining, and for the space of fifty years he had known everybody who had been of any mark in France. He was born in 1798; his father, who was a Jacobin and had been a member of the Convention, did not have him baptised, but brought him up to believe in Truth, (hence the name Philarète,) and apprenticed him to a printer. At the Restoration of the Royal Family, he was imprisoned, together with his father, but released through the influence of Chateaubriand; he then went to England, where he remained for full seven years (1819-1826), working as a typographer, and made a careful study of English literature, then almost unknown in France. After having spent some further time in Germany, he returned to Paris and published a number of historical and critical writings.

Philarète Chasles, as librarian to the Mazarin Library, had his apartments in the building itself, that is, in the very centre of Paris; in the Summer he lived in the country at Meudon, where he had had his veranda decorated with pictures of Pompeian mosaic. He was having a handsome new house with a tower built near by. He needed room, for he had a library of 40,000 volumes.

His niece kept house for him; she was married to a German from Cologne, Schulz by name, who was a painter on glass. The pair lived apart. Madame Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter, the fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was charmed with her, and it was always full of guests, young students from Alsace and Provence, young negroes from Hayti, young ladies from Jerusalem, and poetesses who would have liked to read their poems aloud and would have liked still better to induce Chasles to make them known by an article.

Chasles chatted with everyone, frequently addressing his conversation to me, talking incessantly about the very men and women that I most cared to hear about, of those still living whom I most admired, such as George Sand, and Mérimée, and, in fact, of all the many celebrities he had known. As a young man, he had been taken to the house of Madame Récamier, and had there seen Chateaubriand, an honoured and adored old man, and Sainte-Beuve an eager and attentive listener, somewhat overlooked on account of his ugliness, in whom there was developing that lurking envy of the great, and of those women clustered round, which he ought to have combatted, to produce just criticism.

Chasles had known personally Michelet and Guizot, the elder Dumas and Beyle, Cousin and Villemain, Musset and Balzac; he knew the Comtesse d'Agoult, for so many years the friend of Liszt, and Madame Colet, the mistress, first of Cousin, then of Musset, and finally of Flaubert, of whom my French uncle, who had met her on his travels, had drawn me a very unattractive picture. Chasles was on terms of daily intimacy with Jules Sandeau; even as an old man he could not forget George Sand, who had filched the greater part of his name and made it more illustrious than the whole became. Sandeau loved her still, forty years after she had left him.

Chasles was able, in a few words, to conjure up very vividly the images of the persons he was describing to his listener, and his anecdotes about them were inexhaustible. He took me behind the scenes of literature and I saw the stage from all its sides. The personal history of his contemporaries was, it is quite true, more particularly its chronicle of scandals, but his information completed for me the severe and graceful restraint of all Taine said. And side by side with his inclination for gay and malicious gossip, Chasles had a way of sketching out great synopses of intellectual history, which made one realise, as one reflected,' the progress of development of the literatures with which one was familiar. Those were pleasant evenings, those moonlight Spring evenings in the open veranda out there at Meudon, when the old man with the sharp-pointed beard and the little skull-cap on one side of his head, was spokesman. He had the aptest and most amusing way of putting things. For instance, to my question as to whether Guizot had really been as austere by nature as he was in manner, he replied: "It is hard to say; when one wishes to impress, one cannot behave like a harlequin."

Although I had a keen enough eye for Philarète Chasles' weaknesses, I felt exceedingly happy in his house. There I could obtain without difficulty the information I wished for, and have the feeling of being thoroughly "in Paris." Paris was and still is the only city in the world that is and wishes to be the capital not only of its own country but of Europe; the only one that takes upon itself as a duty, not merely to meet the visitor half-way by opening museums, collections, buildings, to him, but the only one where people habitually, in conversation, initiate the foreigner in search of knowledge into the ancient, deep culture of the nation, so that its position with regard to that of other races and countries is made clear to one.

VI.

I had not let a single day elapse before I took my seat again in the Théâtre Français, to which I had free admission for an indefinite period. The first time I arrived, the doorkeeper at the theatre merely called the sub-officials together; they looked at me, noted my appearance, and for the future I might take my seat wherever I liked, when the man at the entrance had called out his Entrée. They were anything but particular, and in the middle of the Summer, after a visit of a month to London, I found my seat reserved for me as before.

The first evening after my arrival, I sat, quietly enjoying Hernani (the lyric beauty of which always rejoiced my heart), with Mounet-Sully in the leading rôle, Bressant as Charles V, and as Doña Sol, Mlle. Lloyd, a minor actress, who, however, at the conclusion of the piece, rose to the level of the poetry. The audience were so much in sympathy with the spirit of the piece that a voice from the gallery shouted indignantly: "Le roi est un lâche!" Afterwards, during the same evening, I saw, in a transport of delight, Mme. de Girardin's charming little piece, La Joie fait Peur. A certain family believe that their son, who is a young naval officer, fallen in the far East, has been cruelly put to death. He comes back, unannounced, to his broken-hearted mother, his despairing bride, his sister, and an old man-servant. This old, bent, faithful retainer, a stock dramatic part, was played by Régnier with the consummate art that is Nature itself staged. He has hidden the returned son behind a curtain for fear that his mother, seeing him unexpectedly, should die of joy. The sister comes in. Humming, the servant begins to dust, to prevent her going near the curtain; but unconsciously, in his delight, his humming grows louder and louder, until, in a hymn of jubilation, tratara-tratara! he flings the broom up over his head, then stops short suddenly, noticing that the poor child is standing there, mute with astonishment, not knowing what to think. Capital, too, was the acting of a now forgotten actress, Mlle. Dubois, who played the young girl. Her exclamation, as she suddenly sees her brother, "Je n'ai pas peur, va!" was uttered so lightly and gaily, that all the people round me, and I myself, too, burst into tears.

I was much impressed by Edmond Thierry, then director of the Théâtre Français. I thought him the most refined man I had so far met, possessed of all the old French courtesy, which seemed to have died out in Paris. A conversation with him was a regular course in Dramaturgy, and although a young foreigner like myself must necessarily have been troublesome to him, he let nothing of this be perceptible. I was so charmed by him that nearly two years later I introduced a few unimportant words of his about Molière's Misanthrope into my lectures on the first part of Main Currents in European Literature, simply for the pleasure of mentioning his name.

It was, moreover, a very pleasant thing to pay him a visit, even when he was interrupted. For actors streamed in and out of his house. One day, for instance, the lovely Agar burst into the room to tell her tale of woe, being dissatisfied with the dress that she was to wear in a new part. I saw her frequently again when war had been declared, for she it was who, every evening, with overpowering force and art, sang the Marseillaise from before the footlights.

The theatrical performances were a delight to me. I had been charmed as much only by Michael Wiehe and Johanne Luise Heiberg in my salad days when they played together in Hertz's Ninon. But my artistic enjoyment went deeper here, for the character portrayal was very much more true to life. The best impressions I had brought with me of Danish art were supremely romantic, Michael Wiehe as Henrik in The Fairies, as the Chevalier in Ninon, as Mortimer in Schiller's Mary Stuart. But this was the real, living thing.

One evening I saw Ristori play the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth with thrilling earnestness and supreme virtuosity. You felt horror to the very marrow of your bones, and your eyes filled with tears of emotion and anxiety. Masterly was the regular breathing that indicated slumber, and the stiff fingers when she washed her hands and smelt them to see if there were blood upon them. But Mme. Favart, who with artistic self-restraint co-ordinated herself into the whole, without any virtuosity at all, produced no less an effect upon me. As the leading character in Feuillet's Julie, she was perfection itself; when I saw her, it seemed to me as though no one at home in Denmark had any idea of what feminine characterisation was. What had been taken for such (Heiberg's art, for instance,) only seemed like a graceful and brilliant convention, that fell to pieces by the side of this.

The performances at the Théâtre Français lasted longer than they do now. In one evening you could see Gozlan's Tempête dans un verre d'Eau, Augier's Gabrielle, and Banville's Gringoire. When I had seen Mme. Favart and Régnier in Gabrielle, Lafontaine as Louis XI, his wife as Loyse, Mlle. Ponsin as Nicole, and Coquelin, at that time still young and fresh, as Gringoire, I felt that I had enjoyed one of the greatest and most elevating pleasures the world had to offer. I went home, enraptured and enthusiastic, as much edified as the believer returning from his church. I could see Gringoire a dozen times in succession and find only one expression for what I felt: "This is holy."

The piece appealed to me so much, no doubt, because it was more in agreement than the rest with what in Denmark was considered true poetry. But during the three years since I had last seen him, Coquelin had made immense strides in this rôle. He rendered it now with an individuality, a heartfelt sincerity and charm, that he had not previously attained; in contrast to harsh King Louis and unfeeling Loyse, was so poor, and hungry, and ill and merry and tender and such a hero and such a genius-- that I said to myself: "Who, ever has seen this, has lived."

Quite a short while after my arrival--April 12, 1870--I saw for the first time Sarah Bernhardt, who had just begun to make a name at the Odéon. She was playing in George Sand's beautiful and mutinous drama L'autre, from which the great-grandmother in Björnson's Leonarda is derived. The piece is a plea for the freedom of love, or rather, for indulgence with regard to what are branded by society as the sins of love. Sarah Bernhardt was the young girl who, in her innocence, judges all moral irregularities with the utmost severity, until her eyes are opened to what the world really is. She is, without knowing it, the child of unlawful love, and the father's curse is that of not daring to be anything to his child--whom he has educated and over whom he watches--not daring to claim his right to her affection, as he would otherwise stain her mother's memory. In his presence, the young girl utters all the hard words that society has for those who break her laws; she calls her unknown father false and forsworn. George Sand has collected all the justified protests and every prejudice for this young girl to utter, because in her they inspire most respect, and are to their best advantage.--So far her father has not revealed himself. Then at last it dawns upon her that it is he, her benefactor, who is the other one whom she has just condemned, and as the curtain falls she flings herself, melted, into his arms.

Sarah played the part with great modesty, with what one might assume to be the natural melancholy of the orphan, and the enthusiasm of the young virgin for strict justice, and yet in such wise that, through all the coldness, through the expressive uncertainty of her words, and especially through the lovely, rich ring of her voice, one suspected tenderness and mildness long held back.

VII.

I tried, while I was in Paris, to understand something of the development of French literature since the beginning of the century, to arrange it in stages, and note the order of their succession; I wanted, at the same time, to form for myself a similar general view of Danish literature, and institute parallels between the two, being convinced beforehand that the spirit of the age must be approximately the same in two European countries that were, so to speak, intellectually allied. This was my first naïve attempt to trace The Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.

The French poetry of the nineteenth century seemed to me to fall into three groups: Romanticism, the School of Common Sense, the Realistic Art. I defined them as follows:

I. What the French call Romanticism has many distinguishing marks. It is, firstly, a break with Graeco-Roman antiquity. It therefore harks back to the Gallic, and to the Middle Ages. It is a resurrection of the poets of the sixteenth century. But the attempt is a failure, for Ronsard and the Pleiad [Footnote: The poets who formed the first and greater Pleiad were, besides Ronsard, Dubellay, Remi, Belleau, Jodelle, Dorat, Baif and Pontus de Thiard.] are also Greek-taught, are Anacreontics. If we except the Chanson de Roland, there is no original mediaeval literature that can be compared with the Icelandic. For that reason the choice of subjects is extended from the Middle Ages in France to the Middle Ages in other countries, for instance, Germany, whence Victor Hugo derives his drama Les Burgraves. The poets select foreign matter, Alfred de Vigny treats Chatterton and Musset Italian and Spanish themes. Mérimée harks back to the French Middle Ages (The Peasant Rising), but as he there finds too little originality, he flees, as a poet, to less civilised nationalities, Spaniards, South Americans, Corsicans, Russians, etc. Romanticism becomes ethnographical.

Its second distinguishing mark is tempestuous violence. It is connected with the 1830 revolution. It attacks society and the conditions of property (Saint Simon, Fourier, Proudhon), attacks marriage and the official verdict upon sexual relations (Dumas) Antony Rousseau's old doctrine that Nature is good, the natural state the right one, and that society alone has spoilt everything. George Sand in particular worships Rousseau, and writes in essential agreement with him.

In the later French literature the influence of Voltaire and that of Rousseau are alternately supreme. Voltaire rules until 1820, Rousseau again until 1850, then Voltaire takes the reins once more with About, Taine, and Sarcey. In Renan Voltaire is merged with Rousseau, and now, later still, Diderot has taken the place of both.

II. The School of Common Sense (l'école de bon sens) follows upon Romanticism. As the latter worshipped passion, so the School of Common Sense pays homage to sound human intelligence. In certain individuals it is possible to trace the transition--Musset's Un Caprice in contrast with the wanton works of his youth. George Sand's village novels, in contrast with her novels on Marriage. The popular tone and the landscape drawing here, which, for that matter, are all derived from Rousseau, lead on into a tranquil idyl. Works like Ponsard's Lucrèce and Augier's Gabrielle show the reaction from Romanticism. In the tragedy it is Lucrèce, in the modern play, Gabrielle, upon whom the action hinges. In Ponsard and Augier common sense, strict justice, and a conventional feeling of honour, are acclaimed. Marriage is glorified in all of Ponsard, Augier and Octave Feuillet's dramas. Literature has no doubt been influenced in some degree by the ruling orders of the monarchy of July. Louis Philippe was the bourgeois King. An author like Scribe, who dominates the stages of Europe, is animated by the all-powerful bourgeois spirit, educated and circumscribed as it was. Cousin, in his first manner, revolutionary Schellingism, corresponded to romanticism; his eclecticism as a moralising philosopher corresponds to the School of Common Sense. The distinctive feature which they have in common becomes a so-called Idealism. Ponsard revives the classical traditions of the seventeenth century. In criticism this endeavour in the direction of the sensible and the classical, is represented by Nisard, Planche, and Sainte-Beuve in his second manner.

III. The third tendency of the century Is Realistic Art, with physiological characteristics. It finds its support in positivist philosophy; Herbart in Germany, Bentham and Mill in England, Comte and Littré in France. In criticism, Sainte-Beuve's third manner. On the stage, the younger Dumas. In novels, the brothers Goncourt, and Flaubert. In Art, a certain brutality in the choice of subject, Gérôme and Régnault. In politics, the accomplished fact (le fait accompli), the Empire, the brutal pressure from above and general levelling by universal suffrage from below. In lyric poetry, the strictly technical artists of form of the Parnasse, Coppée, who describes unvarnished reality, and the master workmen (les maîtres de la facture), Leconte Delisle, Gautier and his pupils, who write better verse than Lamartine and Hugo, but have no new thoughts or feelings--the poetic language materialists.

In conclusion, a great many indistinct beginnings, of which it is as yet impossible to say whither they are tending.

This, my first attempt to formulate for myself a general survey of one of the great literatures of the nineteenth century, contained much that was true enough, but revealed very plainly the beginner's lack of ability to estimate the importance of phenomena, an inclination to over-estimate purely evanescent apparitions, and a tendency to include that which was merely externally similar, under one heading. The insignificant School of Common Sense could not by any means be regarded as marking an epoch. Neither, with any justice, could men like Augier and Dumas be placed in different groups. The attempt to point out realism in the lyric art was likewise exceedingly audacious.

However, this division and grouping seemed to me at that time to be a great discovery, and great was my disappointment when one day I consulted Chasles on the subject and he thought it too forced, and another day submitted it to Renan, who restricted himself to the reply:

"No! no! Things do not proceed so systematically!"

As this survey of the literature of France was also intended to guide me with regard to the Danish, I groped my way forward in the following manner:

I. Romanticism. Oehlenschläger's attitude towards the past corresponds exactly to Victor Hugo's; only that the resurrection of the Middle Ages in poetry is much more successful (Earl Hakon, The Gods of the North), by reason of the fresh originality in Snorre and the Edda. Grundtvig's Scenes from the Lives of the Warriors of the North likewise owes all its value to the Edda and the Sagas. Oehlenschläger's Aladdin is the Northern pendant to Hugo's Les Orientales. Gautier, as a poet, Delacroix as a painter, affect the East, as Oehlenschläger does in Ali and Gulhyndi. Steffens and Sibbern, as influenced by Schelling, correspond to Cousin. Hauch not infrequently seeks his poetic themes in Germany, as do Nodier and Gérard de Nerval. Ingemann's weak historical novels correspond to the French imitations of Sir Walter Scott (Alfred de Vigny's Cinq-Mars, Dumas' Musketeers). Oehlenschläger's tragedies correspond to the dramas of Victor Hugo. With the Danes, as with the French, hatred of intelligence, as cold; only that the Danes glorify imagination and enthusiasm, the French, passion. Romanticism lasts in Denmark (without Revolutions and Restorations) until about 1848, as in France.

II. The School of Common Sense is in Denmark partly a worship of the sound sense of the people, partly a moralising tendency. Grundtvig, with his popular manner, his appreciation of the unsophisticated peasant nature, had points of contact with the pupils of Rousseau. Moralising works are Heiberg's A Soul after Death, Paludan-Müller's Adam Homo, and Kierkegaard's Either-Or. The funny thing about the defence of marriage contained in this last book is that it defends what no one in Denmark attacks. It can only be understood from the contemporary movement in the intellectual life of Europe, which is now asserting the universal validity of morality, as it formerly did the right of passion. Its defence of Protestantism corresponds to Octave Feuillet's defence of Catholicism, only that Feuillet is conciliatory, Kierkegaard vehement. Björnson's peasant novels, which are a continuation of Grundtvig and Blicher, are, by their harmony and their peaceable relations to all that is, an outcome of love of common sense; they have the same anti-Byronic stamp as the School of Common Sense. The movement comes to us ten years later. But Björnson has simultaneously something of Romanticism and something of Realism. We have not men to place separately in the various frames.

III. Realistic Art. There is so far only an attempt at a realistic art.

Thus, in Björnson's Arne and Sigurd Slembe. Note also an attempt in Bergsöe's clumsy use of realistic features, and in his seeking after effect. Richardt corresponds in our lyric art as an artist in language to the poets of the Parnasse, while Heiberg's philosophy and most of his poetry may be included in the School of Common Sense. Bröchner's Ideal Realism forms the transitional stage to the philosophy of Reality. Ibsen's attack upon the existing state of things corresponds to realism in the French drama. He is Dumas on Northern soil. In the Love Comedy, as a scoffer he is inharmonious. In Peer Gynt, he continues in the moralising tendency with an inclination to coarse and brutal realistic effects (relations with Anitra).

In Germany we find ourselves at the second stage still, sinking deeper and deeper into dialect and popular subjects (from Auerbach to Claus Groth and Fritz Reuter).

It is unnecessary to point out to readers of the present day how incomplete and arbitrary this attempt at a dissection of Danish literature was. I started from the conviction that modern intellectual life in Europe, in different countries, must necessarily in all essentials traverse the same stages, and as I was able to find various unimportant points of similarity in support of this view, I quite overlooked the fact that the counterbalancing weight of dissimilarities rendered the whole comparison futile.

IX.

As, during my first stay in Paris, I had frequently visited Madame Victorine, the widow of my deceased uncle, and her children, very cordial relations had since existed between us, especially after my uncle's faithless friend had been compelled to disgorge the sums sent from Denmark for her support, which he had so high-handedly kept back. There were only faint traces left of the great beauty that had once been hers; life had dealt hardly with her. She was good and tender-hearted, an affectionate mother, but without other education than was usual in the Parisian small bourgeois class to which she belonged. All her opinions, her ideas of honour, of propriety, of comfort and happiness, were typical of her class.

Partly from economy, partly from a desire not to waste the precious time, I often, in those days, restricted my midday meal. I would buy myself, at a provision dealer's, a large veal or ham pie and eat it in my room, instead of going out to a restaurant. One day Victorine surprised me at a meal of this sort, and exclaimed horrified: "Comment? vous vous nourrissez si mal!" To her, it was about the same as if I had not had any dinner at all. To sit at home without a cloth on the table, and cut a pie in pieces with a paper knife, was to sink one's dignity and drop to poor man's fare.

Her thoughts, like those of most poor people in France and elsewhere, centred mostly on money and money anxieties, on getting on well in the world, or meeting with adversity, and on how much this man or the other could earn, or not earn, in the year. Her eldest son was in St. Petersburg, and he was doing right well; he was good and kind and sent his mother help when he had a little to spare. He had promised, too, to take charge of his next brother. But she had much anxiety about the little ones. One of them was not turning out all that he should be, and there were the two youngest to educate.

There was a charming celebration in the poor home when little Emma went to her first communion, dressed all in white, from head to foot, with a long white veil and white shoes, and several other little girls and boys came just as smartly dressed, and presents were given and good wishes offered. Little Henri looked more innocent than any of the little girls.

Victorine had a friend whom she deemed most happy; this was Jules Clarétie's mother, for, young though her son was, he wrote in the papers, wrote books, too, and earned money, so that he was able to maintain his mother altogether. He was a young man who ought to be held in high estimation, an author who was all that he should be. There was another author whom she detested, and that was P.L. Möller, the Dane:

"Jacques, as you know, was always a faithful friend of Monsieur Möller; he copied out a whole book for him, [Footnote: The Modern Drama in France and Denmark, which won the University Gold Medal for Möller.] when he himself was very busy. But then when Jacques died--pauvre homme!--he came and paid visits much too often and always at more and more extraordinary times, so that I was obliged to forbid him the house."

X.

In a students' hotel near the Odéon, where a few Scandinavians lived, I became acquainted with two or three young lawyers and more young abbés and priests. If you went in when the company were at table in the dining room, the place rang again with their noisy altercations. The advocates discussed politics, literature and religion with such ardour that the air positively crackled. They were apparently practising to speak one day at the Bar or in the Chamber. It was from surroundings such as these that Gambetta emerged.

The young abbés and priests were very good fellows, earnest believers, but so simple that conversations with them were only interesting because of their ignorance and lack of understanding. Scandinavians in Paris who knew only Roman Catholic priests from Tartufe at the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet. Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one of these three types. But my ecclesiastical acquaintances were as free from hypocrisy as from fanaticism. They were good, honest children of the commonalty, with, not the cunning, but the stupidity, of peasants.

Many a day I spent exploring the surroundings of Paris in their company. We went to St. Cloud and Sèvres, to Versailles and St. Germain, to Saint Denis, to Montmorency and Enghien, or to Monthléry, a village with an old tower from the thirteenth century, and then breakfasted at Longjumeau, celebrated for its postillion. There Abbé Leboulleux declared himself opposed to cremation, for the reason that it rendered the resurrection impossible, since God himself could not collect the bones again when the body had been burnt. It was all so amiable that one did not like to contradict him. At the same meal another was giving a sketch of the youth of Martin Luther; he left the church--on se demande encore pourquoi. In the innocence of his heart this abbé regarded the rebellion of Luther less as an unpermissible than as an inexplicable act.

XI.

The society of the Italian friends of my first visit gave me much pleasure. My first call at the Pagellas' was a blank; at the next, I was received like a son of the house and heaped with reproaches for not having left my address; they had tried to find me at my former hotel, and endeavoured in vain to learn where I was staying from Scandinavians whom they knew by name; now I was to spend all the time I could with them, as I used to do in the old days. They were delighted to see me again, and when I wished to leave, drove me home in their carriage. I resumed my former habit of spending the greater part of my spare time with Southerners; once more I was transported to Southern Europe and South America. The very first day I dined at their house I met a jovial old Spaniard, a young Italian, who was settled in Egypt, and a very coquettish young Brazilian girl. The Spaniard, who had been born in Venezuela, was an engineer who had studied conditions in Panama for eleven years, and had a plan for the cutting of the isthmus. He talked a great deal about the project, which Lesseps took up many years afterwards.

Pagella, too, was busy with practical plans, setting himself technical problems, and solving them. Thus he had discovered a new method of constructing railway carriages on springs, with a mechanism to prevent collisions. He christened this the Virginie-ressort, after his wife, and had had offers for it from the Russian government.

An Italian engineer, named Casellini, who had carried out the construction for him, was one of the many bold adventurers that one met with among the Southerners in Paris. He had been sent to Spain the year before by Napoleon III to direct the counter-revolution there. Being an engineer, he knew the whole country, and had been in constant communication with Queen Isabella and the Spanish Court in Paris. He gave illuminating accounts of Spanish corruptibility. He had bribed the telegraph officials in the South of Spain, where he was, and saw all political telegrams before the Governor of the place. In Malaga, where he was leading the movement against the Government, he very narrowly escaped being shot; he had been arrested, his despatches intercepted and 1,500 rifles seized, but he bribed the officials to allow him to make selection from the despatches and destroy those that committed him. In Madrid he had had an audience of Serrano, after this latter had forbidden the transmission from the town of any telegrams that were not government telegrams; he had taken with him a telegram drawn up by the French party, which sounded like an ordinary business letter, and secured its being sent off together with the government despatches. Casellini had wished to pay for the telegram, but Serrano had dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand, rung a bell and given the telegram to a servant. It was just as in Scribe's Queen Marguerite's Novels, the commission was executed by the enemy himself.

Such romantic adventures did not seem to be rare in Spain. Prim himself had told the Pagellas how at the time of the failure of the first insurrection he had always, in his flight, (in spite of his defective education, he was more magnanimous and noble-minded than any king), provided for the soldiers who were sent out after him, ordered food and drink for them in every inn he vacated, and paid for everything beforehand, whereas the Government let their poor soldiers starve as soon as they were eight or ten miles from Madrid.

I often met a very queer, distinguished looking old Spaniard named Don José Guell y Rente, who had been married to a sister of King Francis, the husband of King Isabella, but had been separated from her after, as he declared, she had tried to cut his throat. As witness to his connubial difficulties, he showed a large scar across his throat. He was well-read and, amongst other things, enthusiastically admired Scandinavian literature because it had produced the world's greatest poet, Ossian, with whom he had become acquainted in Cesarotti's Italian translation. It was useless to attempt to explain to him the difference between Scandinavia and Scotland. They are both in the North, he would reply.

XII.

A young American named Olcott, who visited Chasles and occasionally looked me up, brought with him a breath from the universities of the great North American Republic. A young German, Dr. Goldschmidt, a distinguished Sanscrit scholar, a man of more means than I, who had a pretty flat with a view over the Place du Châtelet, and dined at good restaurants, came, as it were, athwart the many impressions I had received of Romance nature and Romance intellectual life, with his violent German national feeling and his thorough knowledge. As early as the Spring, he believed there would be war between Germany and France and wished in that event to be a soldier, as all other German students, so he declared, passionately wished. He was a powerfully built, energetic, well-informed man of the world, with something of the rich man's habit of command. He seemed destined to long life and quite able to stand fatigue. Nevertheless, his life was short. He went through the whole of the war in France without a scratch, after the conclusion of peace was appointed professor of Sanscrit at the University of conquered Strasburg, but died of illness shortly afterwards.

A striking contrast to his reticent nature was afforded by the young Frenchmen of the same age whom I often met. A very rich and very enthusiastic young man, Marc de Rossiény, was a kind of leader to them; he had 200,000 francs a year, and with this money had founded a weekly publication called "L'Impartial," as a common organ for the students of Brussels and Paris. The paper's name, L'Impartial, must be understood in the sense that it admitted the expression of every opinion with the exception of defence of so-called revealed religion. The editorial staff was positivist, Michelet and Chasles were patrons of the paper, and behind the whole stood Victor Hugo as a kind of honorary director. The weekly preached hatred of the Empire and of theology, and seemed firmly established, yet was only one of the hundred ephemeral papers that are born and die every day in the Latin quarter. When it had been in existence a month, the war broke out and swept it away, like so many other and greater things.

XIII.

Of course I witnessed all that was accessible to me of Parisian public life. I fairly often found my way, as I had done in 1866, to the Palais de Justice to hear the great advocates plead. The man I enjoyed listening to most was Jules Favre, whose name was soon to be on every one's lips. The younger generation admired in him the high-principled and steadfast opponent of the Empire in the Chamber, and he was regarded as well-nigh the most eloquent man in France. As an advocate, he was incomparable. His unusual handsomeness,--his beautiful face under a helmet of grey hair, and his upright carriage,--were great points in his favour. His eloquence was real, penetrating, convincing, inasmuch as he piled up fact upon fact, and was at the same time, as the French manner is, dramatic, with large gesticulations that made his gown flutter restlessly about him like the wings of a bat. It was a depressing fact that afterwards, as the Minister opposed to Bismarck, he was so unequal to his position.

I was present at the Théâtre Français on the occasion of the unveiling of Ponsard's bust. To the Romanticists, Ponsard was nothing less than the ass's jawbone with which the Philistines attempted to slay Hugo. But Émile Chasles, a son of my old friend, gave a lecture upon him, and afterwards Le lion amoureux was played, a very tolerable little piece from the Revolutionary period, in which, for one thing, Napoleon appears as a young man. There are some very fine revolutionary tirades in it, of which Princess Mathilde, after its first representation, said that they made her Republican heart palpitate. The ceremony in honor of this little anti-pope to Victor Hugo was quite a pretty one.

Once, too, I received a ticket for a reception at the French Academy. The poet Auguste Barbier was being inaugurated and Silvestre de Sacy welcomed him, in academic fashion, in a fairly indiscreet speech. Barbier's Jamber was one of the books of poems that I had loved for years, and I knew many of the strophes by heart, for instance, the celebrated ones on Freedom and on Napoleon; I had also noticed how Barbier's vigour had subsided in subsequent collections of poems; in reality, he was still living on his reputation from the year 1831, and without a doubt most people believed him to be dead. And now there he stood, a shrivelled old man in his Palm uniform, his speech revealing neither satiric power nor lofty intellect. It was undoubtedly owing to his detestation of Napoleon (vide his poem L'Idole) that the Academy, who were always agitating against the Empire, had now, so late in the day, cast their eyes upon him. Bald little Silvestre de Sacy, the tiny son of an important father, reproached him for his verses on Freedom, as the bold woman of the people who was not afraid to shed blood.

"That is not Freedom as I understand it," piped the little man,--and one believed him,--but could not refrain from murmuring with the poet:

C'est que la Liberté n'est pas une comtesse
Du noble Faubourg St. Germain,
Une femme qu'un cri fait tomber en faiblesse,
Qui met du blanc et du carmin;
C'est une forte femme.

XIV.

A very instructive resort, even for a layman, was the Record Office, for there one could run through the whole history of France in the most entertaining manner with the help of the manuscripts placed on view, from the most ancient papyrus rolls to the days of parchment and paper. You saw the documents of the Feudal Lords' and Priests' Conspiracies under the Merovingians and the Capets, the decree of divorce between Philip Augustus and Ingeborg, and letters from the most notable personages of the Middle Ages and the autocracy. The period of the Revolution and the First Empire came before one with especial vividness. There was Charlemagne's monogram stencilled in tin, and that of Robert of Paris, reproduced in the same manner, those of Louis XIV. and Molière, of Francis the Catholic and Mary Stuart. There were letters from Robespierre and Danton, requests for money and death-warrants from the Reign of Terror, Charlotte Corday's last letters from prison and the original letters of Napoleon from St. Helena.

In June I saw the annual races at Longchamps for the first time. Great was the splendour. From two o'clock in the afternoon to six there was an uninterrupted stream of carriages, five or six abreast, along the Champs Elysées; there were thousands of lorettes (as they were called at that time) in light silk gowns, covered with diamonds and precious stones, in carriages decorated with flowers. Coachmen and footmen wore powdered wigs, white or grey, silk stockings and knee-breeches and a flower in the buttonhole matching the colour of their livery and the flowers which hung about the horses' ears. Some of the carriages had no coachman's box or driver, but were harnessed to four horses ridden by postillions in green satin or scarlet velvet, with white feathers in their caps.

The only great demi-mondaine of whom I had hitherto caught a glimpse was the renowned Madame de Païva, who had a little palace by the side of the house in which Frölich the painter lived, in the Champs Elysées. Her connection with Count Henckel v. Donnersmark permitted her to surround herself with regal magnificence, and, to the indignation of Princess Mathilde, men like Gautier and Renan, Sainte-Beuve and Goncourt, Saint-Victor and Taine, sat at her table. The ladies here were younger and prettier, but socially of lower rank. The gentlemen went about among the carriages, said tu without any preamble to the women, and squeezed their hands, while their men-servants sat stolid, like wood, seeming neither to hear nor see.

This race-day was the last under the Empire. It is the one described in Zola's Nana. The prize for the third race was 100,000 francs. After English horses had been victorious for several years in succession, the prize was carried off in 1870--as in Nana--by a native-born horse, and the jubilation was great; it was a serious satisfaction to national vanity.

At that time, the Tuileries were still standing, and I was fond of walking about the gardens near closing time, when the guard beat the drums to turn the people out. It was pleasant to hear the rolling of the drums, which were beaten by two of the Grenadier Guard drummers and a Turco. Goldschmidt had already written his clever and linguistically very fine piece of prose about this rolling of the drums and what it possibly presaged: Napoleon's own expulsion from the Tuileries and the humiliation of French grandeur before the Prussians, who might one day come and drum this grandeur out. But Goldschmidt had disfigured the pretty little piece somewhat by relating that one day when, for an experiment, he had tried to make his way into the gardens after the signal for closing had sounded, the Zouave had carelessly levelled his bayonet at him with the words: "Ne faites pas des bêtises!" This levelling of the bayonet on such trivial provocation was too tremendous, so I made up my mind one evening to try myself. The soldier on guard merely remarked politely: "Fermé, monsieur, on va sortir."

I little dreamed that only a few months later the Empress would steal secretly out of the palace, having lost her crown, and still less that only six months afterwards, during the civil war, the Tuileries would be reduced to ashes, never to rise again.

XV.

At that time the eyes of the Danes were fixed upon France in hope and expectation that their national resuscitation would come from that quarter, and they made no distinction between France and the Empire. Although the shortest visit to Paris was sufficient to convince a foreigner not only that the personal popularity of the Emperor was long since at an end, but that the whole government was despised, in Denmark people did not, and would not, know it. In the Danish paper with the widest circulation, the Daily Paper, foreign affairs were dealt with by a man of the name of Prahl, a wildly enthusiastic admirer of the Empire, a pleasant man and a brainy, but who, on this vital point, seemed to have blinkers on. From all his numerous foreign papers, he deduced only the opinions that he held before, and his opinions were solely influenced by his wishes. He had never had any opportunity of procuring information at first hand. He said to me one day:

"I am accused of allowing my views to be influenced by the foreign diplomatists here, I, who have never spoken to one of them. I can honestly boast of being unacquainted with even the youngest attaché of the Portuguese Ministry." His remarks, which sufficiently revealed this fact, unfortunately struck the keynote of the talk of the political wiseacres in Denmark.

Though the Danes were so full of the French, it would be a pity to say that the latter returned the compliment. It struck me then, as it must have struck many others, how difficult it was to make people in France understand that Danes and Norsemen were not Germans. From the roughest to the most highly educated, they all looked upon it as an understood thing, and you could not persuade them of anything else. As soon as they had heard Northerners exchange a few words with each other and had picked up the frequently recurring Ja, they were sufficiently edified. Even many years after, I caught the most highly cultured Frenchmen (such as Edmond de Concourt), believing that, at any rate on the stage, people spoke German in Copenhagen.

One day in June I began chatting on an omnibus with a corporal of Grenadiers. When he heard that I was Danish, he remarked: "German, then." I said: "No." He persisted in his assertion, and asked, cunningly, what oui was in Danish. When I told him he merely replied, philosophically, "Ah! then German is the mother tongue." It is true that when Danes, Norwegians and Swedes met abroad they felt each other to be compatriots; but this did not prevent them all being classed together as Germans; that they were not Englishmen, you saw at a glance. Even when there were several of them together, they had difficulty in asserting themselves as different and independent; they were a Germanic race all the same, and people often added, "of second-class importance," since the race had other more pronounced representatives.

The only strong expression of political opinion that was engineered in France then was the so-called plebiscite of May, 1870; the government challenged the verdict of the entire male population of France upon the policy of Napoleon III. during the past eighteen years, and did so with the intention, strangely enough not perceived by Prime Minister Ollivier, of re-converting the so-called constitutional Empire which had been in existence since January 1, 1870, into an autocracy. Sensible people saw that the plebiscite was only an objectionable comedy; a favourable reply would be obtained all over the country by means of pressure on the voters and falsification of votes; the oppositionist papers showed this up boldly in articles that were sheer gems of wit. Disturbances were expected in Paris on the 9th of May, and here and there troops were collected. But the Parisians, who saw through the farce, remained perfectly indifferent.

The decision turned out as had been expected; the huge majority in Paris was against, the provincial population voted for, the Emperor.

XVI.

On July 5th I saw John Stuart Mill for the first time. He had arrived in Paris the night before, passing through from Avignon, and paid a visit to me, unannounced, in my room in the Rue Mazarine; he stayed two hours and won my affections completely. I was a little ashamed to receive so great a man in so poor a place, but more proud of his thinking it worth his while to make my acquaintance. None of the French savants had ever had an opportunity of conversing with him; a few days before, Renan had lamented to me that he had never seen him. As Mill had no personal acquaintances in Paris, I was the only person he called upon.

To talk to him was a new experience. The first characteristic that struck me was that whereas the French writers were all assertive, he listened attentively to counter-arguments; it was only when his attitude in the woman question was broached that he would not brook contradiction and overwhelmed his adversaries with contempt.

At that time Mill was without any doubt, among Europe's distinguished men, the greatest admirer of French history and French intellectual life to be found outside of France; but he was of quite a different type from the French, even from those I esteemed most highly. The latter were comprehensive-minded men, bold and weighty, like Taine, or cold and agile like Renan, but they were men of intellect and thought, only having no connection with the practical side of life. They were not adapted to personal action, felt no inclination to direct interference.

Mill was different. Although he was more of a thinker than any of them, his boldness was not of the merely theoretic kind. He wished to interfere and re-model. None of those Frenchmen lacked firmness; if, from any consideration, they modified their utterances somewhat, their fundamental views, at any rate, were formed independently; but their firmness lay in defence, not in attack; they wished neither to rebuke nor to instigate; their place was the lecturer's platform, rather than the tribune. Mill's firmness was of another kind, hard as steel; both in character and expression he was relentless, and he went to work aggressively. He was armed, not with a cuirass, but a glaive.

Thus in him I met, for the first time in my life, a figure who was the incarnation of the ideal I had drawn for myself of the great man. This ideal had two sides; talent and character: great capacities and inflexibility. The men of great reputation whom I had met hitherto, artists and scientists, were certainly men richly endowed with talents; but I had never hitherto encountered a personality combining talents with gifts of character. Shortly before leaving home, I had concluded the preface to a collection of criticisms with these words: "My watchword has been: As flexible as possible, when it is a question of understanding, as inflexible as possible, when it is a question of speaking," and I had regarded this watchword as more than the motto of a little literary criticism. Now I had met a grand inflexibility of ideas in human form, and was impressed for my whole life long.

Unadapted though I was by nature to practical politics, or in fact to any activity save that of ideas, I was far from regarding myself as mere material for a scholar, an entertaining author, a literary historian, or the like. I thought myself naturally fitted to be a man of action. But the men of action I had hitherto met had repelled me by their lack of a leading principle. The so-called practical men at home, lawyers and parliamentarians, were not men who had made themselves masters of any fund of new thoughts that they wished to reduce to practical effect; they were dexterous people, well-informed of conditions at their elbow, not thinkers, and they only placed an immediate goal in front of themselves. In Mill I learnt at last to know a man in whom the power of action, disturbance, and accomplishment were devoted to the service of modern sociological thought.

He was then sixty-four years old, but his skin was as fresh and clear as a child's, his deep blue eyes young. He stammered a little, and nervous twitches frequently shot over his face; but there was a sublime nobility about him.

To prolong the conversation, I offered to accompany him to the Windsor Hotel, where he was staying, and we walked the distance. As I really had intended to go over to England at about that time, Mill proposed my crossing with him. I refused, being afraid of abusing his kindness, but was invited to visit him frequently when I was in England, which I did not fail to do. A few days afterwards I was in London.

XVII.

My French acquaintances all said the same thing, when I told them I wanted to go over to England: "What on earth do you want there?" Though only a few hours' journey from England, they had never felt the least curiosity to see the country. "And London! It was said to be a very dull city; it was certainly not worth putting one's self out to go there." Or else it was: "If you are going to London, be careful! London is full of thieves and rascals; look well to your pockets!"

Only a few days later, the Parisians were shaken out of their calm, without, however, being shaken out of their self-satisfaction. The Duc de Grammont's speech on the 6th of July, which amounted to the statement that France was not going to stand any Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain, made the people fancy themselves deeply offended by the King of Prussia, and a current of martial exasperation ran through the irritable and misled people, who for four years had felt themselves humiliated by Prussia's strong position. All said and believed that in a week there would be war, and on both sides everything was so ordered that there might be. There was still hope that common sense might get the better of warlike madness in the French Government; but this much was clear, there was going to be a sudden downfall of everything.

Between Dover and Calais the waves beat over the ship. From Dover, the train went at a speed of sixty miles an hour, and made one think him a great man who invented the locomotive, as great as Aristotle and Plato together. It seemed to me that John Stuart Mill was that kind of man. He opened, not roads, but railroads; his books were like iron rails, unadorned, but useful, leading to their goal. And what will there was in the English locomotive that drew our train,--like the driving instinct of England's character!

Two things struck me on my journey across, a type of mechanical Protestant religiosity which was new to me, and the knowledge of the two languages along the coasts. A pleasant English doctor with whom I got into conversation sat reading steadily in a little Gospel of St. John that he carried with him, yawning as he read. The seamen on the ship and the coast dwellers both in England and France spoke English and French with about equal ease. It is probably the same in all border countries, but it occurred to me that what came about here quite naturally will in time be a possibility all over the world, namely, the mastery of a second and common language, in addition to a people's own.

I drove into London through a sea of houses. When I had engaged a room, changed my clothes, and written a letter that I wanted to send off at once, the eighteen-year-old girl who waited on me informed me that no letters were accepted on Sundays. As I had some little difficulty in making out what she said, I supposed she had misunderstood my question and thought I wanted to speak to the post-official. For I could not help laughing at the idea that even the letterboxes had to enjoy their Sabbath rest. But I found she was right. At the post-office, even the letter-box was shut, as it was Sunday; I was obliged to put my letter in a pillar-box in the street.

In Paris the Summer heat had been oppressive. In London, to my surprise, the weather was fresh and cool, the air as light as it is in Denmark in Autumn. My first visit was to the Greek and Assyrian collections in the British Museum. In the Kensington Museum and the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, I added to my knowledge of Michael Angelo, to whom I felt drawn by a mighty affection. The admiration for his art which was to endure undiminished all my life was even then profound. I early felt that although Michael Angelo had his human weaknesses and limitations, intellectually and as an artist he is one of the five or six elect the world has produced, and scarcely any other great man has made such an impression on my inner life as he.

In the British Museum I was accosted by a young Dane with whom I had sometimes ridden out in the days of my riding lessons; this was Carl Bech, now a landed proprietor, and in his company I saw many of the sights of London and its environs. He knew more English than I, and could find his way anywhere. That the English are rigid in their conventions, he learnt one day to his discomfort; he had put on a pair of white trousers, and as this was opposed to the usual precedent and displeased, we were stared at by every man, woman and child we met, as if the young man had gone out in his underclothing. I had a similar experience one day as I was walking about the National Gallery with a young German lady whose acquaintance I had made. An Englishwoman stopped her in one of the rooms to ask:

"Was it you who gave up a check parasol downstairs?" and receiving an answer in the affirmative, she burst out laughing in her face and went off.

On July 16th came the great daily-expected news. War was declared, and in face of this astounding fact and all the possibilities it presented, people were struck dumb. The effect it had upon me personally was that I made up my mind to return as soon as possible to France, to watch the movement there. In London, where Napoleon III. was hated, and in a measure despised, France was included in the aversion felt for him. Everywhere, when I was asked on which side my sympathies were, they broke in at once: "We are all for Prussia."

XVIII.

As often as I could, I took the train to Blackheath to visit John Stuart Mill. He was good and great, and I felt myself exceedingly attracted by his greatness. There were fundamental features of his thought and mode of feeling that coincided with inclinations of my own; for instance, the Utilitarian theory, as founded by Bentham and his father and developed by him. I had written in 1868: "What we crave is no longer to flee from society and reality with our thoughts and desires. On the contrary, we wish to put our ideas into practice in society and life. That we may not become a nation of poetasters, we will simply strive towards actuality, the definite goal of Utility, which the past generation mocked at. Who would not be glad to be even so little useful?"

Thus I found myself mentally in a direction that led me towards Mill, and through many years' study of Comte and Littré, through an acquaintance with Mill's correspondence with Comte, I was prepared for philosophical conversations concerning the fundamental thoughts of empiric philosophy as opposed to speculative philosophy, conversations which, on Mill's part, tended to represent my entire University philosophical education at Copenhagen as valueless and wrong.

But what drew me the most strongly to Mill was not similarity of thought, but the feeling of an opposed relationship. All my life I had been afraid of going further in a direction towards which I inclined. I had always had a passionate desire to perfect my nature--to make good my defects. Julius Lange was so much to me because he was so unlike me. Now I endeavoured to understand Mill's nature and make it my own, because it was foreign to mine. By so doing I was only obeying an inner voice that perpetually urged me. When others about me had plunged into a subject, a language, a period, they continued to wrestle with it to all eternity, made the thing their speciality. That I had a horror of. I knew French well; but for fear of losing myself in French literature, which I could easily illustrate, I was always wrestling with English or German, which presented greater difficulties to me, but made it impossible for me to grow narrow. I had the advantage over the European reading world that I knew the Northern languages, but nothing was further from my thoughts than to limit myself to opening up Northern literature to Europe. Thus it came about that when the time in my life arrived that I felt compelled to settle outside Denmark I chose for my place of residence Berlin, the city with which I had fewest points in common, and where I could consequently learn most and develop myself without one-sidedness.

Mill's verbally expressed conviction that empiric philosophy was the only true philosophy, made a stronger impression upon me than any assertion of the kind that I had met with in printed books. The results of empiric philosophy seemed to me much more firmly based than those of the newer German philosophy. At variance with my teachers, I had come to see that Hume had been right rather than Kant. But I could not conform to the principle of empiric philosophy. After all, our knowledge is not ultimately based merely on experience, but on that which, prior to experience, alone renders experience possible. Otherwise not even the propositions of Mathematics can be universally applicable. In spite of my admiration for Mill's philosophical works, I was obliged to hold to the rationalistic theory of cognition; Mill obstinately held to the empiric. "Is not a reconciliation between the two possible?" I said. "I think that one must choose between the theories," replied Mill. I did not then know Herbert Spencer's profoundly thoughtful reconciliation of the teachings of the two opposing schools. He certainly maintains, as does the English school, that all our ideas have their root in experience, but he urges at the same time, with the Germans, that there are innate ideas. The conscious life of the individual, that cannot be understood from the experience of the individual, becomes explicable from the inherited experience of the race. Even the intellectual form which is the condition of the individual's apprehension is gradually made up out of the experience of the race, and consequently innate without for that reason being independent of foregoing experiences. But I determined at once, incited thereto by conversations with Mill, to study, not only his own works, but the writings of James Mill, Bain, and Herbert Spencer; I would endeavour to find out how much truth they contained, and introduce this truth into Denmark.

I was very much surprised when Mill informed me that he had not read a line of Hegel, either in the original or in translation, and regarded the entire Hegelian philosophy as sterile and empty sophistry. I mentally confronted this with the opinion of the man at the Copenhagen University who knew the history of philosophy best, my teacher, Hans Bröchner, who knew, so to speak, nothing of contemporary English and French philosophy, and did not think them worth studying. I came to the conclusion that here was a task for one who understood the thinkers of the two directions, who did not mutually understand one another.

I thought that in philosophy, too, I knew what I wanted, and saw a road open in front of me.

However, I never travelled it. The gift for abstract philosophical thought which I had possessed as a youth was never developed, but much like the tendency to verse-making which manifested itself even earlier, superseded by the historio-critical capacity, which grew strong in me. At that time I believed in my natural bent for philosophy, and did so even in July, 1872, when I sketched out and began a large book: "The Association of Ideas, conceived and put forward as the fundamental principle of human knowledge," but the book was never completed. The capacity for abstraction was too weak in me.

Still, if the capacity had no independent development, it had a subservient effect on all my criticism, and the conversations with Mill had a fertilising and helpful influence on my subsequent intellectual life.

XIX.

Some weeks passed in seeing the most important public buildings in London, revelling in the treasures of her museums and collections, and in making excursions to places in the neighbourhood and to Oxford. I was absorbed by St. Paul's, saw it from end to end, and from top to bottom, stood in the crypt, where Sir Christopher Wren lies buried,--Si monumentum requiris, circumspice--mentally compared Wellington's burial-place here with that of Napoleon on the other side of the Channel, then went up to the top of the building and looked out to every side over London, which I was already so well acquainted with that I could find my way everywhere alone, take the right omnibuses, and the right trains by the underground, without once asking my way. I spent blissful hours in the National Gallery. This choice collection of paintings, especially the Italian ones, afforded me the intense, overwhelming delight which poetry, the masterpieces of which I knew already, could no longer offer me. At the Crystal Palace I was fascinated by the tree-ferns, as tall as fruit-trees with us, and by the reproductions of the show buildings of the different countries, an Egyptian temple, a house from Pompeii, the Lions' den from the Alhambra. Here, as everywhere, I sought out the Zoological Gardens, where I lingered longest near the hippopotami, who were as curious to watch when swimming as when they were on dry land. Their clumsiness was almost captivating. They reminded me of some of my enemies at home.

Oxford, with the moss-grown, ivy-covered walls, with all the poetry of conservatism, fascinated me by its dignity and its country freshness; there the flower of the English nature was expressed in buildings and trees. The antiquated and non-popular instruction, however, repelled me. And the old classics were almost unrecognisable in English guise, for instance, the anglicised veni, vidi, vici, which was quoted by a student.

The contrast between the English and the French mind was presented to me in all its force when I compared Windsor Castle with Versailles. The former was an old Northern Hall, in which the last act of Oehlenschläger's Palnatoke would have been well staged.

I saw all that I could: the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Hall and Abbey, the Tower and the theatres, the Picture Gallery at Dulwich with Rembrandt's Girl at the Window, the one at Hampton Court, with the portrait of Loyola ascribed to Titian, sailed down the river to Greenwich and lingered in the lovely Gardens at Kew, which gave me a luxuriant impression of English scenery. I also saw the Queen's model farm. Every animal was as splendid a specimen as if it had been intended for an agricultural show, the dairy walls were tiled all over. The bailiff regretted that Prince Albert, who had himself made the drawings for a special kind of milk containers, had not lived to see them made. It was not without its comic aspect to hear him inform you sadly, concerning an old bullock, that the Queen herself had given it the name of Prince Albert.

For me, accustomed to the gay and grotesque life deployed in an evening at the dancing-place of the Parisian students in the Closerie des lilas, it was instructive to compare this with a low English dancing-house, the Holborn Casino, which was merely sad, stiff, and repulsive.

Poverty in London was very much more conspicuous than in Paris; it spread itself out in side streets in the vicinity of the main arteries in its most pitiable form. Great troops, regular mobs of poor men, women and children in rags, dispersed like ghosts at dawn, fled away hurriedly and vanished, as soon as a policeman approached and made sign to them to pass on. There was nothing corresponding to it to be seen in Paris. Crime, too, bore a very different aspect here. In Paris, it was decked out and audacious, but retained a certain dignity; here, in the evening, in thickly frequented streets, whole swarms of ugly, wretchedly dressed, half or wholly drunken women could be seen reeling about, falling, and often lying in the street.

Both the tendency of the English to isolate themselves and their social instincts were quite different from those of the French. I was permitted to see the comfortably furnished Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall, membership of which was so much desired that people of high standing would have their names on the list for years beforehand, and these clubs corresponded to the cafés in Paris, which were open to every passer-by. I noticed that in the restaurants the tables were often hidden behind high screens, that the different parties who were dining might not be able to see one another.

XX.

The house in London where I was happiest was Antonio Gallenga's. A letter from the Hauchs was my introduction there, and I was received and taken up by them as if they had known me and liked me for years.

Antonio Gallenga, then a man of seventy, who nevertheless gave one an impression of youthfulness, had a most eventful life behind him. He had been born at Parma, was flung into prison at the age of twenty as a conspirator under Mazzini, was banished from Piedmont, spent some time at Malta, in the United States and in England, where he earned his living as a journalist and teacher of languages, and in 1848 returned to Italy, where he was active as a liberal politician. After the battle of Novara, he was again obliged to take refuge in London; but he was recalled to Piedmont by Cavour, who had him elected deputy for Castellamonte. He wrote an Italian Grammar in English, and, likewise in English, the History of Piedmont, quarrelled with Mazzini's adherents, withdrew from parliamentary life, and in preference to settling down permanently in Italy elected to be war correspondent to the Times. In that capacity he took part from 1859 onwards in the campaigns in Italy, in the North American States, in Denmark, and in Spain. His little boy was still wearing the Spanish national costume. Now he had settled down in London, on the staff of the Times, and had just come into town from the country, as the paper wished him to be near, on account of the approaching war. Napoleon III., to whom Gallenga had vowed an inextinguishable hatred, had been studied so closely by him that the Emperor might be regarded as his specialty. He used the energetic, violent language of the old revolutionary, was with all his heart and soul an Italian patriot, but had, through a twenty years' connection with England, acquired the practical English view of political affairs. Towards Denmark, where he had been during the most critical period of the country's history, he felt kindly; but our war methods had of course not been able to excite his admiration; neither had our diplomatic negotiations during the war.

Gallenga was a well-to-do man; he owned a house in the best part of London and a house in the country as well. He was a powerful man, with passionate feelings, devoid of vanity. It suited him well that the Times, as the English custom is, printed his articles unsigned; he was pleased at the increased influence they won thereby, inasmuch as they appeared as the expression of the universal paper's verdict. His wife was an Englishwoman, pleasant and well-bred, of cosmopolitan education and really erudite. Not only did she know the European languages, but she wrote and spoke Hindustani. She was a splendid specimen of the English housekeeper, and devoted herself enthusiastically to her two exceedingly beautiful children, a boy of eleven and a little girl of nine. The children spoke English, Italian, French, and German with equal facility and correctness.

Mrs. Gallenga had a more composite and a deeper nature than her husband, who doubted neither the truth of his ideas, nor their salutary power. She shared his and my opinions without sharing our confidence in them. When she heard me say that I intended to assert my ideas in Denmark, and wage war against existing prejudices, she would say, in our long conversations:

"I am very fond of Denmark; the people there seem to me to be happy, despite everything, and the country not to be over-populated. In any case, the population finds ample means of outlet in sea-life and emigration. Denmark is an idyllic little country. Now you want to declare war there. My thoughts seek down in dark places, and I ask myself whether I really believe that truth does any good, whether in my secret heart I am convinced that strife is better than stagnation? I admire Oliver Cromwell, but I sympathise with Falkland, who died with 'Peace! Peace!' [Footnote: Sir Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, who fell at Newbury, Sept. 20, 1643.] on his lips. I am afraid that you will have to bear a great deal. You will learn that the accoutrements of truth are a grievously heavy coat of mail. You will call forth reaction. Even that is the least. But reaction will come about in your own mind; after a long time, I mean. Still, you are strong; it will be a reaction of the kind that keeps aloof in order to spring farther and better. Your unity will not go to pieces. You are a kind of cosmos."

When the conversation turned upon England and English conditions, she protested against the opinion prevalent on the continent since Byron's day, that English society was infested with hypocrisy.

"I do not think that hypocrisy is characteristic of English thought. We have, of course, like every serious people, our share of hypocrites; in a frivolous nation hypocrisy has no pretext for existence. But its supremacy amongst us is over. Apathetic orthodoxy, and superficial ideas of the correct thing, ruled England during the first half of the century. The intellectual position of the country is different now. No one who has not lived in England has any idea how serious and real the belief here is in the tough doctrine of the Trinity, who, in human form, walked about in Galilee. Good men, noble men, live and work for this dogma, perform acts of love for it. We, you and I, have drunk from other sources; but for these people it is the fountain of life. Only it is depressing to see this doctrine in its Roman Catholic form winning greater power everywhere every day. In Denmark, intellectual stagnation has hindered it hitherto; you have political, but not yet religious, freedom. Belgium has both, and Belgium is at the present time the most fiery Catholic power there is. France is divided between extreme materialism and Madonna worship. When European thought--between 1820 and 1860, let us say--rebelled against every kind of orthodoxy, and, as always happens with rebellion, made mistakes and went too far, France played a wretched rôle. It is a Celtic land, and Celtic it will remain; it desires, not personal freedom, but a despotic levelling, not equality before the law, but the base equality which is inimical to excellence, not the brotherhood that is brotherly love, but that which gives the bad the right to share with the good. That is why the Empire could be victorious in France, and that is why the Roman Catholic Church, even in its most modern, Byzantine form, is triumphant there."

So thoroughly English was Anna Gallenga's way of looking at things, in spite of an education which had included the chief countries in Europe. So blindly did she share the prejudice that the French are essentially Celtic. And so harshly did she judge, in spite of a scepticism, feminine though it was, that was surprising in a woman.

XXI.

Don Juan Prim, Count of Reus, Marques de los Castillejos, would now be forgotten outside Spain were it not that Régnault's splendid equestrian picture of him, as he is receiving the homage of the people (on a fiery steed, reminding one of Velasquez), keeps his memory green in everyone who visits the Gallery of the Louvre. At that time his name was on every tongue. The victorious general and revolutionary of many years' standing had since 1869 been Prime Minister of Spain, and had eagerly endeavoured to get a foreign prince for the throne who would be dependent upon him and under whom he would be able to keep the power in his own hands. He had now offered the throne of Spain to Leopold of Hohenzollern, but without having assured himself of the consent of the Powers. That of Prussia was of course safe enough, and for six weeks Napoleon had looked on benevolently at the negotiations, and acted as though the arrangement had his approval, which Prim had the more reason to suppose since Leopold was related to the Murat family, and the Emperor had raised no objection to a Hohenzollern ascending the throne of Roumania. Consequently, Prim was thunderstruck when France suddenly turned round and seized upon this trivial pretext for a breach of the peace.

He was in regular correspondence with the Gallengas, whom he had seen a good deal of during the years, after the unsuccessful rebellion against Queen Isabella, that he had spent in London. At that time he had been a man of fifty, and, with his little body and large head, had looked very strange among Englishmen. He was of modest birth, but denied the fact. He was now a Spanish grandee of the first class, but this was through a patent bestowed on him for courage in the war with Morocco; he had little education, did not know a word of English, wrote French with a purely fantastic orthography, but had excellent qualities as a Liberal, an army chief, and a popular leader. Still, he was not pleased that Régnault had painted him greeted by the enthusiastic cheers of an untidy, ragged mob of rebels; he would have preferred to be receiving the acclamations of regular troops, and of the highest men and women in the nation, as now, at the conclusion of his career, he really was. Only a few months later (in December, 1870), he was shot by an assassin in the streets of Madrid.

In Prim's communications to Gallenga, the attitude of the French government appeared to me in a most unfavourable light. Ollivier, the Premier, I had long despised; it did not need much political acumen to see that he was an ambitious and conceited phrase-monger, who would let himself be led by the nose by those who had disarmed him. The Emperor himself was a wreck. I had had no doubt of that since I had one day seen him at very close quarters in the Louvre, where he was inspecting some recently hung, decorative paintings. It was quite evident that he could not walk alone, but advanced, half-sliding, supported by two tall chamberlains, who each gave him an arm. His eyes were half-closed and his gaze absolutely dulled. The dressed and waxed moustache, which ran to a needle-like point, looked doubly tasteless against his wax mask of a face. He was the incarnation of walking decrepitude, vapid and slack. Quite evidently he had committed the blunder of trusting to a split in Germany. In his blindness he explained that he had come to free the Germans, who had, against their will, been incorporated into Prussia, and all Germany rose like one man against him. And in his foolish proclamation he declared that he was waging this war for the sake of the civilising ideals of the first Republic, as if Germany were now going to be civilised for the first time, and as if he, who had made an end of the second Republic by a coup d'état, could speak in the name of Republican freedom. His whole attitude was mendacious and mean, and the wretched pretext under which he declared war could not but prejudice Europe against him. In addition to this, as they knew very well in England, from the earlier wars of the Empire, he had no generals; his victories had been soldier victories.

I was very deeply impressed, in the next place, by the suicide of Prévost-Paradol. I had studied most carefully his book, La France Nouvelle; I had seen in this friend and comrade of Taine and of Renan the political leader of the future in France. No one was so well acquainted with its resources as he; no one knew better than he what policy ought to be followed. If he had despaired, it was because he foresaw that the situation was hopeless. He had certainly made mistakes; first, in believing that in January it had been Napoleon's serious intention to abrogate personal control of the state, then that of retaining, despite the long hesitation so well known to me, his position as French Envoy to North America, after the plebiscite. That he should now have turned his pistol against his own forehead told me that he regarded the battle as lost, foresaw inevitable collapse as the outcome of the war. When at first all the rumours and all the papers announced the extreme probability of Denmark's taking part in the war as France's ally, I was seized with a kind of despair at the thought of the folly she seemed to be on the verge of committing. I wrote to my friends, would have liked, had I been permitted, to write in every Danish paper a warning against the martial madness that had seized upon people. It was only apparently shared by the French. Even now, only a week after the declaration of war, and before a single collision had taken place, it was clear to everyone who carefully followed the course of events that in spite of the light-hearted bragging of the Parisians and the Press, there was deep-rooted aversion to war. And I, who had always counted Voltaire's Micromégas as one of my favourite tales, thought of where Sirius, the giant, voices his supposition that the people on the earth are happy beings who pass their time in love and thought, and of the philosopher's reply to him: "At this moment there are a hundred thousand animals of our species, who wear hats, engaged in killing a hundred thousand more, who wear turbans, or in being killed by them. And so it has been all over the earth from time immemorial." Only that this time not a hundred thousand, but some two million men were being held in readiness to exterminate each other.

What I saw in London of the scenic art at the Adelphi Theatre, the Prince of Wales' Theatre and the Royal Strand Theatre was disheartening. Molière was produced as the lowest kind of farce, Sheridan was acted worse than would be permitted in Denmark at a second-class theatre; but the scenic decorations, a greensward, shifting lights, and the like, surpassed anything that I had ever seen before.

More instructive and more fascinating than the theatres were the parliamentary debates and the trials in the Law Courts. I enjoyed in particular a sitting of the Commons with a long debate between Gladstone and Disraeli, who were like representatives of two races and two opposed views of life. Gladstone was in himself handsomer, clearer, and more open, Disraeli spoke with a finer point, and more elegantly, had a larger oratorical compass, more often made a witty hit, and evoked more vigorous response and applause. Their point of disagreement was the forthcoming war; Disraeli wished all the documents regarding it to be laid before parliament; Gladstone declared that he could not produce them. In England, as elsewhere, the war that was just breaking out dominated every thought.

XXII.

The Paris I saw again was changed. Even on my way from Calais I heard, to my astonishment, the hitherto strictly forbidden Marseillaise hummed and muttered. In Paris, people went arm in arm about the streets singing, and the Marseillaise was heard everywhere. The voices were generally harsh, and it was painful to hear the song that had become sacred through having been silenced so long, profaned in this wise, in the bawling and shouting of half-drunken men at night. But the following days, as well, it was hummed, hooted, whistled and sung everywhere, and as the French are one of the most unmusical nations on earth, it sounded for the most part anything but agreeable.

In those days, while no collision between the masses of troops had as yet taken place, there was a certain cheerfulness over Paris; it could be detected in every conversation; people were more lively, raised their voices more, chatted more than at other times; the cabmen growled more loudly, and cracked their whips more incessantly than usual.

Assurance of coming victory was expressed everywhere, even among the hotel servants in the Rue Racine and on the lips of the waiters at every restaurant. Everybody related how many had already volunteered; the number grew from day to day; first it was ten thousand, then seventy-five thousand, then a hundred thousand. In the Quartier Latin, the students sat in their cafés, many of them in uniform, surrounded by their comrades, who were bidding them good-bye. It was characteristic that they no longer had their womenfolk with them; they had flung them aside, now that the matter was serious. Every afternoon a long stream of carriages, filled with departing young soldiers, could be seen moving out towards the Gare du Nord. From every carriage large flags waved. Women, their old mothers, workwomen, who sat in the carriages with them, held enormous bouquets on long poles. The dense mass of people through which one drove were grave; but the soldiers for the most part retained their gaiety, made grimaces, smoked and drank.

Nevertheless, the Emperor's proclamation had made a very poor impression. It was with the intention of producing an effect of sincerity that he foretold the war would be long and grievous, (longue et pénible); with a people of the French national character it would have been better had he been able to write "terrible, but short." Even now, when people had grown accustomed to the situation, this proclamation hung like a nightmare over them. I was all the more astonished when an old copy of the Daily Paper for the 30th of July fell into my hands, and I read that their correspondent (Topsöe, recently arrived in Paris) had seen a bloused workman tear off his hat, after reading the proclamation, and heard him shout, "Vive la France!" So thoughtlessly did people continue to feed the Danish public with the food to which it was accustomed.

Towards the 8th or 9th of August I met repeatedly the author of the article. He told me that the Duc de Cadore had appeared in Copenhagen on a very indefinite errand, but without achieving the slightest result. Topsöe, for that matter, was extraordinarily ignorant of French affairs, had only been four weeks in France altogether, and openly admitted that he had touched up his correspondence as well as he could. He had never yet been admitted to the Corps législatif, nevertheless he had related how the tears had come into the eyes of the members and the tribunes the day when the Duc de Grammont "again lifted the flag of France on high." He said: "I have been as unsophisticated as a child over this war," and added that Bille had been more so than himself.

XXIII.

One could hardly praise the attitude of the French papers between the declaration of war and the first battles. Their boasting and exultation over what they were going to do was barely decent, they could talk of nothing but the victories they were registering beforehand, and, first and last, the entry into Berlin. The insignificant encounter at Saarbrücken was termed everywhere the première victoire! The caricatures in the shop-windows likewise betrayed terrible arrogance. One was painfully reminded of the behaviour of the French before the battle of Agincourt in Shakespeare's Henry V.

It was no matter for surprise that a populace thus excited should parade through the streets in an evening, shouting "A Berlin! A Berlin!"

National enthusiasm could vent itself in the theatres, in a most convenient manner, without making any sacrifice. As soon as the audience had seen the first piece at the Théâtre Français, the public clamoured for La Marseillaise, and brooked no denial. A few minutes later the lovely Mlle.

Agar came in, in a Greek costume. Two French flags were held over her head. She then sang, quietly, sublimely, with expression at the same time restrained and inspiring, the Marseillaise. The countless variations of her voice were in admirable keeping with her animated and yet sculptural gesticulation, and the effect was thrilling, although certain passages in the song were hardly suitable to the circumstances of the moment, for instance, the invocation of Freedom, the prayer to her to fight for her defenders. When the last verse came, she seized the flag and knelt down; the audience shouted, "Debout!" All rose and listened standing to the conclusion, which was followed by mad applause.

People seized upon every opportunity of obtruding their patriotism. One evening Le lion amoureux was given. In the long speech which concludes the second act, a young Republican describes the army which, during the Revolution, crossed the frontier for the first time and utterly destroyed the Prussian armies. The whole theatre foamed like the sea.

XXIV.

Those were Summer days, and in spite of the political and martial excitement, the peaceful woods and parks in the environs of Paris were tempting. From the Quartier Latin many a couple secretly found their way to the forests of St. Germain, or the lovely wood at Chantilly. In the morning one bought a roast fowl and a bottle of wine, then spent the greater part of the day under the beautiful oak-trees, and sat down to one's meal in the pleasant green shade. Now and again one of the young women would make a wreath of oak leaves and twine it round her companion's straw hat, while he, bareheaded, lay gazing up at the tree-tops. For a long time I kept just such a wreath as a remembrance, and its withered leaves roused melancholy reflections some years later, for during the war every tree of the Chantilly wood had been felled; the wreath was all that remained of the magnificent oak forest.

XXV.

The news of the battle of Weissenburg on August 4th was a trouble, but this chiefly manifested itself in profound astonishment. What? They had suffered a defeat? But one did not begin to be victorious at once; victory would soon follow now. And, indeed, next morning, the news of a victory ran like lightning about the town. It had been so confidently expected that people quite neglected to make enquiries as to how and to what extent it was authenticated. There was bunting everywhere; all the horses had flags on their heads, people went about with little flags in their hats. As the day wore on it turned out to be all a false report, and the depression was great.

Next evening, as I came out of the Théâtre Français, there stood the Emperor's awful telegram to read, several copies of it posted up on the columns of the porch: "Macmahon has lost a battle. Frossard is retreating. Put Paris in a condition of defence as expeditiously as possible!" Then, like everyone else, I understood the extent of the misfortune. Napoleon had apparently lost his head; it was very unnecessary to publish the conclusion of the telegram.

Immediately afterwards was issued the Empress' proclamation, which was almost silly. "I am with you," it ran--a charming consolation for the Parisians.

Astonishment produced a kind of paralysis; anger looked round for an object on which to vent itself, but hardly knew whom to select. Besides, people had really insufficient information as to what had happened. The Siècle printed a fairly turbulent article at once, but no exciting language in the papers was required. Even a foreigner could perceive that if it became necessary to defend Paris after a second defeat, the Empire would be at an end.

The exasperation which had to vent itself was directed at first against the Ministers, and ridiculously enough the silence imposed on the Press concerning the movements of the troops (le mutisme) was blamed for the defeat at Weissenburg; then the exasperation swung back and was directed against the generals, who were dubbed negligent and incapable, until, ponderously and slowly, it turned against the Emperor himself.

But with the haste that characterises French emotion, and the rapidity with which events succeeded one another, even this exasperation was of short duration. It raged for a few days, and then subsided for want of contradiction of its own accord, for the conviction spread that the Emperor's day was irrevocably over and that he continued to exist only in name. A witness to the rapidity of this volte face were three consecutive articles by Edmond About in Le Soir. The first, written from his estate in Saverne, near Strassburg. was extremely bitter against the Emperor; it began: "Napoleone tertio feliciter regnante, as people said in the olden days, I have seen with my own eyes, what I never thought to see: Alsace overrun by the enemy's troops." The next article, written some days later, in the middle of August, when About had come to Paris, called the Emperor, without more ado, "The last Bonaparte," and began: "I see that I have been writing like a true provincial; in the provinces at the moment people have two curses on their lips, one for the Prussians, and one for those who began the war; in Paris, they have got much farther; there they have only one curse on their lips, one thought, and one wish; there are names that are no more mentioned in Paris than if they belonged to the twelfth century."

What he wrote was, at the moment, true and correct. I was frequently asked in letters what the French now said about the government and the Emperor. The only answer was that all that side of the question was antiquated in Paris. If I were to say to one of my acquaintances: "Eh! bien, que dites-vous de l'empereur?" the reply would be: "Mais, mon cher, je ne dis rien de lui. Vous voyez si bien que moi, qu'il ne compte plus. C'est un homme par terre. Tout le monde le sait; la gauche même ne l'attaque plus." Even General Trochu, the Governor of the capital, did not mention Napoleon's name in his proclamation to Paris. He himself hardly dared to send any messages. After having been obliged to surrender the supreme command, he followed the army, like a mock emperor, a kind of onlooker, a superfluous piece on the board. People said of him: "On croit qu'il se promène un peu aux environs de Châlons."

As can be seen from this, the deposition of the Emperor had taken place in people's consciousness, and was, so to speak, publicly settled, several weeks before the battle of Sedan brought with it his surrender to the King of Prussia and the proclamation of the French Republic. The Revolution of September 4th was not an overturning of things; it was merely the ratification of a state of affairs that people were already agreed upon in the capital, and had been even before the battle of Gravelotte.

In Paris preparations were being made with the utmost energy for the defence of the city. All men liable to bear arms were called up, and huge numbers of volunteers were drilled. It was an affecting sight to see the poor workmen drilling on the Place du Carrousel for enrolment in the volunteer corps. Really, most of them looked so bloodless and wretched that one was tempted to think they went with the rest for the sake of the franc a day and uniform.

XXVI.

Anyone whose way led him daily past the fortifications could see, however technically ignorant he might be, that they were exceedingly insignificant. Constantly, too, one heard quoted Trochu's words: "I don't delude myself into supposing that I can stop the Prussians with the matchsticks that are being planted on the ramparts." Strangely enough, Paris shut herself in with such a wall of masonry that in driving through it in the Bois de Boulogne, there was barely room for a carriage with two horses. They bored loop-holes in these walls and ramparts, but few doubted that the German artillery would be able to destroy all their defences with the greatest ease.

Distribute arms to the civil population, as the papers unanimously demanded, from readily comprehensible reasons, no one dared to do. The Empress' Government had to hold out for the existing state of things; nevertheless, in Paris,--certainly from about the 8th August,--people were under the impression that what had been lost was lost irrevocably.

I considered it would be incumbent upon my honour to return to Denmark, if we were drawn into the war, and I lived with this thought before my eyes. I contemplated with certainty an approaching revolution in France; I was vexed to think that there was not one conspicuously great and energetic man among the leaders of the Opposition, and that such a poor wretch as Rochefort was once more daily mentioned and dragged to the front. Of Gambetta no one as yet thought, although his name was respected, since he had made himself felt the last season as the most vehement speaker in the Chamber. But it was not speakers who were wanted, and people did not know that he was a man of action.

The Ministry that followed Ollivier's inspired me with no confidence. Palikao, the Prime Minister, was termed in the papers an iron man (the usual set phrase). It was said that he "would not scruple to clear the boulevards with grape"; but the genius needed for such a performance was not overwhelming. What he had to do was to clear France of the Germans, and that was more difficult.

Renan had had to interrupt the journey to Spitzbergen which he had undertaken in Prince Napoleon's company; the Prince and his party had only reached Tromsöe, when they were called back on account of the war, and Renan was in a state of the most violent excitement. He said: "No punishment could be too great for that brainless scoundrel Ollivier, and the Ministry that has followed his is worse. Every thinking man could see for himself that the declaration of this war was madness. (A-t-on jamais vu pareille folie, mon Dieu, mon Dieu, c'est navrant. Nous sommes un peuple désarçonné.)" In his eyes, Palikao was no better than a robber, Jérôme David than a murderer. He considered the fall of Strasburg imminent. He was less surprised than I at the unbounded incapacity shown by the French fleet under the difficult conditions; all plans for a descent on Northern Germany had already been given up, and the French fleet was unable to set about even so much as a blockade of the ports, such as the Danes had successfully carried out six years before.

Taine was as depressed as Renan. He had returned from Germany, where he had gone to prepare a treatise on Schiller, on account of the sudden death of Madame Taine's mother. As early as August 2d, when no battle had as yet been fought, he felt exceedingly anxious, and he was the first Frenchman whom I heard take into consideration the possibility of the defeat of France; he expressed great sorrow that two nations such as France and Germany should wage national war against each other as they were doing. "I have just come from Germany," he remarked, "where I have talked with many brave working-men. When I think of what it means for a man to be born into the world, nursed, brought up, instructed, and equipped; when I think what struggling and difficulties he must go through himself to be fit for the battle of life, and then reflect how all that is to be flung into the grave as a lump of bleeding flesh, how can I do other than grieve! With two such statesmen as Louis Philippe, war could certainly have been averted, but with two quarrelsome men like Bismarck and Napoleon at the head of affairs, it was, of course, inevitable."

Philarète Chasles saw in the defeats a confirmation of the theory that he proclaimed, day in, day out, namely: that the Latin races were on the rapid down-grade; Spain and Portugal, Italy, Roumania, the South American republics, were, in his opinion, in a state of moral putrefaction, France a sheer Byzantium. It had been a piece of foolhardiness without parallel to try to make this war a decisive racial struggle between the nation that, as Protestant, brought free research in its train and one which had not yet been able to get rid of the Pope and political despotism. Now France was paying the penalty.

Out in the country at Meudon, where he was, there had--probably from carelessness--occurred repeated explosions, the last time on August 20th. Twenty cases of cartridges had just been sent to Bazaine; a hundred still remained, which were to start the day that they were urgently required. They blew up, and no one in the town doubted that the explosion was the work of Prussian spies. For things had come to such a pass that people saw Prussian spies everywhere. (During the first month of the war all Germans were called Prussians.) Importance was attached to the fact that General Frossard's nephew, a young lieutenant who lay wounded in Chasles' tower-house, from a sword-thrust in the chest, and was usually delirious, at the crash had jumped up and come to his senses, crying out: "It is treachery! It is Chamber No. 6 blowing up!" As a matter of fact, that was where the cartridges were. It was said that at Meudon traces had been found of the same explosive as had been used in bombs against the Emperor during the first days of May (a plot that had probably been hatched by the police). The perpetrator, however,--doubtless for good reasons--was not discovered.

Whatever vanity there was about old Philarète Chasles left him altogether during this critical time, which seemed to make good men better still. His niece, too, who used to be loud-voiced and conceited, was quite a different person. One day that I was at their house at Meudon, she sat in a corner for a long time crying quietly. Out there, they were all feverishly anxious, could not rest, craved, partly to hear the latest news, partly to feel the pulse of Paris. One day after dinner, Chasles invited me to go into town with him, and when we arrived he took a carriage and drove about with me for two hours observing the prevailing mood. We heard countless anecdotes, most of them apocryphal, but reflecting the beliefs of the moment: The Empress had sent three milliards (!) in French gold to the Bank of England. The Emperor, who was jealous of Macmahon since the latter had rescued him at Magenta, had taken the command of the Turcos from the Marshal, although the latter had said in the Council of War: "The Turcos must be given to me, they will not obey anyone else." And true it was that no one else had any control over them. If one had committed theft, or misbehaved himself in any other way, and Macmahon. whom they called only "Our Marshal," rode down the front of their lines and scolded them, they began to cry, rushed up and kissed his feet, and hung to his horse, like children asking for forgiveness. And now someone had made the great mistake of giving them to another general. And, the commander being anxious to dazzle the Germans with them, they and the Zouaves had been sent first into the fire, in spite of Bazaine's very sensible observation: "When you drive, you do not begin at a galop." And so these picked troops were broken up in their first engagement. It was said that of 2,500 Turcos, only 29 were left.

An anecdote like the following, which was told to us, will serve to show how popular legends grow up, in virtue of the tendency there is to reduce a whole battle to a collision between two generals, just as in the Homeric age, or in Shakespeare: The Crown Prince of Prussia was fighting very bravely at Wörth, in the front ranks. That he threw the Turcos into confusion was the result of a ray of sunlight falling on the silver eagle on his helmet. The Arabs thought it a sign from Heaven. Macmahon, who was shooting in the ranks, was so near the Crown Prince that the latter shouted to him in French: "Voilà un homme!" but the Frenchman surpassed him in chivalrous politeness, for he saluted, and replied: "Voilà un héros!"

XXVII.

After my return to Paris, I had taken lessons from an excellent language teacher, Mademoiselle Guémain, an old maid who had for many years taught French to Scandinavians, and for whom I wrote descriptions and remarks on what I saw, to acquire practise in written expression. She had known most of the principal Northerners who had visited Paris during the last twenty years, had taught Magdalene Thoresen, amongst others, when this latter as a young woman had stayed in Paris. She was an excellent creature, an unusual woman, intellectual, sensitive, and innocent, who made an unforgettable impression upon one. Besides the appointed lesson-times, we sometimes talked for hours together. How sad that the lives of such good and exceptional women should vanish and disappear, without any special thanks given to them in their life-times, and with no one of the many whom they have benefitted to tell publicly of their value. She possessed all the refinement of the French, together with the modesty of an old maid, was both personally inexperienced, and by virtue of the much that she had seen, very experienced in worldly things. I visited her again in 1889, after the lapse of nineteen years, having learned her address through Jonas Lie and his wife, who knew her. I found her older, but still more charming, and touchingly humble. It cut me to the heart to hear her say: "C'est une vraie charité que vous me faites de venir me voir."

Mlle. Guémain was profoundly affected, like everyone else, by what we were daily passing through during this time of heavy strain. As a woman, she was impressed most by the seriousness which had seized even the most frivolous people, and by the patriotic enthusiasm which was spreading in ever wider circles. She regarded it as deeper and stronger than as a rule it was.

XXVIII.

The temper prevailing among my Italian friends was very different. The Italians, as their way was, were just like children, laughed at the whole thing, were glad that the Prussians were "drubbing" the French, to whom, as good patriots, they wished every misfortune possible. The French had behaved like tyrants in Italy; now they were being paid out. Besides which, the Prussians would not come to Paris. But if they did come, they would be nice to them, and invite them to dinner, like friends. Sometimes I attempted to reply, but came off badly. One day that I had ventured a remark to a large and ponderous Roman lady, on the ingratitude of the Italians towards the French, the good lady jumped as if a knife had been stuck into her, and expatiated passionately on the infamy of the French. The Romans were,--as everyone knew,--the first nation on earth. The French had outraged them, had dared to prevent them making their town the capital of Italy, by garrisoning it with French soldiers who had no business there, so that they had themselves asked for the Nemesis which was now overtaking them, and which the Italians were watching with flashing eyes. She said this, in spite of her anger, with such dignity, and such a bearing, that one could not but feel that, if she were one day called upon to adorn a throne, she would seat herself upon it as naturally, and as free from embarrassment, as though it were nothing but a Roman woman's birthright.

XXIX.

In the meantime, defeats and humiliations were beginning to confuse the good sense of the French, and to lead their instincts astray. The crowd could not conceive that such things could come about naturally. The Prussians could not possibly have won by honourable means, but must have been spying in France for years. Why else were so many Germans settled in Paris! The French were paying now, not for their faults, but for their virtues, the good faith, the hospitality, the innocent welcome they had given to treacherous immigrants. They had not understood that the foreigner from the North was a crafty and deceitful enemy.

It gradually became uncomfortable for a foreigner in Paris. I never went out without my passport. But even a passport was no safeguard. It was enough for someone to make some utterly unfounded accusation, express some foolish, chance suspicion, for the non-Frenchman to be maltreated as a "spy." Both in Metz and in Paris, in the month of August, people who were taken for "Prussians" were hanged or dismembered. In the latter part of August the papers reported from the Dordogne that a mob there had seized a young man, a M. de Moneys, of whom a gang had asserted that he had shouted "Vive la Prusse!" had stripped him, bound him with ropes, carried him out into a field, laid him on a pile of damp wood, and as this would not take fire quick enough, had pushed trusses of straw underneath all round him, and burnt him alive. From the Quartier La Vilette in Paris, one heard every day of similar slaughter of innocent persons who the people fancied were Prussian spies. Under such circumstances, a trifle might become fatal. One evening at the end of August I had been hearing L'Africaine at the grand opera, and at the same time Marie Sass' delivery of the Marseillaise--she sang as though she had a hundred fine bells in her voice, but she sang the national anthem like an aria. Outside the opera-house I hailed a cab. The coachman was asleep; a man jogged him to wake him, and he started to drive. I noticed that during the drive he looked at his watch and then drove on for all that he was worth, as fast as the harness and reins would stand. When I got to the hotel I handed him his fare and a four sous' tip. He bawled out that it was not enough; he had been de remise; he had taken me for someone else, being waked so suddenly; he had been bespoken by another gentleman. I laughed and replied that that was his affair, not mine; what had it got to do with me? But as all he could demand, if he had really been de remise, was two sous more, and as, under the ordinances prevailing, it was impossible to tell whether he was or not, I gave him the two sous; but no tip with it, since he had no right to claim it, and I had not the slightest doubt that he was lying. Then he began to croak that it was a shame not to give a pourboire, and, seeing that did not help matters, as I simply walked up the hotel steps, he shouted in his ill-temper, first "Vous n'êtes pas Français!" and then "Vous êtes Prussien!" No sooner had he said it than all the hotel servants who were standing in the doorway disappeared, and the people in the street listened, stopped, and turned round. I grasped the danger, and flew into a passion. In one bound I was in the road, I rushed at the cabman, seized him by the throat and shook my hand, with its knuckle-duster upon it, threateningly at his head. Then he forgot to abuse me and suddenly whined: "Ne frappez pas, monsieur!" mounted his box, and drove very tamely away. In my exasperation I called the hotel waiters together and poured scorn on them for their cowardice.

In spite of the season, it was uncomfortable weather, and the temper of the town was as uncomfortable as the weather. As time went on, few people were to be seen about the streets, but there was a run on the gunmakers' and sword-smiths'. By day no cheerful shouts or songs rang out, but children of six or seven years of age would go hand in hand in rows down the street in the evenings, singing "Mourir pour la patrie," to its own beautiful, affecting melody. But these were the only gentle sounds one heard. Gradually, the very air seemed to be reeking with terror and frenzy. Exasperation rolled up once more, like a thick, black stream, against the Emperor, against the ministers and generals, and against the Prussians, whom people thought they saw everywhere.

XXX.

Foreigners were requested to leave Paris, so that, in the event of a siege, the city might have no unnecessary mouths to feed. Simultaneously, in Trochu's proclamation, it was announced that the enemy might be outside the walls in three days. Under such circumstances, the town was no longer a place for anyone who did not wish to be shut up in it.

One night at the end of August, I travelled from Paris to Geneva. At the departure station the thousands of German workmen who had been expelled from Paris were drawn up, waiting, herded together like cattle,--a painful sight. These workmen were innocent of the war, the defeats, and the spying service of which they were accused; now they were being driven off in hordes, torn from their work, deprived of their bread, and surrounded by inimical lookers-on.

As it had been said that trains to the South would cease next day, the Geneva train was overfilled, and one had to be well satisfied to secure a seat at all. My travelling companions of the masculine gender were very unattractive: an impertinent and vulgar old Swiss who, as it was a cold night, and he had no travelling-rug, wrapped himself up in four or five of his dirty shirts--a most repulsive sight; a very precise young Frenchman who, without a vestige of feeling for the fate of his country and nation, explained to us that he had long had a wish to see Italy, and had thought that now, business being in any case at a standstill, the right moment had arrived.

The female travellers in the compartment were a Parisian, still young, and her bright and charming fifteen-year-old daughter, whose beauty was not unlike that of Mlle. Massin, the lovely actress at the Théâtre du Gymnase. The mother was all fire and flame, and raved, almost to tears, over the present pass, cried shame on the cowardice of the officers for not having turned out the Emperor; her one brother was a prisoner at Königsberg; all her male relations were in the field. The daughter was terror-struck at the thought that the train might be stopped by the enemy--which was regarded as very likely--but laughed at times, and was divided between fear of the Prussians and exceeding anxiety to see them: "J'aimerais bien pouvoir dire que j'aie vu des Prussiens!"

At one station some soldiers in rout, with torn and dusty clothes, got into our carriage; they looked repulsive, bespattered with mud and clay; they were in absolute despair, and you could hear from their conversation how disorganised discipline was, for they abused their officers right and left, called them incapable and treacherous, yet themselves gave one the impression of being very indifferent soldiers. The young sergeant major who was leading them was the only one who was in anything like spirits, and even he was not much to boast of. It was curious what things he believed: Marshal Leboeuf had had a Prussian officer behind his chair, disguised as a waiter, at Metz, and it had only just been discovered. Russia had lent troops to Prussia, and put them into Prussian uniforms; otherwise there could not possibly be so many of them. But Rome, too, was responsible for the misfortunes of France; the Jesuits had planned it all, because the country was so educated; they never liked anybody to learn anything.

After Culoz commenced the journey through the lovely Jura mountains. On both sides an immense panorama of high, wooded mountain ridges, with poverty-stricken little villages along the mountain sides. At Bellegarde our passports were demanded; no one was allowed to cross the frontier without them--a stupid arrangement. The Alps began to bound our view. The train went on, now through long tunnels, now between precipices, now again over a rocky ridge, whence you looked down into the valley where the blue-green Rhone wound and twined its way between the rocks like a narrow ribbon. The speed seemed to be accelerating more and more. The first maize-field. Slender poplars, without side-branches, but wholly covered with foliage, stood bent almost into spirals by the strong wind from the chinks of the rocks. The first Swiss house.

XXXI.

There was Geneva, between the Alps, divided by the southern extremity of Lake Leman, which was spanned by many handsome bridges. In the centre, a little isle, with Rousseau's statue. A little beyond, the Rhone rushed frothing and foaming out of the lake. From my window I could see in the distance the dazzling snow peak of Mont Blanc.

After Paris, Geneva looked like a provincial town. The cafés were like servants' quarters or corners of cafés. There were no people in the streets, where the sand blew up in clouds of dust till you could hardly see out of your eyes, and the roads were not watered. In the hotel, in front of the mirror, the New Testament in French, bound in leather; you felt that you had come to the capital of Calvinism.

The streets in the old part of the town were all up and down hill. In the windows of the booksellers' shops there were French verses against France, violent diatribes against Napoleon III. and outbursts of contempt for the nation that had lost its virility and let itself be cowed by a tyrant. By the side of these, portraits of the Freethinkers and Liberals who had been driven from other countries and found a refuge in Switzerland.

I sailed the lake in every direction, enraptured by its beauty and the beauty of the surrounding country. Its blueness, to which I had never seen a parallel, altogether charmed me in the changing lights of night and day. On the lake I made the acquaintance of a very pleasant Greek family, the first I had encountered anywhere. The eldest daughter, a girl of fourteen, lost her hat. I had a new silk handkerchief packed amongst my things, and offered it to her. She accepted it and bound it round her hair. Her name was Maria Kumelas. I saw for the first time an absolutely pure Greek profile, such as I had been acquainted with hitherto only from statues. One perfect, uninterrupted line ran from the tip of her nose to her hair.

XXXII.

I went for excursions into Savoy, ascended La Grande Salève on donkey-back, and from the top looked down at the full length of the Leman.

I drove to the valley of Chamounix, sixty-eight miles, in a diligence and four; about every other hour we had relays of horses and a new driver. Whenever possible, we went at a rattling galop. Half-way I heard the first Italian. It was only the word quattro; but it filled me with delight. Above the high, wooded mountains, the bare rock projected out of the earth, at the very top. The wide slopes up which the wood ascended, until it looked like moss on stone, afforded a view miles in extent. The river Arve, twisting itself in curves, was frequently spanned by the roadway; it was of a greyish white, and very rapid, but ugly. Splendid wooden bridges were thrown over it, with abysms on both sides. Midway, after having for some time been hidden behind the mountains, Mont Blanc suddenly appeared in its gleaming splendour, positively tiring and paining the eye. It was a new and strange feeling to be altogether hemmed in by mountains. It was oppressive to a plain-dweller to be shut in thus, and not to be able to get away from the immutable sheet of snow, with its jagged summits. Along the valley of the stream, the road ran between marvellously fresh walnut-trees, plane-trees, and avenues of apple trees; but sometimes we drove through valleys so narrow that the sun only shone on them two or three hours of the day, and there it was cold and damp. Savoy was plainly enough a poor country. The grapes were small and not sweet; soil there was little of, but every patch was utilised to the best advantage. In one place a mountain stream rushed down the rocks; at a sharp corner, which jutted out like the edge of a sloping roof, the stream was split up and transformed into such fine spray that one could perceive no water at all; afterwards the stream united again at the foot of the mountain, and emptied itself with frantic haste into the river, foaming greyish white, spreading an icy cold around. The changes of temperature were striking. Under shelter, hot Summer, two steps further, stern, inclement Autumn, air that penetrated to the very marrow of your bones. You ran through every season of the year in a quarter of an hour.

The other travellers were English people, all of one pattern, unchangeable, immovable. If one of them had buttoned up his coat at the beginning of the drive, he did not unbutton it on the way, were he never so warm, and if he had put leather gloves on, for ten hours they would not be off his hands. The men yawned for the most part; the young ladies jabbered. The English had made the whole country subservient to them, and at the hotels one Englishman in this French country was paid more attention to than a dozen Frenchmen.

Here I understood two widely different poems: Hauch's Swiss Peasant, and Björnson's Over the Hills and Far Away. Hauch had felt this scenery and the nature of these people, by virtue of his Norwegian birth and his gift of entering into other people's thought; Björnson had given unforgettable expression to the feeling of imprisoned longing. But for the man who had been breathing street dust and street sweepings for four months, it was good to breathe the strong, pure air, and at last see once more the clouds floating about and beating against the mountain sides, leaning, exhausted, against a declivity and resting on their journey. Little children of eight or ten were guarding cattle, children such as we know so well in the North, when they come with their marmots; they looked, without exception, like tiny rascals, charming though they were.

I rode on a mule to Montanvert, and thence on foot over the Mer de Glace, clambered up the steep mountain side to Chapeau, went down to the crystal Grotto and rode from there back to Chamounix. The ride up in the early hours of the morning was perfect, the mountain air so light; the mists parted; the pine-trees round the fresh mountain path exhaled a penetrating fragrance. An American family with whom I had become acquainted took three guides with them for four persons. One worthy old gentleman who was travelling with his young daughter, would not venture upon this feat of daring, but his daughter was so anxious to accompany us that when I offered to look after her she was entrusted to my care. I took two mules and a guide, thinking that sufficient. From Montanvert and down to the glacier, the road was bad, a steep, rocky path, with loose, rolling stones. When we came to the Ice Sea, the young lady, as was natural, took the guide's hand, and I, the last of the caravan, strode cautiously along, my alpenstock in my hand, over the slippery, billow-like ice. But soon it began to split up into deep crevasses, and farther on we came to places where the path you had to follow was no wider than a few hands' breadth, with yawning precipices in the ice on both sides. I grew hot to the roots of my hair, and occasionally my heart stood still. It was not that I was actually afraid. The guide shouted to me: "Look neither to right nor left; look at your feet, and turn out your toes!" I had only one thought--not to slip!--and out on the ice I grew burningly hot. When at last I was across, I noticed that I was shaking. Strangely enough, I was trembling at the thought of the blue, gaping crevasses on both sides of me, down which I had barely glanced, and yet I had passed them without a shudder. The beginning of the crossing had been comparatively easy; it was only that at times it was very slippery. But in the middle of the glacier, progress was very uncomfortable; moraines, and heaps of gigantic blocks lay in your path, and all sorts of stone and gravel, which melted glaciers had brought down with them, and these were nasty to negotiate. When at last you had them behind you, came le Mauvais Pas, which corresponded to its name. You climbed up the precipitous side of the rock with the help of an iron railing drilled into it. But foothold was narrow and the stone damp, from the number of rivulets that rippled and trickled down. Finally it was necessary at every step to let go the railing for a few seconds. The ascent then, and now, was supposed to be quite free from danger, and the view over the glaciers which one gained by it, was a fitting reward for the inconvenience. Even more beautiful than the summit of Mont Blanc itself, with its rounded contours, were the steep, gray, rocky peaks, with ice in every furrow, that are called l'Aiguille du Dru. These mountains, which as far as the eye could range seemed to be all the same height, although they varied from 7,000 to 14,800 feet, stretched for miles around the horizon.

The ice grotto here was very different from the sky-blue glacier grotto into which I had wandered two years earlier at Grindelwald. Here the ice mass was so immensely high that not the slightest peep of daylight penetrated through it into the excavated archway that led into the ice. It was half-dark inside, and the only light proceeded from a row of little candles stuck into the crevices of the rock. The ice was jet black in colour, the light gleaming with a golden sheen from all the rounded projections and jagged points. It was like the gilt ornamentation on a velvet pall.

When I returned from Chamounix to Geneva, the proprietor of the hotel was standing in the doorway and shouted to me: "The whole of the French army, with the Emperor, has been taken prisoner at Sedan!"-- "Impossible!" I exclaimed. "It is quite certain," he replied; "it was in the German telegrams, and so far there has not come a single unveracious telegram from the Germans."

The next day a Genevese paper published the news of the proclamation of the Republic in France.

Simultaneously arrived a letter from Julius Lange, attacking me for my "miserly city politics," seriously complaining that "our declaration of war against Prussia had come to nothing," and hoping that my stay in France had by now made me alter my views.

In his opinion, we had neglected "an opportunity of rebellion, that would never recur."

XXXIII.

Lake Leman fascinated me. All the scenery round looked fairy-like to me, a dream land, in which mighty mountains cast their blue-black shadows down on the turquoise water, beneath a brilliant, sparkling sunshine that saturated the air with its colouring. My impressions of Lausanne, Chillon, Vevey, Montreux, were recorded in the first of my lectures at the University the following year. The instruments of torture at Chillon, barbaric and fearsome as they were, made me think of the still worse murderous instruments being used in the war between France and Germany. It seemed to me that if one could see war at close quarters, one would come to regard the earth as peopled by dangerous lunatics. Political indifference to human life and human suffering had taken the place of the premeditated cruelty of the Middle Ages. Still, if no previous war had ever been so frightful, neither had there ever been so much done to mitigate suffering. While fanatic Frenchwomen on the battlefields cut the noses off wounded Germans, and mutilated them when they could, and while the Germans were burning villages and killing their peaceful inhabitants, if one of them had so much as fired a shot, in all quietness the great societies for the care of the wounded were doing their work. And in this Switzerland especially bore the palm. There were two currents then, one inhuman and one humane, and of the two, the latter will one day prove itself the stronger. Under Louis XIV. war was still synonymous with unlimited plundering, murder, rape, thievery and robbery. Under Napoleon I. there were still no such things as ambulances. The wounded were carted away now and again in waggons, piled one on the top of each other, if any waggons were to be had; if not, they were left as they lay, or were flung into a ditch, there to die in peace. Things were certainly a little better.

XXXIV.

In Geneva, the news reached me that--in spite of a promise Hall, as Minister, had given to Hauch, when the latter asked for it for me--I was to receive no allowance from the Educational Department. To a repetition of the request, Hall had replied: "I have made so many promises and half-promises, that it has been impossible to remember or to keep them." This disappointment hit me rather hard; I had in all only about £50 left, and could not remain away more than nine weeks longer without getting into debt, I, who had calculated upon staying a whole year abroad. Circumstances over which I had no control later obliged me, however, to remain away almost another year. But that I could not foresee, and I had no means whatever to enable me to do so. Several of my acquaintances had had liberal allowances from the Ministry; Krieger and Martensen had procured Heegaard £225 at once, when he had been anxious to get away from Rasmus Nielsen's influence. It seemed to me that this refusal to give me anything augured badly for the appointment I was hoping for in Denmark. I could only earn a very little with my pen: about 11s. 3d. for ten folio pages, and as I did not feel able, while travelling, to write anything of any value, I did not attempt it. It was with a sort of horror that, after preparing for long travels that were to get me out of the old folds, I thought of the earlier, narrow life I had led in Copenhagen. All the old folds seemed, at this distance, to have been the folds of a strait-waistcoat.

XXXV.

With abominable slowness, and very late, "on account of the war," the train crawled from Geneva, southwards. Among the travellers was a rhetorical Italian master-mason, from Lyons, an old Garibaldist, the great event of whose life was that Garibaldi had once taken lunch alone with him at Varese. He preserved in his home as a relic the glass from which the general had drunk. He was talkative, and ready to help everyone; he gave us all food and drink from his provisions. Other travellers told that they had had to stand in queue for fully twelve hours in front of the ticket office in Paris, to get away from the town.

The train passed the place where Rousseau had lived, at Madame de Warens'. In an official work on Savoy, written by a priest, I had recently read a summary dismissal of Rousseau, as a calumniator of his benefactress. According to this author, it certainly looked as though, to say the least of it, Rousseau's memory had failed him amazingly sometimes. The book asserted, for instance, that the Claude of whom he speaks was no longer alive at the time when he was supposed to be enjoying Madame de Warens' favours.

We passed French volunteers in blouses bearing a red cross; they shouted and were in high good humour; passed ten districts, where numbers of cretins, with their hideous excrescences, sat by the wayside. At last we arrived,--several hours behind time,--at St. Michel, at the foot of Mont Cenis; it was four o'clock in the afternoon, and I was beginning to feel tired, for I had been up since four in the morning. At five o'clock we commenced the ascent, to the accompaniment of frightful groanings from the engine; all the travellers were crowded together in three wretched little carriages, the small engine not being able to pull more. Gay young French girls exulted at the idea of seeing "Italy's fair skies." They were not particularly fair here; the weather was rough and cloudy, in keeping with abysms and mountain precipices. But late at night the journey over Mont Cenis was wonderful. High up on the mountain the moonlight gleamed on the mountain lake. And the way was dominated, from one rocky summit, by the castle of Bramans with its seven imposing forts.

The locomotive stopped for an hour, for want of water. We were thus obliged to sleep at the little Italian town of Susa (in a glorious valley under Mont Cenis), the train to Turin having left three hours before. Susa was the first Italian town I saw. When the train came in next morning to the station at Turin, a crowd of Italian soldiers, who were standing there, shouted: "The Prussians for ever!" and winked at me. "What are they shouting for?" I asked a young Turin fellow with whom I had had some long conversations. "It is an ovation to you," he replied. "People are delighted at the victory of the Prussians, and they think you are a Prussian, because of your fair moustache and beard."

XXXVI.

An overwhelming impression was produced upon me by the monuments of Turin, the River Po, and the lovely glee-singing in the streets. For the first time, I saw colonnades, with heavy curtains to the street, serve as pavements, with balconies above them. Officers in uniforms gleaming with gold, ladies with handkerchiefs over their heads instead of hats, the mild warmth, the brown eyes, brought it home to me at every step that I was in a new country.

I hurried up to Costanza Blanchetti. Madame la comtesse est à la campagne. Monsieur le comte est sorti. Next morning, as I was sitting in my room in the Hotel Trombetta, Blanchetti rushed in, pressed me to his bosom, kissed me on both cheeks, would not let me go, but insisted on carrying me off with him to the country.

We drove round the town first, then went by rail to Alpignano, where Costanza was staying with a relative of the family, Count Buglioni di Monale. Here I was received like a son, and shown straight to my room, where there stood a little bed with silk hangings, and where, on the pillow, there lay a little, folded-up thing, likewise of white silk, which was an enigma to me till, on unfolding it, I found it was a night-cap, the classical night-cap, tapering to a point, which you see at the theatre in old comedies. The Buglionis were gentle, good-natured people, rugged and yet refined, an old, aristocratic country gentleman and his wife. Nowhere have I thought grapes so heavy and sweet and aromatic as there. The perfume from the garden was so strong and fragrant. Impossible to think of a book or a sheet of paper at Alpignano. We walked under the trees, lay among the flowers, enjoyed the sight and the flavour of the apricots and grapes, and chatted, expressing by smiles our mutual quiet, deep-reaching sympathy.

One evening I went into Turin with Blanchetti to see the play. The lover in La Dame aux Camélias was played by a young Italian named Lavaggi, as handsome as an Antinous, a type which I often encountered in Piedmont. With his innate charm, restful calm, animation of movement and the fire of his beauty, he surpassed the acting of all the young lovers I had seen on the boards of the French theatres. The very play of his fingers was all grace and expression.

XXXVII.

On my journey from Turin to Milan, I had the mighty Mont Rosa, with its powerful snow mass, and the St. Bernard, over which Buonaparte led his tattered troops, before my eyes. We went across maize fields, through thickets, over the battlefield of Magenta. From reading Beyle, I had pictured Milan as a beautiful town, full of free delight in life. Only to see it would be happiness. And it was,--the cupola gallery, the dome, from the roof of which, immediately after my arrival, I looked out over the town, shining under a pure, dark-blue sky. In the evening, in the public gardens, I revelled in the beauty of the Milanese women. Italian ladies at that time still wore black lace over their heads instead of hats. Their dresses were open in front, the neck being bare half-way down the chest. I was struck by the feminine type. Upright, slender-waisted women; delicate, generally bare hands; oval faces, the eyebrows of an absolutely perfect regularity; narrow noses, well formed, the nostrils curving slightly upwards and outwards--the models of Leonardo and Luini.

The Last Supper, in the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and the drawings in the Ambrose Library, brought me closer to Leonardo than I had ever been able to get before, through reproductions; I saw the true expression in the face of the Christ in the Last Supper, which copies cannot avoid distorting.

XXXVIII.

A violent affection for Correggio, and a longing to see his works where they are to be found in greatest number, sent me to Parma.

I reached the town at night; no gas, no omnibus from any hotel. An out-porter trotted with my portmanteau on his back through wide, pitch-dark, deserted, colonnaded streets, past huge palaces, until, after half an hour's rapid walk, we arrived at the hotel. The day before my arrival dall'Ongaro had unveiled the beautiful and beautifully situated statue of Correggio in the Market Square. I first investigated the two domes in the Cathedral and San Giovanni Evangelista, then the ingratiating pictorial decoration of the convent of San Paolo. In the Museum, where I was pretty well the only visitor, I was so eagerly absorbed in studying Correggio and jotting down my impressions, that, in order to waste no time, I got the attendant to buy my lunch, and devoured it,--bread, cheese, and grapes,--in the family's private apartments. They were pleasant, obliging people, and as I bought photographs for a considerable amount from them, they were very hospitable. They talked politics to me and made no secret of their burning hatred for France.

There were other things to see at Parma besides Correggio, although for me he dominated the town. There was a large exhibition of modern Italian paintings and statuary, and the life of the people in the town and round about. In the streets stood carts full of grapes. Four or five fellows with bare feet would stamp on the grapes in one of these carts; a trough led from the cart down to a vat, into which the juice ran, flinging off all dirt in fermentation.

It was pleasant to walk round the old ramparts of the town in the evening glow, and it was lively in the ducal park. One evening little knots of Italian soldiers were sitting there. One of them sang in a superb voice, another accompanied him very nicely on the lute; the others listened with profound and eager attention.

XXXIX.

After this came rich days in Florence. Everything was a delight to me there, from the granite paving of the streets, to palaces, churches, galleries, and parks. I stood in reverence before the Medici monuments in Michael Angelo's sanctuary. The people attracted me less; the women seemed to me to have no type at all, compared with the lovely faces and forms at Milan and Parma. The fleas attracted me least of all.

Dall 'Ongaro received every Sunday evening quite an international company, and conversation consequently dragged. With the charming Japanese wife of the English consul, who spoke only English and Japanese, neither of her hosts could exchange a word. There were Dutchmen and Swiss there with their ladies; sugar-sweet and utterly affected young Italian men; handsome young painters and a few prominent Italian scientists, one of whom, in the future, was to become my friend.

I had a double recommendation to the Danish Minister at Florence, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from an old and intimate friend of his in Copenhagen. When I presented my letters, he exclaimed, in annoyance: "These special recommendations again! How often must I explain that they are unnecessary, that all Danes, as such, are welcome to my house!"--This was the delicate manner in which he let me understand that he was not inclined to do anything whatever for me. Moreover, he began at once with regrets that his family were absent, so that he was not in housekeeping, and could not entertain anyone.

At a production of Émile Augier's Le Fils de Giboyer, at which all the foreign diplomatists were present, he, too, turned up. While the other diplomatists greeted each other silently with a nod, he made more of the meeting than any one else did, went from place to place in the stalls, shook hands, spoke French, German, English and Italian by turns, was all things to all men, then came and sat down by me, made himself comfortable, and in a moment was fast asleep. When he began to snore, one after another of his colleagues turned their heads, and smiled faintly. He slept through two acts and the intervals between them, in spite of the voices from the stage and the loud talking between the acts, and woke up in the middle of the third act, to mumble in my ear, "It is not much pleasure to see the piece played like this."

At my favourite restaurant, Trattoria dell'antiche carrozze, I was one day witness to a violent dispute between a Polish noble who, for political reasons, had fled from Russian Poland, and Hans Semper, a Prussian, author of a book on Donatello. The latter naturally worshipped Bismarck, the former warmly espoused the cause of Denmark. When I left, I said politely to him:

"I thank you for having so warmly defended my country; I am a Dane." The next day the Pole came to look for me at the restaurant, and a closer acquaintance resulted. We went for many walks together along the riverside; he talking like a typical Polish patriot, I listening to his dreams of the resuscitated Poland that the future was to see. I mention this only because it affords an example of the remarkable coincidences life brings about, which make one so easily exclaim: "How small the world is!" This Pole became engaged several years afterwards to a young Polish girl and left her, without any explanation, having got entangled with a Russian ballet dancer. I made her acquaintance at Warsaw fifteen years after I had met him at Florence. She was then twenty-six years of age, and is one of the women who have taught me most; she told me the story of her early youth and of the unengaging part my acquaintance of 1870 had played in it.

At Florence I saw Rossi as Hamlet. The performance was a disappointment to me, inasmuch as Rossi, with his purely Italian nature, had done away with the essentially English element in Hamlet. The keen English humour, in his hands, became absurd and ridiculous. Hamlet's hesitation to act, he overlooked altogether. Hamlet, to him, was a noble young man who was grieved at his mother's ill-behaviour. The details he acted like a virtuoso. For instance, it was very effective during the mimic play, when, lying at Ophelia's feet, he crushes her fan in his hands at the moment when the King turns pale. I derived my chief enjoyment, not from the acting, but from the play. It suddenly revealed itself to me from other aspects, and I fell prostrate in such an exceeding admiration for Shakespeare that I felt I should never rise again. It was touching to hear the Italians' remarks on Hamlet. The piece was new to them. You frequently heard the observation: "It is a very philosophical piece." As people changed from place to place, and sat wherever they liked, I overheard many different people's opinions of the drama. The suicide monologue affected these fresh and alert minds very powerfully.

That evening, moreover, I had occasion to observe human cowardice, which is never accounted so great as it really is. There was a noise behind the scene during the performance, and immediately afterwards a shout of Fuoco! The audience were overmastered by terror. More than half of them rushed to the doors, pulled each other down, and trampled on the fallen, in their endeavours to get out quickly enough; others rushed up on the stage itself. As there was not the least sign of fire visible, I of course remained in my seat. A few minutes later one of the actors came forward and explained that there had been no fire; a fight between two of the scene-shifters had been the cause of all the alarm. The good-humoured Italians did not even resent the fellows having thus disturbed and interrupted the performance.

John Stuart Mill had given me an introduction to Pasquale Villari, who, even at that time, was commendatore professore, and held a high position on the Board of Education, but was still far from having attained the zenith of his fame and influence. When the reserve of the first few days had worn off, he was simply splendid to me. When anything I said struck him as being to the point, he pressed my hands with all the ardour of youth, and he applauded every joke I attempted with uproarious laughter.

Some twenty years were to elapse before I saw him again. Then he called upon me in Copenhagen, wishing to make my acquaintance, without in the least suspecting that I was the young man who, so long before, had come to him from Mill. He looked with amazement at books in which he had written with his own hand, and at old letters from himself which I produced. I visited him again in 1898. His books on Machiavelli and Savonarola entitle him to rank among the foremost students and exponents of Italy.

I went one day to the great annual fair at Fiesole. Shouting and shrieking, the people drove down the unspeakably dusty road with such haste, carelessness and high spirits that conveyances struck against each other at every moment. It was the life represented in Marstrand's old-time pictures. In crowded Fiesole, I saw the regular Tuscan country type, brown eyes, yellow or clear, white skin, thin, longish face, brown or fair, but never black hair, strong, healthy bodies. The masculine type with which I was acquainted from the soldiers, was undeniably handsomer than our own, in particular, was more intelligent; the young women were modest, reserved in their manner, seldom entered into conversation with the men, and despite the fire in their eyes, manifested a certain peasant bashfulness, which seems to be the same everywhere.

XL.

Vines twine round the fruit-trees; black pigs and their families make their appearance in tribes; the lake of Thrasymene, near which Hannibal defeated the Romans, spreads itself out before us. The train is going from Florence to Rome. Towards mid-day a girl enters the carriage, apparently English or North American, with brown eyes and brown hair, that curls naturally about her head; she has her guitar-case in her hand, and flings it up into the net. Her parents follow her. As there is room in the compartment for forty-eight persons without crowding, she arranges places for her parents, and after much laughter and joking the latter settle off to sleep. The Italians stare at her; but not I. I sit with my back to her. She sits down, back to back with me, then turns her head and asks me, in Italian, some question about time, place, or the like. I reply as best I can. She (in English): "You are Italian?" On my reply, she tells me: "I hardly know twenty words in Italian; I only speak English, although I have been living in Rome for two years."

She then went on to relate that she was an American, born of poor parents out on the Indian frontier; she was twenty-six years old, a sculptor, and was on her way from Carrara, where she had been superintending the shipment of one of her works, a statue of Lincoln, which the Congress at Washington had done her the honour of ordering from her. It was only when she was almost grown up that her talent had been discovered by an old sculptor who happened to pay a visit and who, when he saw her drawing, had, half in jest, given her a lump of clay and said: "Do a portrait of me!" She had then never seen a statue or a painting, but she evinced such talent that before long several distinguished men asked her to do busts of them, amongst others, Lincoln. She was staying at his house that 14th April, 1865, when he was murdered, and was consequently selected to execute the monument after his death. She hesitated for a long time before giving up the modest, but certain, position she held at the time in a post-office; but, as others believed in her talent, she came to Europe, stayed first in Paris, where, to her delight, she made the acquaintance of Gustave Doré, and where she modelled a really excellent bust of Père Hyacinthe, visited London, Berlin, Munich, Florence, and settled down in Rome. There she received plenty of orders, had, moreover, obtained permission to execute a bust of Cardinal Antonelli, was already much looked up to, and well-to-do. In a few weeks she was returning to America.

As she found pleasure in talking to me, she exclaimed without more ado: "I will stay with you," said a few polite things to me, and made me promise that I would travel with her to Rome from the place where we were obliged to leave the train, the railway having been broken up to prevent the Italian troops entering the Papal States. At Treni a Danish couple got into the train, a mediocre artist and his wife, and with national astonishment and curiosity watched the evident intimacy between the young foreigner and myself, concerning which every Scandinavian in Rome was informed a few days later.

From Monte Rotondo, where the bridge had been blown up, we had to walk a long distance, over bad roads, and were separated in the throng, but she kept a place for me by her side. Thus I drove for the first time over the Roman Campagna, by moonlight, with two brown eyes gazing into mine. I felt as though I had met one of Sir Walter Scott's heroines, and won her confidence at our first meeting.

XLI.

Vinnie Ream was by no means a Scott heroine, however, but a genuine American, and doubly remarkable to me as being the first specimen of a young woman from the United States with whom I became acquainted. Even after I had seen a good deal of her work, I could not feel wholly attracted by her talent, which sometimes expressed itself rather in a pictorial than a plastic form, and had a fondness for emotional effects. But she was a true artist, and a true woman, and I have never, in any woman, encountered a will like hers. She was uninterruptedly busy. Although, now that the time of her departure was so near, a few boxes were steadily being packed every day at her home, she received every day visits from between sixteen and twenty-five people, and she had so many letters by post that I often found three or four unopened ones amongst the visiting cards that had been left. Those were what she had forgotten, and if she had read them, she had no time to reply to them. Every day she sat for a few hours to the clever American painter Healy, who was an admirer of her talent, and called her abilities genius. Every day she worked at Antonelli's bust. To obtain permission to execute it, she had merely, dressed in her most beautiful white gown, asked for an audience of the dreaded cardinal, and had at once obtained permission. Her intrepid manner had impressed the hated statesman of the political and ecclesiastical reaction, and in her representation of him he appeared, too, in many respects nobler and more refined than he was. But besides modelling the cardinal's bust, she put the finishing touches to two others, saw to her parents' household affairs and expenses, and found time every day to spend a few hours with me, either in a walk or wandering about the different picture-galleries.

She maintained the family, for her parents had nothing at all. But when the statue of Lincoln had been ordered from her, Congress had immediately advanced ten thousand dollars. So she was able to live free from care, though for that matter she troubled not at all about money. She was very ignorant of things outside her own field, and the words my work were the only ones that she spoke with passion. What she knew, she had acquired practically, through travel and association with a multiplicity of people. She hardly knew a dozen words of any language besides English, and was only acquainted with English and American writers; of poets, she knew Shakespeare and Byron best; from life and books she had extracted but few general opinions, but on the other hand, very individual personal views. These were based upon the theory that the lesser mind must always subordinate itself to the higher, and that the higher has a right to utilise freely the time and strength of the lesser, without being called to account for doing so. She herself was abjectly modest towards the artists she looked up to. Other people might all wait, come again, go away without a reply.

Rather small of stature, strong and healthy,--she had never been ill, never taken medicine,--with white teeth and red cheeks, quick in everything, when several people were present she spoke only little and absently, was as cold, deliberate and composed as a man of strong character; but at the same time she was unsuspecting and generous, and in spite of her restlessness and her ambitious industry, ingratiatingly coquettish towards anyone whose affection she wished to win. It was amusing to watch the manner in which she despatched the dutifully sighing Italians who scarcely crossed the threshold of her studio before they declared themselves. She replied to them with a superabundance of sound sense and dismissed them with a jest.

One day that I went to fetch her to the Casino Borghese, I found her dissolved in tears. One of the two beautiful doves who flew about the house and perched on her shoulders, and which she had brought with her from Washington, had disappeared in the night. At first I thought that her distress was half jest, but nothing could have been more real; she was beside herself with grief. I realised that if philologians have disputed as to how far Catullus' poem of the girl's grief over the dead sparrow were jest or earnest, it was because they had never seen a girl weep over a bird. Catullus, perhaps, makes fun a little of the grief, but the grief itself, in his poem too, is serious enough.

In the lovely gardens of the Villa Borghese, Vinnie Ream's melancholy frame of mind was dispersed, and we sat for a long time by one of the handsome fountains and talked, among other things, of our pleasure in being together, which pleasure was not obscured by the prospect of approaching parting, because based only on good-fellowship, and with no erotic element about it. Later in the evening, she had forgotten her sorrow altogether in the feverish eagerness with which she worked, and she kept on, by candle-light, until three o'clock in the morning.

A poor man, an Italian, who kept a little hotel, came in that evening for a few minutes; he sometimes translated letters for Vinnie Ream. As he had no business with me, I did not address any of my remarks to him; she, on the contrary, treated him with extreme kindness and the greatest respect, and whispered to me: "Talk nicely to him, as you would to a gentleman, for that he is; he knows four languages splendidly; he is a talented man. Take no notice of his plain dress. We Americans do not regard the position, but the man, and he does honour to his position." I had not been actuated by the prejudices she attributed to me, nevertheless entered into conversation with the man, as she wished, and listened with pleasure to his sensible opinions. (He spoke, among other things, of Northern art, and warmly praised Carl Bloch's Prometheus.)

XLII.

Vinnie Ream's opinion of me was that I was the most impolitic man that she had ever known. She meant, by that, that I was always falling out with people (for instance, I had at once offended the Danes in Rome by some sharp words about the wretched Danish papers), and in general made fewer friends and more enemies all the time. She herself won the affection of everyone she wished, and made everyone ready to spring to do her bidding. She pointed out to me how politic she had had to be over her art. When she had wished to become a sculptor, everyone in her native place had been shocked at the un-femininity of it, and people fabled behind her back about her depraved instincts. She, for her part, exerted no more strength than just enough to carry her point, let people talk as much as they liked, took no revenge on those who spread calumnies about her, showed the greatest kindliness even towards the evil-disposed, and so, she said, had not an enemy. There was in her a marvellous commingling of determination to progress rapidly, of self-restraint and of real good-heartedness.

On October 20th there was a great festival in Rome to celebrate the first monthly anniversary of the entry of the Italians into the town. Young men went in the evening with flags and music through the streets. Everybody rushed to the windows, and the ladies held out lamps and candles. In the time of the popes this was only done when the Host was being carried in solemn procession to the dying; it was regarded therefore as the greatest honour that could be paid. Everyone clapped hands and uttered shouts of delight at the improvised illumination, while the many beautiful women looked lovely in the flickering lamplight. The 23d again was a gala day, being the anniversary of the death of Enrico Cairoli--one of the celebrated brothers; he fell at Mentana;--and I had promised Vinnie Ream to go to see the fête with her; but she as usual having twenty callers just when we ought to have started, we arrived too late. Vinnie begged of me to go with her instead to the American chapel; she must and would sing hymns, and really did sing them very well.

The chapel was bare. On the walls the ten commandments and a few other quotations from Holy Writ, and above a small altar, "Do this in remembrance of me," in Gothic lettering. I had to endure the hymns, the sermon (awful), and the reading aloud of the ten commandments, with muttered protestations and Amens after each one from the reverent Americans. When we went out I said nothing, as I did not know whether Vinnie might not be somewhat moved, for she sang at the end with great emotion. However, she merely took my arm and exclaimed: "That minister was the most stupid donkey I have ever heard in my life; but it is nice to sing." Then she began a refutation of the sermon, which had hinged chiefly on the words: "Thy sins are forgiven thee," and of the unspeakable delight it should be to hear this. Vinnie thought that no rational being would give a fig for forgiveness, unless there followed with it a complete reinstatement of previous condition. What am I benefitted if ever so many heavenly beings say to me: "I pretend you have not done it" if I know that I have!

The last week in October we saw marvellous Northern Lights in Rome. The northern half of the heavens, about nine o'clock in the evening, turned a flaming crimson, and white streaks traversed the red, against which the stars shone yellow, while every moment bluish flashes shot across the whole. When I discovered it I went up to the Reams' and fetched Vinnie down into the street to see it. It was an incredibly beautiful atmospheric phenomenon. Next evening it manifested itself again, on a background of black clouds, and that was the last beautiful sight upon which Vinnie and I looked together.

Next evening I wrote:

Vinnie Ream leaves to-morrow morning; I said good-bye to her this evening. Unfortunately a great many people were there. She took my hand and said: "I wish you everything good in the world, and I know that you wish me the same." And then: Good-bye. A door opens, and a door closes, and people never meet again on this earth, never again, never--and human language has never been able to discover any distinction between good-bye for an hour, and good-bye forever. People sit and chat, smile and jest. Then you get up, and the story is finished. Over! over! And that is the end of all stories, says Andersen.

All one's life one quarrels with people as dear to one as Ploug is to me. I have a well-founded hope that I may see Rudolph Schmidt's profile again soon, and a hundred times again after that; but Vinnie I shall never see again.

I did not understand her at first; I had a few unpleasant conjectures ready. I had to have many conversations with her before I understood her ingenuousness, her ignorance, her thorough goodness, in short, all her simple healthiness of soul. Over!

When I was teasing her the other day about all the time I had wasted in her company, she replied: "People do not waste time with their friends," and when I exclaimed: "What do I get from you?" she answered, laughing:

"Inspiration." And that was the truth. Those great brown eyes, the firm eyebrows, the ringleted mass of chestnut brown hair and the fresh mouth--all this that I still remember, but perhaps in three months shall no longer be able to recall, the quick little figure, now commanding, now deprecating, is to me a kind of inspiration. I have never been in love with Vinnie; but most people would think so, to hear the expressions I am now using. But I love her as a friend, as a mind akin to my own. There were thoughts of our brains and strings of our hearts, which always beat in unison. Peace be with her! May the cursed world neither rend her nor devour her; may she die at last with the clear forehead she has now! I am grateful to her. She has communicated to me a something good and simple that one cannot see too much of and that one scarcely ever sees at all. Finally, she has shown me again the spectacle of a human being entirely happy, and good because happy, a soul without a trace of bitterness, an intellect whose work is not a labour.

It is not that Vinnie is--or rather was, since she is dead for me--an educated girl in the Copenhagen sense of the word. The verdict of the Danish educational establishments upon her would be that she was a deplorably uneducated girl. She was incomprehensibly dull at languages. She would be childishly amused at a jest or joke or compliment as old as the hills (such as the Italians were fond of using), and think it new, for she knew nothing of the European storehouse of stereotyped remarks and salted drivel. Her own conversation was new; a breath of the independence of the great Republic swept through it. She was no fine lady, she was an American girl, who had not attained her rank by birth, or through inherited riches, but had fought for it herself with a talent that had made its way to the surface without early training, through days and nights of industry, and a mixture of enthusiasm and determination.

She was vain; she certainly was that. But again like a child, delighted at verses in her honour in the American papers, pleased at homage and marks of distinction, but far more ambitious than vain of personal advantages. She laughed when we read in the papers of Vinnie Ream, that, in spite of the ill-fame creative lady artists enjoy, far from being a monster with green eyes, she ventured to be beautiful.

She was a good girl. There was a certain deep note about all that her heart uttered. She had a mind of many colours. And there was the very devil of a rush and Forward! March! about her, always in a hurry.

And now--no Roman elegy--I will hide her away in my memory:

Here lies
VINNIE REAM
Sculptor
of Washington, U.S.A.
Six-and-twenty years of age
This recollection of her is retained by
One who knew her
for seventeen days
and will never forget her.

I have really never seen Vinnie Ream since. We exchanged a few letters after her departure, and the rest was silence.

Her statue of Abraham Lincoln stands now in a rotunda on the Capitol, for which it was ordered. Later, a Congress Committee ordered from her a statue of Admiral Farragut, which is likewise erected in Washington. These are the only two statues that the government of the United States has ever ordered from a woman. Other statues of hers which I have seen mentioned bear the names of Miriam, The West, Sappho, The Spirit of Carnival, etc. Further than this, I only know that she married Richard L. Hoxie, an engineer, and only a few years ago was living in Washington.

XLIII.

It was a real trouble to me that the Pope, in his exasperation over the conquest of Rome--in order to make the accomplished revolution recoil also on the heads of the foreigners whom he perhaps suspected of sympathy with the new order of things--had closed the Vatican and all its collections. Rome was to me first and foremost Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Stanzas and Loggias, and now all this magnificent array, which I had travelled so far to see, was closed to me by an old man's bad temper.

But there was still enough to linger over in Rome. The two palaces that seemed to me most deserving of admiration were the Farnese and the Cancellaria, the former Michael Angelo's, the latter Bramante's work, the first a perpetuation in stone of beauty and power, the second, of grace and lightness. I felt that if one were to take a person with no idea of architecture and set him in front of these buildings, there would fall like scales from his eyes, and he would say: "Now I know what the building art means."

Luini's exquisite painting, Vanity and Modesty, in the Galleria Sciarra, impressed me profoundly. It represented two women, one nun-like, the other magnificently dressed. The latter is Leonardo's well-known type, as a magically fascinating personality. Its essential feature is a profoundly serious melancholy, but the beauty of the figure is seductive. She is by no means smiling, and yet she looks as though a very slight alteration would produce a smile, and as though the heavens themselves would open, if smile she did. The powerful glance of the dark blue eyes is in harmony with the light-brown hair and the lovely hands. "It would be terrible to meet in real life a woman who looked like that," I wrote; "for a man would grow desperate at his inability to win her and desperate because the years must destroy such a marvel. That is why the gracious gods have willed it otherwise; that is why she does not exist. That is why she is only a vision, a revelation, a painting, and that is why she was conceived in the brain of Leonardo, the place on earth most favoured by the gods, and executed by Luini, that all generations might gaze at her without jealousy, and without dread of the molestations of Time."

One day, at the Museo Kircheriano, where I was looking at the admirable antiquities, I made acquaintance with a Jesuit priest, who turned out to be exceedingly pleasant and refined, a very decent fellow, in fact. He spoke Latin to me, and showed me round; at an enquiry of mine, he fetched from his quarters in the Collegio Romano a book with reproductions from the pagan section of the Lateran Museum, and explained to me some bas-reliefs which I had not understood. His obligingness touched me, his whole attitude made me think. Hitherto I had only spoken to one solitary embryo Jesuit,--a young Englishman who was going to Rome to place himself at the service of the Pope, and who was actuated by the purest enthusiasm; I was struck by the fact that this second Jesuit, too, seemed to be a worthy man. It taught me how independent individual worth is of the nature of one's convictions.

Most of the Italians I had so far been acquainted with were simple people, my landlord and his family, and those who visited them, and I sometimes heard fragments of conversation which revealed the common people's mode of thought to me. In one house that I visited, the mistress discovered that her maid was not married to her so-called husband, a matter in which, for that matter, she was very blameless, since her parents had refused their consent, and she had afterwards allowed herself to be abducted. Her mistress reproached her for the illegal relations existing. She replied, "If God wishes to plunge anyone into misery, that person is excused."--"We must not put the blame of everything upon God," said the mistress.--"Yes, yes," replied the girl unabashed; "then if the Devil wishes to plunge a person into misery, the person is excused."--"Nor may we put the blame of our wrongdoing on the Devil," said the mistress.--"Good gracious," said the girl, "it must be the fault of one or other of them, everybody knows that. If it is not the one, it is the other."

At the house of the Blanchettis, who had come to Rome, I met many Turin and Roman gentlemen. They were all very much taken up by an old Sicilian chemist of the name of Muratori, who claimed that he had discovered a material which looked like linen, but was impervious to bullets, sword-cuts, bayonet-thrusts, etc. Blanchetti himself had fired his revolver at him at two paces, and the ball had fallen flat to the ground. There could be no question of juggling; Muratori was an honourable old Garibaldist who had been wounded in his youth, and now went about on crutches, but, since we have never heard of its being made practical use of, it would seem that there was nothing in it.

I did not care to look up all the Italians to whom I had introductions from Villari. But I tried my luck with a few of them. The first was Dr. Pantaleoni, who had formerly been banished from the Papal States and who left the country as a radical politician, but now held almost conservative views. He had just come back, and complained bitterly of all the licentiousness. "Alas!" he said, "we have freedom enough now, but order, order!" Pantaleoni was a little, eager, animated man of fifty, very much occupied, a politician and doctor, and he promised to introduce me to all the scholars whose interests I shared. As I felt scruples at taking up these gentlemen's time, he exclaimed wittily: "My dear fellow, take up their time! To take his time is the greatest service you can render to a Roman; he never knows what to do to kill it!"

The next man I went to was Prince Odescalchi, one of the men who had then recently risen to the surface, officially termed the hero of the Young Liberals. Pantaleoni had dubbed him a blockhead, and he had not lied. He turned out to be a very conceited and frothy young man with a parting all over his head, fair to whiteness, of strikingly Northern type, with exactly the same expressionless type of face as certain of the milksops closely connected with the Court in Denmark.

XLIV.

There were a great many Scandinavians in Rome; they foregathered at the various eating-houses and on a Saturday evening at the Scandinavian Club. Some of them were painters, sculptors and architects, with their ladies, there were some literary and scientific men and every description of tourists on longer or shorter visits to the Eternal City. I held myself aloof from them. Most of them had their good qualities, but they could not stand the test of any association which brought them into too close contact with one another, as life in a small town does. They were divided up into camps or hives, and in every hive ruled a lady who detested the queen bee of the next one. So it came about that the Scandinavians lived in perpetual squabbles, could not bear one another, slandered one another, intrigued against one another. When men got drunk on the good Roman wine at the osterie, they abused one another and very nearly came to blows. Moreover, they frequently got drunk, for most of them lost their self-control after a few glasses. Strangely enough, in the grand surroundings, too much of the Northern pettiness came to the surface in them. One was continually tempted to call out to the ladies, in Holberg's words: "Hold your peace, you good women!" and to the men: "Go away, you rapscallions, and make up your quarrels!"

There were splendid young fellows among the artists, but the painters, who were in the majority, readily admitted that technically they could learn nothing at all in Rome, where they never saw a modern painting; they said themselves that they ought to be in Paris, but the authorities in Christiania and Copenhagen were afraid of Paris: thence all bad and dangerous influences proceeded, and so the painters still journey to Rome, as their fathers did before them.

XLV.

Towards the middle of November the Pope opened the Vatican. But in face of the enormous conflux of people, it was not easy to get a permesso from the consul, and that could not be dispensed with. I had just made use of one for the Vatican sculpture collection, one day, when I felt very unwell. I ascribed my sensations at first to the insufferable weather of that month, alternately sirocco and cold sleet, or both at once; then I was seized with a dread of the climate, of Rome, of all these strange surroundings, and I made up my mind to go home as quickly as possible. The illness that was upon me was, without my knowing it, the cause of my fear. The next day I was carried downstairs by two vile-smelling labourers and taken by Vilhelm Rosenstand the painter, who was one of the few who had made friends with me and shown me kindness, to the Prussian hospital on the Tarpeian Rock, near the Capitol.

Here a bad attack of typhoid fever held me prisoner in my bed for some few months, after a compatriot, who had no connection whatever with me, had been so inconsiderate as to inform my parents by telegraph how ill I was, and that there was little hope for me.

The first month I was not fully conscious; I suffered from a delusion of coercion. Thus it seemed to me that the left side of my bed did not belong to me, but to another man, who sometimes took the place; and that I myself was divided into several persons, of which one, for instance, asked my legs to turn a little to the one side or the other. One of these persons was Imperialist, and for that reason disliked by the others, who were Republicans; nevertheless, he performed great kindnesses for them, making them more comfortable, when it was in his power. Another strangely fantastic idea that held sway for a long time was that on my head, the hair of which had been shorn by the hospital attendant rather less artistically than one cuts a dog's, there was a clasp of pearls and precious stones, which I felt but could not see.

Afterwards, all my delusions centred on food.

I was very much neglected at the hospital. The attendance was wretched. The highly respected German doctor, who was appointed to the place, had himself an immense practice, and moreover was absolutely taken up by the Franco-Prussian war. Consequently, he hardly ever came, sometimes stayed away as long as thirteen days at a stretch, during all which time a patient who might happen to be suffering, say, from constipation, must lie there without any means of relief. My bed was as hard as a stone, and I was waked in the night by pains in my body and limbs; the pillow was so hard that the skin of my right ear was rubbed off from the pressure. There were no nurses. There was only one custodian for the whole hospital, a Russian fellow who spoke German, and who sometimes had as many as fourteen patients at a time to look after, but frequently went out to buy stores, or visit his sweetheart, and then all the patients could ring at once without any one coming. After I had passed the crisis of my illness, and consequently began to suffer terribly from hunger, I was ordered an egg for my breakfast; I sometimes had to lie for an hour and a half, pining for this egg. Once, for three days in succession, there were no fresh eggs to be had. So he would bring for my breakfast nothing but a small piece of dry bread. One day that I was positively ill with hunger, I begged repeatedly for another piece of bread, but he refused it me. It was not malice on his part, but pure stupidity, for he was absolutely incapable of understanding how I felt. And to save fuel, he let me suffer from cold, as well as from hunger; would never put more than one wretched little stick at a time into the stove. Everything was pinched to an incredible extent. Thus it was impossible for me to get a candle in the evening before it was absolutely dark, and then never more than one, although it made my eyes water to try to read. Candles and firing, it appears, were not put down in the bill. And yet this hospital is kept up on subscriptions from all the great Powers, so there must be someone into whose pockets the money goes. Most of us survived it; a few died who possibly might have been kept alive; one was preserved for whom the Danish newspapers have beautiful obituaries ready.

Over my head, in the same building, there lived a well-known German archaeologist, who was married to a Russian princess of such colossal physical proportions that Roman popular wits asserted that when she wished to go for a drive she had to divide herself between two cabs. This lady had a great talent for music. I never saw her, but I became aware of her in more ways than one: whenever she crossed the floor on the third story, the ceiling shook, and the boards creaked, in a manner unbearable to an invalid. And just when I had settled myself off, and badly wanted to sleep, towards eleven o'clock at night, the heavy lady above would sit down at her grand piano, and make music that would have filled a concert hall resound through the place.

After a month had passed, the doctor declared that I had "turned the corner," and might begin to take a little food besides the broth that up till then had been my only nourishment. A little later, I was allowed to try to get up. I was so weak that I had to begin to learn to walk again; I could not support myself on my legs, but dragged myself, with the help of the custodian, the four or five steps from the bed to a sofa.

Just at this time I received two letters from Copenhagen, containing literary enquiries and offers. The first was from the editor of the Illustrated Times, and enquired whether on my return home I would resume the theatrical criticisms in the paper; in that case they would keep the position open for me. I gave a negative reply, as I was tired of giving my opinion on a Danish drama. The second letter, which surprised me more, was from the editor of the, at that time, powerful Daily Paper, Steen Bille, offering me the entire management of the paper after the retirement of Molbech, except so far as politics were concerned, the editor naturally himself retaining the latter. As Danish things go, it was a very important offer to a young man. It promised both influence and income, and it was only my profound and ever-increasing determination not to give myself up to journalism that made me without hesitation dictate a polite refusal. I was still to weak to write. My motive was simply and solely that I wished to devote my life to knowledge. But Bille, who knew what power in a little country like Denmark his offer would have placed in my hands, hardly understood it in this way, and was exceedingly annoyed at my refusal. It gave the first impulse to his altered feeling toward me. I have sometimes wondered since whether my fate in Denmark might not have been different had I accepted the charge. It is true that the divergence between what the paper and I, in the course of the great year 1871, came to represent, would soon have brought about a split. The Commune in Paris caused a complete volte face of the liberal bourgeoisie in Denmark, as elsewhere.

XLVI.

While I was still too weak to write, I received a letter from Henrik Ibsen (dated December 20, 1870), which impressed me greatly. Henrik Ibsen and I had been on friendly terms with one another since April, 1866, but it was only about this time that our intimacy began to emit sparks, an intimacy which was destined to have a very widening influence upon me, and which is perhaps not without traces on the stages of his poetical progress.

Ibsen thought I had already recovered, and wrote to me as to a convalescent. He complained bitterly of the conquest of Rome by the Italians: Rome was now taken from "us men" and given over to the "politicians"; it had been a spot sacred to peace, and was so no longer.--This assertion was at variance with my religion. It seemed to me unpermissible to desire, for aesthetic reasons, to see the restoration of an ecclesiastical régime, with its remorseless system of oppression. Human happiness and intellectual progress were worth more than the retention of the idylls of naiveté. I replied to him by declaring my faith in freedom and soon he outdid me in this, as in other domains.

But there was one other part of the letter that went to my heart and rejoiced me. It was where Ibsen wrote that what was wanted was a revolt in the human mind, and in that I ought to be one of the leaders. These words, which were in exact agreement with my own secret hope, fired my imagination, ill though I was. It seemed to me that after having felt myself isolated so long, I had at last met with the mind that understood me and felt as I did, a real fellow-fighter. As soon as I was once more fit to use my pen, I wrote a flaming reply in verse (headed, The Hospital in Rome, the night of January 9, 1871). In it I described how solitary I had been, in my intellectual fight and endeavour, and expressed my contentment at having found a brother in him.

XLVII.

Among the Danes, and there were not many of them, who frequently came to see me at the hospital, I must mention the kind and tactful musician Niels Ravnkilde, whom I had known when I was a child. He had been living in Rome now for some twenty years. He was gentle and quiet, good-looking, short of stature, modest and unpretending, too weak of character not to be friends with everyone, but equipped with a natural dignity. When a young music master in Copenhagen, he had fallen in love with a young, wealthy girl, whose affections he succeeded in winning in return, but he was turned out of the house by her harsh, purse-proud father, and in desperation had left Denmark to settle down in Rome. As his lady-love married soon after and became a contented wife and mother, he remained where he was. He succeeded in making his way.

He gradually became a favourite teacher of music among the ladies of the Roman aristocracy, who sometimes invited him to their country-houses in the Summer. He was on a good footing with the native maestros most in request, who quickly understood that the modest Dane was no dangerous rival. Graceful as Ravnkilde was in his person, so he was in his art; there was nothing grand about him. But he was clever, and had a natural, unaffected wit. His difficult position as a master had taught him prudence and reserve. He was obligingness personified to travelling Scandinavians, and was proud of having, as he thought, made the acquaintance in Rome of the flower of the good society of the Northern countries. Even long after he had come to the front, he continued to live in the fourth storey apartment of the Via Ripetta, where he had taken up his abode on his arrival in Rome, waited upon by the same simple couple. His circumstances could not improve, if only for the reason that he sent what he had to spare to relatives of his in Copenhagen, who had a son who was turning out badly, and lived by wasting poor Ravnkilde's savings. After having been the providence of all Danish travellers to Rome for thirty years, certain individuals who had influence with the government succeeded in obtaining a distinction for him. The government then gave him, not even the poor little decoration that he ought to have had twenty years before, but--brilliant idea!--awarded him the title of Professor, which in Italian, of course, he had always been, and which was a much more insignificant title than Maestro, by which he was regularly called.

Ravnkilde wrote my letters at the hospital for me, and the day I came out we drove away together to the French restaurant to celebrate the occasion by a dinner.

I went from there up to Monte Pincio in a glorious sunshine, rejoiced to see the trees again, and the people in their Sunday finery, and the lovely women's faces, as well as at being able to talk to people once more. It was all like new life in a new world. I met a good many Scandinavians, who congratulated me, and a young savant, Giuseppe Saredo, who, as professor of law, had been removed from Siena to Rome, and with whom, at the house of dall'Ongaro at Florence, I had had some delightful talks. We decided that we would keep in touch with one another.

XLVIII.

It was only this one day, however, that happiness and the sun shone upon me. On the morrow pains in my right leg, in which there was a vein swollen, made me feel very unwell. So ignorant was the doctor that he declared this to be of no importance, and gave me a little ointment with which to rub my leg. But I grew worse from day to day, and after a very short time my leg was like a lump of lead. I was stretched once more for some months on a sick-bed, and this weakened me the more since very heroic measures were used in the treatment of the complaint, a violent attack of phlebitis. The leg was rubbed every day from the sole of the foot to the hip with mercury ointment, which could not be without its effect on my general health.

Still, I kept up my spirits finely. Among the Scandinavians who showed me kindness at this time I gratefully remember the Danish painters Rosenstand and Mackeprang, who visited me regularly and patiently, and my friend Walter Runeberg, the Finnish sculptor, whose cheerfulness did me good.

Other Scandinavians with whom I was less well acquainted came to see me now and again, but they had one very annoying habit. It was customary at that time for all letters to be addressed, for greater security, to the Danish consulate, which served the purpose of a general Scandinavian consulate. Anyone who thought of coming to see me would fetch what letters had arrived for me that day and put them in his pocket to bring me. The letters I ought to have had at ten o'clock in the morning I generally received at seven in the evening. But these gentlemen often forgot to pay their visit at all, or did not get time, and then it would happen that after having gone about with the letters in their pockets for a few days, they took them back to the consulate, whence they were sent to me, once, three days late. As my whole life on my sick-bed was one constant, painful longing for letters from home, the more so as my mother, all the time I was in bed, was lying dangerously ill, I felt vexed at the thoughtless behaviour of my compatriots.

However, I had not travelled so far to meet Northmen, and I learnt far more from the one Italian who sat by my bedside day after day, Giuseppe Saredo. It was amusing to note the difference between his ways and the Northmen's. He did not come in; he exploded. At six o'clock in the evening, he would rush in without knocking at the door, shouting at one and the same time Italian to the people of the house, and French to me. He talked at a furious rate, and so loudly that people who did not know might have fancied we were quarrelling, and he changed his seat once a minute, jumped up from the easy chair and seated himself half in the window, began a sentence there and finished it sitting on my bed. And every second or third day he either himself brought books to entertain me or sent large parcels by a messenger.

He had risen to be professor at the University of the the capital, without ever having been either student or graduate. His family were too poor for him to study. For many years, when a lad, he had never eaten dinner. His occupation, when at last he began to get on, was that of proof-reader in a printing establishment, but he tried to add to his income by writing melodramas for the boulevard theatres in Turin.

He thought he had written over fifty. He told me: "The manager generally came to me on a Sunday, when we were at liberty, and said: 'We must have a new play for next Sunday.' On Monday the first act was finished, on Tuesday the second, etc.; and every act was delivered as it was written, and the parts allotted. Sometimes the last act was only finished on Saturday morning, which, however, would not prevent the piece being played on Sunday evening." In a number of the Revue des deux Mondes for 1857 we found Saredo mentioned among the melodramatists of Italy. This must have been ferreted out privately, since he always wrote these melodramas anonymously, he having determined, with naïve conceit, "not to stain his future reputation." When he was twenty-one, he tried to raise himself from this rank to that of a journalist, and succeeded; he sent all sorts of articles to three newspapers. From his twenty-first to his twenty-fourth year he wrote for the daily papers, and wrote gay accounts of the volatile lives of young Italian journalists with the ladies of the theatres. Then he fell in love with the lady who later became his wife (known as a novelist under the pseudonym of Ludovico de Rosa), and from that time forth never looked at another woman. All his life he cherished a great admiration for his wife and gratitude towards her.

When he had commenced his legal work, he strained every nerve to the utmost, and obtained his professorships in the various towns through competition, without having followed the usual University path. "I have always had the most unshaken faith in my star," he said one day, "even when, from hunger or despair, thoughts of suicide occurred to me. When I broke my black bread, I said to myself: 'The day will come when I shall eat white.'"

Like all Italians at that time, Saredo detested and despised modern France. As far as reconquered Rome was concerned, he regarded her with sorrowful eyes. "There are only nobility, ecclesiastics, and workmen here," he said; "no middle classes, no industry and no trade. Absurd tariff laws have up till now shut off the Papal States from the surrounding world. And what a government! A doctor, who after his second visit did not make his patient confess to a priest, lost his official post, if he happened to hold one, and was in any case sent to prison for five months. A doctor who did not go to Mass a certain number of times during the week was prohibited practising. The huge number of tied-up estates made buying and selling very difficult. The new government has struck the nobility a fatal blow by abolishing entailed property and lands. The calling in of the ecclesiastical property by the State is giving the towns a chance to breathe."

Whenever I revisited Italy, I saw Saredo. His heroism during the inquiries into the irregularities in Naples in 1900-1901 made his name beloved and himself admired in his native country. He died in 1902, the highest life official in Italy; since 1897 he had been President of the Council.

XLIX.

I came under an even greater debt of gratitude than to Saredo, to the good-natured people in whose house I lay ill. I was as splendidly looked after as if I had made it a specified condition that I should be nursed in case of illness.

My landlady, Maria, especially, was the most careful nurse, and the best creature in the world, although she had the physiognomy of a regular Italian criminal, when her face was in repose. The moment she spoke, however, her features beamed with maternal benevolence. After the hospital, it was a decided change for the better. I was under no one's tyranny and did not feel as though I were in prison; I could complain if my food was bad, and change trattoria, when I myself chose. Everything was good.

As long as I was well, I had taken hardly any notice of the people in the house, hardly exchanged a word with them; I was out all day, and either hastily asked them to do my room, or to put a little on the fire. It was only when I fell ill that I made their acquaintance.

Let me quote from my notes at the time:

Maria is forty, but looks nearly sixty. Her husband is a joiner, a stout, good-looking man, who works all day for his living, and has a shop. Then there is Maria's niece, the nineteen-year-old Filomena, a tall, handsome girl. Every evening they have fine times, laugh, sing, and play cards. On Sunday evening they go out to the fair (alla fiera) and look at the things without buying. Others have to pay a lire to go in, but they go in free, as they know some of the people. On festival occasions Maria wears a silk dress.

There is a crucifix over my bed, an oleograph of the Madonna and child and a heart, embroidered with gold on white, horribly pierced by the seven swords of pain, which were supposed to be nails; on the centre of the heart, you read, partly in Latin, partly in Greek letters:

JESU XPI PASSIO.

All the same, Maria is very sceptical. Yesterday, on the evening of my birthday, we had the following conversation:

Myself: "Here you celebrate your saints' day; not your birthday; but, you know, up in the North we have not any saints"--and, thinking it necessary to add a deep-drawn religious sigh, I continued: "We think it enough to believe in God." "Oh! yes," she said slowly, and then, a little while after: "That, too, is His own business." "How?" "Well," she said, "You know that I am dreadfully ignorant; I know nothing at all, but I think a great deal. There are these people now who are always talking about the Lord. I think it is all stuff. When I married, they said to me: 'May it please the Lord that your husband be good to you.' I thought: If I had not been sensible enough to choose a good husband, it would not help me much what should please the Lord. Later on they said: 'May it please the Lord to give you sons.' I had some, but they died when they were little ones. Then I thought to myself: 'If my husband and I do not do something in the matter, it won't be much use for the Lord to be pleased to give them to us. Nature, too, has something to say to it. (Anche la natura è una piccola cosa.) You have no idea, sir, how we have suffered from priests here in the Papal State. Everyone had to go to Confession, and as of course they did not wish to confess their own sins, they confessed other people's,--and told lies, too,--and in that way the priests knew everything. If the priest had heard anything about a person, he or she would get a little ticket from him: 'Come to me at such and such a time! 'Then, when the person went, he would say: 'Are you mad to live with such and such a person without being married!'--and all the while he himself had a woman and a nest full of children. Then he would say: 'I won't have you in my parish,' and he would publish the poor thing's secret to the whole world. Or, if he were more exasperated, he would say: 'Out of the Pope's country!' and send for a few carabineers; they would take one to a cart and drive one to the frontier; there, there were fresh carabineers, who took one farther --and all without trial, or any enquiry. Often the accusation was false. But we were ruled by spies, and all their power was based on the confessional, which is nothing but spying. Shortly before Easter, a priest came and counted how many there were in the house. If afterwards there were one who did not go to mass, then his name was stuck up on the church door as an infidel, in disgrace. It is many years now since I have been to any confessor. When I die, I shall say: 'God, forgive me my sins and my mistakes,' and shall die in peace without any priest."

Whatever we talk about, Maria always comes back to her hatred of the priests. The other day, we were speaking of the annoyance I had been subjected to by a compatriot of mine, K.B., who came to see me, but looked more particularly at a large fiasco I had standing there, containing four bottles of Chianti. He tasted the wine, which was very inferior, declared it 'nice,' and began to drink, ten glasses straight off. At first he was very polite to me, and explained that it was impossible to spend a morning in a more delightful manner than by visiting the Sistine Chapel first, and me in my sick-room afterwards, but by degrees he became ruder and ruder, and as his drunkenness increased I sank in his estimation. At last he told me that I was intolerably conceited, and started abusing me thoroughly. Lying defenceless in bed, and unable to move, I was obliged to ring for Maria, and whisper to her to fetch a few gentlemen from the Scandinavian Club, who could take the drunken man home, after he had wasted fully six hours of my day. I managed in this way to get him out of the door. He was hardly gone than Maria burst out: "Che porcheria!" and then added, laughing, to show me her knowledge of languages: "Cochonnerie, Schweinerei!" She has a remarkable memory for the words she has heard foreigners use. She knows a number of French words, which she pronounces half like Italian, and she also knows a little Russian and a little German, having, when a young girl, kept house for a Russian prince and his family.

"I feel," she said to me, "that I could have learnt both French and German easily, if I could have compared them in a book. But I can neither read nor write. These wretched priests have kept us in ignorance. And now I am old and good for nothing. I was forty a little while ago, and that is too old to learn the alphabet. Do you know, signore, how it originally came about that I did not believe, and despised the priests? I was twelve years old, and a tall girl, and a very good-looking girl, too, though you cannot see that, now that I am old and ugly." (You can see it very plainly, for her features are haughty and perfectly pure of line; it is only that her expression, when she sits alone, is sinister.) "I lost my father when I was five years old. About that time my mother married again, and did not trouble herself any more about me, as she had children with her new husband. So I was left to myself, and ran about the streets, and became absolutely ungovernable, from vivacity, life, and mischief, for I was naturally a very lively child. Then one day I met a mule, alone; the man had left it; I climbed up, and seated myself upon it, and rode about, up and down the street, until a dog came that frightened the mule and it kicked and threw me over its head. There I lay, with a broken collar-bone, and some of the bone stuck out through the skin. Then a doctor came and wanted to bind it up for me, but I was ashamed for him to see my breast, and would not let him. He said: 'Rubbish! I have seen plenty of girls.' So I was bound up and for six weeks had to lie quite still. In the meantime a priest, whom they all called Don Carlo--I do not know why they said Don --came to see me, and when I was a little better and only could not move my left arm, he said to me one day, would I go and weed in his garden, and he would give me money for it. So I went every day into the garden, where I could very well do the work with one arm. He came down to me, brought me sweets and other things, and asked me to be his friend. I pretended not to understand. He said, too, how pretty I was, and such things. Then at last one day, he called me into his bedroom, and first gave me sweets, and then set me on his knee. I did not know how to get away. Then I said to him: 'It is wrong, the Madonna would not like it.' Do you know, sir, what he replied? He said: 'Child! there is no Madonna (non c'è Madonna) she is only a bridle for the common people' (è un freno per il populo basso). Then I was anxious to run away, and just then my mother passed by the garden, and as she did not see me there, called, 'Anna Maria! Anna Maria!' I said: 'Mother is calling me,' and ran out of the room. Then mother said to me: 'What did the priest say to you, and what did he do to you? You were in his bedroom.' I said: 'Nothing'; but when my mother went to confession, instead of confessing her sins, she said over and over again to him: 'What have you done to my daughter? I will have my daughter examined, to see what sort of a man you are.' He declared: 'I will have you shot if you do' (una buona schioppettata). So mother did not dare to go farther in the matter. But she would not believe me."

Here we were interrupted by the Russian woman from next door coming in; she is married, more or less, to a waiter, and she complained of his volatility, and cried with jealousy. "Once I was just as weak," said Maria. "When I was newly married I was so jealous of my husband, that I could neither eat nor drink if any one came to me and said: 'This evening he is with such and such a one.' If I tried to eat, I was sick at once. I am just as fond of him as I was then, but I am cured now. If I saw his infidelity with my own eyes, I should not feel the least bit hurt about it. Then, I could have strangled him."