Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851

"Why – why, what should I marry her for?" stammered the Major.

"Oh, Lord!" said Garry, "here will be pleasant news for her! Curse me if I break it to her."

"But really, now, Frank," the Major repeated – "marriage, you know – why, I never thought of such a thing."

"You're the only person that hasn't then," rejoined Owen. "Why, what can the garrison think, after the way you smuggled her in; what can she herself think, after all your attentions?"

"Attentions, my dear boy; – the merest civility."

"Oh, – ah! 'twas civility, I suppose, to squeeze her hand in the inn at Algeçiras, in the way she told Juana of – and heaven knows what else you may have done during the flight. Juana is outrageous against you – actually called you a vile deceiver; but Carlota's feeling is more of sorrow than of anger. She is persuaded that nothing but your ignorance of Spanish has prevented your tongue from confirming what your looks have so faithfully promised. I was really quite affected to-day at the appealing look she cast on me after you left the room; she evidently expected me to communicate her destiny."

My grandfather smoked hard.

"Lots of fellows would give their ears for such a wife," pursued the Ensign. "Lovelace, the Governor's aide-de-camp, bribed the waiter of the hotel to lend him his apron to-day, at dinner, that he might come in and look at her – swears she's a splendid woman, and that he'd run away with such another to-morrow."

Still my grandfather smoked hard, but said nothing, though there was a slight gleam of pride in his countenance.

"Poor thing!" sighed Garry. "All her prospects blighted for ever. Swears she never can love another."

At this my grandfather's eyes grew moist, and he coughed as if he had swallowed some tobacco-smoke.

"And as for me, to have Juana at my lips, as it were, and yet not mine – for she's as inflexible as if she'd been born a Mede and Persian – to know that you are coming between me and happiness as surely as if you were an inexorable father or a cruel guardian – worse, indeed; for those might be evaded. Major, major, have you no compassion! – two days of this will drive me crazy."

The Major changed his pipe from his right hand to his left, and, stretching the former across the table, sympathetically pressed that of the Ensign.

"Do, Major," quoth Garry, changing his flank movement for a direct attack – "do consent to make yourself and me happy; do empower me to negotiate for our all going to church to-morrow." (My grandfather gave a little jump in his chair at this, as if he were sitting on a pin.) "I'll manage it all; you shan't have the least trouble in the matter."

My grandfather spoke not.

"Silence gives consent," said the Ensign, rising. "Come, now, if you don't forbid me, I'll depart on my embassy at once; you needn't speak, I'll spare your blushes. I see this delay has only been from modesty, or perhaps a little ruse on your part. Once, twice, thrice, – I go." And he vanished.

The Major remained in his chair, in the same posture. His pipe was smoked out, but he continued to suck absently at the empty tube. His bewilderment and perturbation were so great that, though he sat up till two in the morning, during which time he smoked eleven pipes, and increased the two glasses of grog with which he was accustomed to prepare for his pillow to four, he was still, when he went to bed, as agitated as ever.

In this state of mind he went to the altar, for next day a double ceremony was performed, making Owen happy with Juana, and giving Carlota a husband and me a grandfather. The Major was more like a proxy than a principal in the affair; for Owen, taking the entire management upon himself, left him little more to do than to make the necessary responses.

Carlota made a very good-tempered, quiet, inobtrusive helpmate, and continued to be fond of her spouse even after he was a gray-headed colonel. My grandfather, though credulous in most matters, could with difficulty be brought to consider himself married. He would sometimes seem to forget the circumstance for a whole day together, till it came to be forced on his recollection at bed-time. And when, about a year after his marriage, a new-born female Flinders (now my venerable aunt) was brought one morning by the nurse for his inspection and approval, he gazed at it with a puzzled air, and could not be convinced that he was actually in the presence of his own flesh and blood, till he had touched the cheek of his first-born with the point of his tobacco-pipe, removed from his mouth for that purpose, making on the infant's countenance a small indentation.

The little Governor, Don Pablo, was subsequently induced to forgive his relatives, and frequent visits and attentions were interchanged, till the commencement of the siege put a stop to all intercourse between Gibraltar and Spain.

I have often, on a summer's evening, sat looking across the bay at a gorgeous sunset, and retracing in imagination the incidents I have related. My grandfather's establishment was broken up during the siege by the enemy's shells, but a similar one now stands on what I think must have been about the site of it. The world has changed since then; but Spain is no land of change; and, looking on the imperishable outline of the Andaluçian hills, unaltered, probably, since a time to which the period of my tale is but as yesterday, it is easy for me to "daff aside" the noisy world without, and, dropping quietly behind the age, to picture to myself my old-fashioned grandfather issuing forth from yonder white-walled town of Algeçiras with his future bride.

GERMAN LETTERS FROM PARIS.[2 - Zwei Monate in Paris. Von Adolph Stahr. Two Vols. Oldenburg: Schulzeschen Buchhandlung. London: Williams and Norgate, 1851.]

German Professors are altered men since those joyous days when we drank chopines and swang the schlaeger in the thirsty and venerable University of Saxesaufenberg. We remember them studious bookworms, uneasy when removed from library and lecture-room, their meerschaum their only passion, knowledge their sole ambition, beholding the external world through "the loopholes of retreat," – the said embrasures being considerably obscured by tobacco-smoke and misty philosophy. Such is the portrait our memory has preserved of them; and we doubt not that its fidelity will be recognised by our brother-burschen of bygone days. But great has been the change. The quality of a German professor now suggests the idea of a red-hot democrat, fanning revolution, pining in prison, or fugitive in foreign lands. The smoking-cap is exchanged for the bonnet rouge, and the silence of the sage for the clamour of the demagogue. This may not be true of all, perhaps not even of a majority, but it is true of a pretentious and prominent minority. The busy, bustling multitude knows nothing of the others.

Professor Stahr, of the University of Oldenburg, is a gentleman chiefly remarkable for his democratic tendencies, and for the fluent correctness of his literary style. Few men write better German, or profess doctrines more revolutionary. His reputation as a literary man rests principally upon a work on Italy, published after a twelvemonth's residence in that country.[3 - Ein Jahr in Italien. Three Vols., 8vo. Oldenburg: 1850.] As a critic of fine art, he is not without merit. As a politician he is wild and speculative. The revolutionary coterie to which he belongs reckons amongst its members Fanny Lewald, the lively Hebrew socialist, and Moritz Hartmann, the bitter radical. Both of these, especially the former, are his intimate friends, and appear to have been his constant companions during two months of last autumn, spent by him in Paris, and which have given occasion and a title to his latest book. With Mr Hartmann he forgathered at Brussels, early in the month of September, and together they proceeded southwards. In consideration of Professor Stahr's acknowledged abilities, we will not apply to him a common rule, and judge him by the company he keeps. But, in spite of his well-turned periods and general moderation of expression, his book is not pleasant to read. There is an ill-conditioned tone about writers of his political class, extremely trying to the patience and temper of the reader. Convinced of the general unfitness of existing human institutions, and of the necessity for radical changes, they inevitably fall into a cavilling and censorious strain. Viewing the condition of society with a jaundiced eye, they adopt the maxim that whatever is, is wrong. Mr Stahr has hardly entered the railway carriage that is to transport him to Paris, when he shows himself querulous and a grumbler. He hoisted his colours before leaving Brussels. Had we never before heard either of him or his principles, we yet should have been at no loss to discover the latter by certain passages in his very first chapter. Sitting in his inn at eventide, after visiting the monument to the slain of 1830, he reads an account of the Belgian revolution. The Dutch troops, he finds, made but one hundred and twenty-two prisoners, whilst the insurgents captured four hundred and ninety-five. On the other hand, the Belgian killed and wounded exceeded by three hundred those of their opponents. Mr Stahr is ready with an inference from these statistics. It takes the form of a slur upon the soldiers who were doing their duty to their king and country. "The inequality in the number of prisoners may well arise from the circumstance that the Dutch, as fighters for loyal tranquillity and order, were least disposed to give quarter. And soldiers against men without uniform – one knows that!" Then he falls foul of the writer of the narrative, for attributing to Providence the preservation of the royal palace, and other public buildings, to which the Dutch attempted to set fire; and, gliding thence into religious speculations, he gets very profound, and rather profane, so that we are not sorry when the current of his ideas is diverted into a more commonplace channel, by the visit, at Valenciennes, of the French customhouse officers, on the look-out for Belgian cigars and reprints. He is sore at this irksome visitation – wonders that powerful France so long endures the literary piracies of her little neighbour – and finally prophesies the abolition of all customhouses. "A time will come," he says, "when this system of legally privileged waylaying will appear just as fabulous to the people of Europe, as do now to us the highway depredations of the robber-knights." Pending the advent of that desirable state of things, he revenges himself on a fellow-traveller for his customhouse annoyances. A German book which he had left in the carriage on alighting had disappeared, and could not be recovered. A douanier had perhaps taken it for a contraband commodity. He should have declared it, opined a fat Frenchman in the same carriage. Mr Stahr was indignant. It was a German book, he tartly replied, and was not printed at Brussels, but at Leipzig – a place, he added, which must still be pretty well remembered in France! A polite and tasteful allusion which did the German radical infinite credit, and to which the fat Frenchman might fairly have retorted, "Jena," and half a dozen other significant names, instead of holding his tongue, and leaving his fellow-traveller to digest at leisure his loss and his ill-humour.

Mr Stahr's volumes, composed of letters to friends, are desultory, and for the most part slight. Picture galleries are favourite haunts of his: now he criticises a pamphlet, now a play; he moralises, after his own peculiar fashion, in deserted palaces, assists at a banquet of workmen, witnesses extravagant dances at Mabille, sits by the bedside of the infirm and suffering Heine. His first walk in Paris was to the Palais Royal, after nightfall. "Stahr," said his companion to him suddenly, on the way, "this is the Place de Grève!" – "Were I to live a century," exclaims the impressionable professor, "I should never forget the shudder that came over me at these words." And he breaks into a tumid rhapsody about the lava-streams of the great European volcano, talks of the guillotine, tells the well-known story of Favras, and proceeds to the Palais Royal, where, at ten o'clock at night, he is unable to obtain a beef-steak for supper, and whose glory he accordingly declares departed. Returning to their quarters, at a hotel beyond the Seine, the two Germans get bewildered in the labyrinth of the Quartier Latin, and are indebted for guidance to some artisans, whose "Good night, citoyens!" at parting, again thrills the sensitive Stahr. The historical and fanciful associations that crowd upon his mind are of a less practical nature than the reflection suggested to his companion by the Republican mode of address – "We must exchange our grey Calabrian hats" (the sort of bandit sombreros affected by travelling students and red republicans) "for the loyal hats of order, or soon we shall have Louis Napoleon's police at our heels." Thus spoke Mr Hartmann – who has a natural aversion to all police, and who gladly sneers at the party of Order, and at Louis Napoleon as its representative. Mr Stahr professes no great liking or tenderness for the chief of the Republic – the first gendarme in France, as he calls him, meaning thereby to cast opprobrium on the President, gentlemen of his political complexion having an instinctive detestation of gendarmes. He saw him for the first time at the celebrated review held at Satory, on the 10th October 1850. On his way thither, Mr Stahr joined in conversation with peasants, who were flocking from all the country round to see the President and the military pageant. Many of them had sons in the regiments that were to be reviewed. They made no mystery of their political creed. It was simple enough: "Peace and moderate taxation," said they, "is what we want. He who gives us those two things is our man, whether as King or President matters not." The review over, the throng of spectators drew up to see Louis Napoleon. After the Minister of War, d'Hautpoul, and the then-all-powerful Changarnier, had passed, each with his staff, "there came by, mounted on a tall gray horse, the elect of six millions of voters. Judiciously-distributed adherents waved their hats and shouted, at the top of their voices, 'Long live the Emperor! Vive Napoleon!' The people were mute. It was a laughable farce. The hero of Strasburg and Boulogne, mounted on a tall charger, in a brilliant general's uniform, the broad riband of the Legion of Honour over his shoulder, in plumed hat and jackboots, was the very model of a circus equestrian." An air of helplessness and exhaustion, according to Mr Stahr, was the main characteristic of the President's appearance. "I stood near enough," he continues, "to see him well, and never did I behold a more unmeaning countenance. An unwholesome grey-brown is its prevailing tint. Of likeness to the great Emperor there is scarcely a trace." There is no chance, Mr Stahr declares, of such a person as Louis Napoleon putting the republic in his pocket. Having given his opinion of the President's exterior, he proceeds in the next chapter to sketch his character, as described by a person who had known him from his youth. "He is naturally goodtempered and harmless," said this anonymous informant, "and by no means without ability. But he is tainted with the moral corruption of all European societies, Italian, French, and English. He has the pourriture of the drawing-room education of all nations. Still he is not devoid of sense, nor of a certain goodness of disposition. He can weep, unaffectedly weep, over a touching case of wretchedness and misery, and he willingly shows clemency, when asked, even to political opponents. But no reliance can be placed in him. In a word, his character is that of a woman. As a result of his wandering and adventurous existence, he appears to-day as a German, to-morrow as a Frenchman, and the day after to-morrow as an Englishman or Italian. He is wholly without fixed principles, and without moral stay. If one represents to him the immorality of an act, he will laugh and say, 'Bah! what is that to me?' But the very next day you shall find him as much oppressed with moral scruples as any German candidate. He has the physical courage of his unusual bodily strength —corporis robore stolide ferox– supported by a fatalist belief in his star; and this belief, which has lately acquired increased strength by his extraordinary vicissitude of fortune, blinds him to his real position, and renders him deaf to the warning voices of his few honest friends. In this respect his mother, who unceasingly stimulated his ambition, did him much harm. Personally he is modest and unassuming, but he is madly vain of his name and of his legitimate claims. That he has done and continues to do himself grievous harm, as it is universally said, by excesses of the most unrefined description, and by opium-smoking, seems unfortunately to be only too true. For the change in him since his youth has been altogether too great. Nevertheless, he is much less the tool of others than might be supposed. He has a way of half-closing his inexpressive light-blue eyes, which he has adopted to prevent persons from reading his thoughts. His chief delusion is that the army is unconditionally devoted to him. This is by no, means the case." We give this curious sketch, in which truth and malignity are ingeniously blended, for no more than it is worth. The reader will have little difficulty in sifting the grain from the chaff, the idle or malicious gossip from the well-founded observations. Mr Stahr supports the assertion of the indifference of the French army to the commonplace nephew of their great idol, by anecdotes derived from personal experience. After the review, he dined for some days in company with three hussar officers, quartered in the house he lived in. His account of them hardly agrees with the popular notion of French officers. "They are modest, reserved, and serious in manner. Nowhere in Paris have I found a trace of that overweening presumption by which German officers, especially cavalrymen, seek to give themselves importance at tables d'hôte and other public places. We spoke of yesterday's manœuvres, and I paid them a compliment on the really splendid bearing of the troops and the capital equipments. There are no longer grounds to depreciate the French cavalry. Africa has been an excellent school for them. 'But there was one thing wanting,' I remarked – 'namely, enthusiasm.' 'You are quite right, sir,' replied one of the officers; 'but there is not much to be enthusiastic about in the position in which we are.' The speaker was a thorough soldier, and anything but an upholder of revolutionary or socialist-democratic ideas. The supporters of the latter he invariably spoke of as 'les Voraces,' and bitterly complained that for years past he and his comrades had had nothing else to do than to 'faire la chasse aux voraces!' But with the 'Nephew of the Uncle' none of the officers showed the least sympathy. Concerning him they all observed a very eloquent silence." In contrast to the ridicule and censure levelled by Mr Stahr at the more recent portion of Louis Napoleon's career, are some anecdotes he tells us of his earlier years. "In his youth," he says, "he must have been very amiable. I have had opportunity to look through a collection of letters written by him to a friend of his family, and extending over more than twenty years. It included even notes written when he was a boy of eleven, some of them in the German language and character. Louis Napoleon is known to be a perfect master of German. The most pleasing and amiable of these letters were a series written from his prison at Ham. Good feeling, hearty gratitude for proofs of faithful adherence and for affectionate little services, and a deep dejection at his lot, were the characteristics of these letters. He read and studied a great deal at Ham, especially military science, but also poetry and literature. Within those prison-walls he now and then began to distrust the 'star' of his destiny." These letters were doubtless the same spoken of elsewhere by Mr Stahr as filling several volumes, and as having been addressed to Madame Hortense Cornu, a well-known writer on fine art, who was long attached to the household of Queen Hortense. She had known Louis Napoleon from his childhood, and retained sufficient influence over him to obtain the rescue from the hands of the Roman priesthood of the Italian republican Cernuschi. The letters, says Mr Stahr, abound in evidence of the esteem and gratitude entertained by the French President for the staunch and trusty friend of his youth. "This correspondence, fragments of which I was favoured with permission to read, includes all the epochs of his adventurous life. It ceases with the day when the infatuated man, having attained to power, laid hands upon the right of universal suffrage which had raised him from the dust. Madame Cornu's last letter was a solemn exhortation to abstain from that step. She laboured in vain, for fate is stronger than humanity. But it is an honourable testimony to the originally good disposition of the blinded man that he did not withdraw his favour from his tried friend. A proof of this is to be found in Cernuschi's deliverance."

During a visit paid by Mr Stahr to Alexander Dumas, the French romance-writer told the German professor an anecdote of Louis Napoleon and the late Duke of Orleans, which is curious, if true. Perhaps it is as well to bear in mind, whilst reading it, that its narrator is a story-teller by profession, and the most imaginative and decorative of historians. Dumas, it appears, had been long acquainted with the imperial pretender and his mother; was aware of the rash schemes of the Prince, then meditating the Strasburg expedition; and advised him, by letter, to abandon them, or at least to adopt a totally different mode of carrying them out. If he would uproot (deraciner) the dynasty of Louis Philippe, wrote Dumas, he must try very different means. He must endeavour to obtain the revocation of his sentence of exile, get himself elected member of the French Chamber of Deputies, and so follow up his plans in opposition to the ruling dynasty. Deaf to this advice, which was certainly sensible enough, Louis Napoleon made his ridiculous attempt at Strasburg, and was taken prisoner. Thereupon his mother, Queen Hortense, hurried to the neighbourhood of Paris under an assumed name, and with one confidential attendant. This person she sent to Dumas, to entreat him to apply to his patron, the Duke of Orleans, to know what the Court had decided with respect to the prisoner's fate. Dumas wrote forthwith for an audience; the Duke received him with a smile. "Well!" he said, "so your protégé has not succeeded in uprooting us?" "Prince, you know – ?" stammered the terrified novelist. "Do you suppose we are so badly served for our money as not to know what brings you here, and where Queen Hortense is at this very moment?" After a short pause, during which he enjoyed the embarrassment of Dumas, the Duke continued, "Tell Madame Hortense," he said, "that the Orleans do not yet feel themselves strong enough to have their Duke d'Enghien."

"It is a bitter answer, your royal highness," replied Dumas, taking his leave, "but still it will console the mother's heart."

"And now," muses Mr Stahr, "the shattered bones of the unfortunate young Duke of Orleans have long been mouldering in the grave, his statue in the court of the Louvre has been dragged down and stowed away in a corner of the Versailles Museum, and the Adventurer of Strasburg rules France as a republic, with power more unlimited than the wily Louis Philippe ever possessed over it as a monarchy! For so long as it lasts, that is to say; for methinks the feet of those who shall carry him out are already before the door. But how did he ever get in? How was it that even his candidature for the presidency was not overwhelmed and rendered impossible by that most dangerous of all opponents in France, the curse of the Ridiculous, which had already decorated with cap and bells the hero of the blunders of Strasburg and Boulogne, the trainer of the tame eagle, the special constable of London?" It has puzzled acuter politicians than Mr Stahr to reply to this question, which millions have asked. The riddle interests him, and he runs about on all sides seeking its solution. He has little success, and evidently himself mistrusts the ingenious and original conclusion to which he at last comes, that the election of Louis Napoleon was a homage to the hereditary principle. "When I recently, on my way across the plain of Satory, asked a countryman if he had given his vote to the President, his reply was, 'Of course! was he not the rightful heir, his uncle's legitimate successor?' This may sound ill for the republican education of the people of the French republic; but it is the truth. The principle of hereditary rule may be perfectly incompatible with that of 'liberty and equality,' but it is, or was, (at the time of Louis Napoleon's election,) the prevailing principle in the heads of the French rural population. 'One must know the French peasantry as I know them, who have grown up amongst them,' lately said to me the representative De Flotte, 'to find their conduct in this matter quite natural. The French peasant has only one fundamental idea in politics, and that is derived from his own family relations. That fundamental idea is the sacredness and necessity of hereditary right. That the territorial property of the father should descend to the son, or next of kin, seems to him the main condition or all human existence.'" Admitting, for argument's sake, the soundness of this statement, and that the French peasant is thus devoted to the hereditary principle, the natural inference is that, when he perceived his country to be in a state of transition, ruled by provisional intruders, and anxiously looking out for a more permanent chief of the state, he should have hoisted the white cockade, and tossed up his beaver for the Fifth Henry. Messrs Stahr and De Flotte explain why he did not do this. "The French peasant has no longer any sort of sympathy with the elder Bourbons. For him the glory of Louis XIV. is far too remote. What else he knows of them is, that they brought the foreigner into his country, and on that account he curses them." In this there is some truth. The old royalist spirit still lingers in certain departments of France, but in the country generally the Count de Chambord's partisans are rather intelligent and influential than numerous. Should he ascend the throne, it will not be in virtue of zeal for the principle of legitimacy or of personal attachment to himself, but because the nation will see in his accession the best guarantee of order and economical administration. These two things are the real wants and desires of the mass of the population. The peasant who told Mr Stahr he wished for peace and light taxation, spoke the feeling of a great majority of Frenchmen. "The dynasty of Orleans," says the professor's informant, continuing his explanation of the concurrence of circumstances which raised Louis Napoleon to the president's chair, "never enjoyed much prestige amongst the rural population, who did not forgive old Louis Philippe for having violated the principle of hereditary right." This is rather far-fetched. If the provinces cared little for Louis Philippe, it was because he had troubled himself little about them. True to his system of centralisation, Paris, to him, was France, and ungrateful Paris it was that finally abandoned and expelled him. It is unnecessary to go out of one's way to seek reasons for the fact, that when, in December 1848, the French, exhausted by nine months' anarchy and misery, and ashamed of those February follies into which a few deluded and designing men had led them, cast about for a ruler under whom they might hope for respite and breathing time, none turned a wishful or expectant eye to any member of the house of Orleans. The family had been weighed and found wanting. From the astute politician, "whose word no man relied on," and who reaped in his latter days those bitter fruits of usurpation and anarchy whose seeds he had sown in his prime, down to the youngest of the sons to whose advancement he had sacrificed his conscience and his country, and who, in the supreme hour of peril and confusion, were found utterly deficient in princely and manly qualities, in self-possession, energy, and resource, there was not one of the line whom France would trust. The time was too short that had elapsed since the picture of selfishness and incapacity had been exhibited to wondering Europe: the cause had been unable to revive from the grievous and self-inflicted shock; it lay supine and seemingly dead, awaiting the day when intrigue and hypocrisy should galvanise it into a precarious vitality. When the crisis of May 1852 arrives, we shall see what has been the effect of the complicated manœuvres of the house of Orleans, which, in December 1848, stood so low in public estimation. Then, according to Mr Stahr, Buonapartism was the only political creed that appealed to the prejudices and feelings of the French peasant, and it required no great skill to get him to write upon his election-ticket the name of the prince whom he looked upon as the rightful heir of the Emperor. "He did it of his own accord, out of a conviction that he was performing an act of justice, and that hereditary right demanded it. Other motives concurred. The forty-five-centime impost had embittered the countryman against the Republic, which had increased instead of lightening his load. Upon the Democrat-Socialists he looked distrustfully. He would have nought to say to those 'partageux' (dividers.) He cared nothing for the fine speeches of parliamentary orators. The peasant is by nature taciturn, and has little confidence in assemblies of great talkers. He was not disposed to make a stir about the freedom of the press, of which he makes no use. His political understanding did not extend beyond one wish, and that wish was, a strong government, which should secure to him the enjoyment and inheritance of his property. And who could do that better than a Napoleon – Napoleon himself, the Emperor of Béranger? – for there are many places where the country people have never believed the Emperor dead." The clever author of Jerome Paturot has expressed a similar opinion as regards the prevalence of this scarcely credible delusion amongst the uneducated classes in certain districts of France. It does not appear to be entirely confined to that country. "I myself am witness," says Mr Stahr, "that, in the year 1848, a peasant of a province of Northern Germany, on hearing of the new French revolution, and of its first consequences in Germany, remarked that, 'without doubt old Buonaparte had a finger in the pie.'" It is Mr Stahr's belief that Louis Napoleon is destined to dispel, by his inability to fulfil the expectations of the ignorant portion of his constituents, that Buonapartist prestige to which he partly owed his election, and that attachment to the hereditary principle which the professor assumes still to exist in France. "The nephew of the great Emperor," he says, "is selected by fate to disturb, if not to destroy, the idolatry with which a large portion of the French nation has hitherto regarded the name and memory of its greatest tyrant. Napoleon the Second throws a grey shadow over Napoleon the First."

If the French President receives but rude handling from the German republican, the Orleans family cannot congratulate themselves on much better treatment. His first reference to that fallen dynasty is suggested by a little book, which, at the time of its appearance, attracted some attention both in England and France. M. Louis Tirel's La République dans les Carrosses du Roi was neither calculated nor intended to please the democrats. Mr Stahr, however, is pretty fair in his appreciation of it, sneering a little at the author for taking what he calls a valet-de-chambre's view of the February revolution, but doing justice to the interest and instruction to be found in his pages, which show up the parties honteuses of that most disastrous and ill-advised political convulsion; the scandalous greed, vanity, and egotism of the adventurers and knaves who alone profited by the storm they had contributed to raise. M. Tirel, although to all appearance honest and truthful, certainly wrote like a partisan. His position and attachments were incompatible with a just estimate of circumstances. Whilst accurately describing events, he deluded himself as to the causes that led to them, and, above all, he could see no wrong in his master; could not for the life of him comprehend how it was that Louis Philippe, "who had so faithfully observed his oath to maintain the charter, and who had a majority in the Chambers," should have been ejected from his throne and kingdom. The worthy keeper of the royal carriages never attains to more than a glimmering and confused notion that the nation could scarcely be said to be represented by the majority in question, and that a moderate extension of the suffrage, accorded with a good grace, would probably have maintained the July dynasty at the helm of French affairs to this day, and for years to come. His admiration of Louis Philippe's wisdom and skill is unlimited, as is also his indignation at the ingratitude of the people. Mr Stahr loses patience at the affectionate manner in which the ex-controlleur des equipages lauds the virtues of the old "Jesuit-King," as the German irreverently styles the defunct monarch; and, provoked by Tirel's exaggerated encomiums, he retorts by the following severe but too true remarks with reference to the oft-repeated accusation of miserly hoarding, brought against Louis Philippe by Republican and Legitimist writers: – "Louis Philippe," he says, "was no avare such as Molière has drawn – no comedy-miser – but yet he was immoderately avaricious. There was no end to his demands of money for the princes of his house. He knew, or thought he knew, that money is power; and as he could not obtain enough of the latter, he restlessly strove after the former as the means to an object. He was a good father of a family, in the bourgeois sense of the word; but he had no conception of that which makes a king the father of his people. His defenders celebrate the care which this prince, denounced as grasping, expended upon the conservation of the royal palaces, the great sums which he laid out upon rich furniture, numerous attendants, brilliant equipages, and luxurious festivals – to which latter often three or four thousand guests were invited. 'How,' it is said, 'could the people tax such a sovereign with niggardliness and greed of gold?' But the people had no part or share in these enjoyments. It suffered hunger and want, whilst the higher and middle classes of the bourgeoisie revelled in these feasts, and grew rich by supplying their materials." Raised to the throne by the suffrages of the middle classes, Louis Philippe relied on them for support. He was bitterly disappointed. Scandalous and cowardly was the manner in which the men of July – those whom he had fed, pampered and decorated, favoured and preferred – deserted him in the hour of danger. The very national guards of Neuilly, who had lived and flourished in the shadow of the château walls, refused to turn out, when, in February 1848, the intendant of the castle appealed to them to protect from plunder the property of their patron and king. They had caught the contagion of that intense selfishness which was Louis Philippe's most striking characteristic. "Let those who choose go out to be shot," said the burghers of Neuilly; "we shall stop at home and take care of our houses." And assuredly the inert and unsympathising attitude of the Paris national guard contributed more than anything else to deter Louis Philippe from resisting by force the progress of the February revolutionists. The burghers were disgusted by the dilapidation of the finances, and the venality of the administration – they were disgusted with Guizot for not daring to resist the headstrong will of the old king – and they cried out for electoral reform. With a little more patience they would have achieved their desire; – over-hasty, they suddenly beheld themselves plunged into revolution. They had not foreseen it; they lacked presence of mind to repel its first inroads. And they also lacked, there can be no question, that feeling of personal attachment to the sovereign which would have prevented their standing by, tame witnesses of his dethronement. "Louis Philippe," says Mr Stahr, "never knew how to inspire an earnest and cordial attachment even in those nearest his person. The circumstances of his fall are the most speaking proof of this. His own panegyrist tells us that Louis Philippe himself had a misgiving that none loved him for his own sake. He often said to his most confidential attendants: 'You serve me faithfully, but not with the zeal and warmth which distinguished the servants of Napoleon. Their devotion to his person was unbounded.' If such was the case in the French king's prosperous days, what could he expect in the hour of adversity? M. Tirel himself proves, beyond the possibility of refutation, that, when the moment of danger arrived, the nearest personal attendants of the king thought, almost without exception, only of themselves. Not one of them troubled himself about the safety of the immense sums contained in the treasury of the Tuileries. None thought of holding in readiness the necessary means of travelling, in the possible case of the departure or flight of the king and his family; and even M. Tirel exclaims, with reference to this – 'It is difficult to credit such utter want of foresight, when they knew they were standing on a volcano.'" At Neuilly, as already mentioned, the national guard refused to turn out; whilst the servants of the royal residence busied themselves in saying their own things, leaving their master's property to be pillaged and burned by the rabble, with whose disgusting and disgraceful depredations the troops of the line did not interfere. Regulars and militia, domestics and mob, the same want of feeling was manifest in all; none showed attachment or devotion to the prince, whose star was on the decline. Mr Stahr made a pilgrimage to Neuilly, and devotes a letter to it. It was a grey, sad-looking autumn afternoon, and the road was silent and deserted along which he took his way to the favourite residence of the departed king. The impression made upon him was most melancholy. "Vous verrez de belles choses," said the porter at the lodge, as he pointed out to the Germans the way to the ruins. "Up to this time," says Mr Stahr, "nothing in Paris had reminded me that here had raged, but a very few years before, the hurricane of a revolution that shook the world, and that had swept a dynasty from the soil of France like chaff from the thrashing-floor. At Neuilly I first received this impression. They made clean work of it, those bands of incendiaries of the 28th February 1848. A single night sufficed to convert that stately building, and all its splendour, into a heap of hideous ruins… High grass now grows upon the floors of the state apartments of the destroyed king's-home. Bushes spring up around the columns, over which creepers luxuriantly twine; and the red poppy and the yellow king-cup wave their blossoms in the chambers and saloons in which, so short a time ago, the ruler of proud France paced his Persian carpets, revolving plans for the eternal consolidation of his dynasty! On the ravaged foot-paths before the windows, the melted glass of the magnificent panes has flowed down and formed a brilliant flooring. At the foot of a balcony, whose pillars still supported the remains of broken beams, a flush of pale pink harvest roses exhaled their delicate fragrance. It was an incredibly melancholy sight. The closely-locked doors and shattered windows of the wing that was saved increased the gloom of the whole impression. Everywhere the tall iron lattice-work, and the iron posts supporting lamps, are rent and broken; the statues on the flights of steps are shivered to pieces; there remain but a couple of colossal sphinxes, which gaze inquiringly out of the dark green of the shrubbery. Who shall solve their riddle – the riddle of the history of France and of mankind? Louis Philippe, wise amongst the wise, thought he had done so. Where is he now? His weary bones sleep the eternal sleep in the country of the banished kings of France."

Neuilly has become a place of pilgrimage for the friends of the fallen dynasty. A host of inscriptions, mostly in an anti-republican sense, were to be read upon the walls and pillars at the period of Mr Stahr's visit. Of several which he took the trouble to copy, one only is superior in tone and significance to the usual average of such scribblings. "High upon a broken column a firm hand had inscribed with charcoal, and in gigantic characters, these three words:

Droit du Talion. 1830. 1848

Other hands had tried to obliterate the writing, but in vain. The revengeful word 'RETALIATION' was still quite legible. And this word best expresses the feeling with which plain-dealing probity contemplates the fate of the overthrown July monarch. For here at Neuilly was it that he, a modern Richard III., played the hypocritical part of rejecting power, when the blood of the July revolution still reddened the streets of Paris. Here was it that he wrote the letter to Charles X. in which he assured him of his fidelity and devotion, when he was already extending a lustful hand towards the crown of the rightful heir. Here too, in Neuilly, was it that he spun that Spanish web, whose most secret documents Lord Palmerston carefully preserves, and which gave the world a glimpse into an abyss of moral foulness at which the soul shudders. And here, in presence of this funeral pile of his happiness and his splendour – here, before the memorial of his disgraceful and ignominious fall – here, when I called to mind his acts, I felt no touch of pity for the fallen King. But the man I did indeed pity, the husband and the father. He had loved this Neuilly. Here had he enjoyed such a measure of domestic happiness as is rarely vouchsafed to a monarch. This house had he, for many a long year, built up and decorated with that fine feeling for art and architecture which was proper to him. To this green retirement and solitude, to this remote dwelling, hidden from all eyes, he loved to withdraw. Here, where all was his own creation – where no stone was added, no tree planted, no path cut, but under his eye – exactly here, in the most sensitive spot, the blow struck him. The destruction of this house was more deeply felt by the man than was the loss of his throne by the king! Before the Count of Neuilly had left French ground, the building had ceased to exist from which he had borrowed the name. And all his wiles and stratagems, all his cunning, were as insufficient to avert, from the man and from the king, this last fated climax, as were the fortifications and bastilles with which he had surrounded the dreaded Paris."

Quitting Neuilly, Mr Stahr was startled, as well he might be, by the terms of a bill stuck upon the park-gates —

"House of Orleans, (thus it ran,) château and domain of Neuilly to let for three years with immediate possession; about one hundred and eighty acres, meadows, forest-land, &c., bordering on the fortifications!"

Wandering through the endless galleries of Versailles, Mr Stahr is naturally enough led to reflect how strange it is that Louis Philippe, the Napoleon of Peace, as his flatterers called him, and as he loved to hear himself called – the man whose motto, as his enemies constantly asserted, was "Peace at any price," and who avowedly and upon principle disliked war – should have devised and carried out the plan of a national gallery of French military fame. A merciless analyser of the citizen king's secret thoughts and motives, Mr Stahr declares this gallery to have been a speculation of "the crowned shopkeeper," – a speculation by which his dynasty was to gain strength at the expense of a national weakness. There is truth in this; but, at the same time, the professor's opinion must not here be accepted as impartial evidence. He is evidently led into unusual fervour by his holy horror of war. We suspect him of being a member of the Peace Congress – to which he in one place kindly alludes, as the humble commencement of a great movement. Like many other adherents of the political sect which proposes to itself an aim that could never possibly be attained without terrible convulsions and sanguinary conflicts, he cannot abide the sight of blood, shudders at wounds, and recoils in terror and dismay from the "slaying and murdering, singeing and burning, cutting and stabbing," depicted upon the walls of the Versailles gallery. He looks not lovingly upon this pictorial history of France, sketched from her battle-fields, and including the exploits of her innumerable warriors, from Clodwig down to Bugeaud. On the other hand, he curiously and eagerly examines the pictures illustrating the events of 1830 and Louis Philippe's accession. Of the battle-pieces he has set down some (and not altogether without reason) as mere daubs, which no one would glance at twice but for the sake of the subject. When surveying the illustrations of the July revolution, he forgets artistic criticism in his satirical account of the personages that fill the canvass, and especially of the chief actor in those scenes, Louis Philippe himself. "His arrival at the Palais Royal," says the rancorous professor, "has something sneaking about it. He is profusely adorned with tricolor ribbons, wears white trousers, a brown coat, and a round hat. He looks like a rogue who has just crept into another man's estate. But characteristic above all is the picture in which he signs the proclamation naming him Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom (July 31, 1830.) The figures are the size of life, all in plain clothes, and decorated with the tricolor. They sit round a green council-table, the coming Citizen-King in the midst of them, dressed in a brown coat with a black velvet collar and a black satin waistcoat, a large fine shirt-frill, a neatly tied white cravat, his hair carefully curled, his eyes half closed, the corners of his month lugubriously drawn down. He holds up the momentous sheet of paper, close above which the pen in his right hand hovers, and seems to ask those around him – 'Ought I then? – must I?' All eyes are fixed trustingly upon him, especially those of honest Laffitte, in the corner on the left. Sebastiani looks somewhat keener and shrewder. Never in my life did I see a picture that so perfectly represents an assemblage of Jew bankers, gathered round their leader to advise on a 'bull' or 'bear' speculation. The whole party have this Jewish calculating expression – Louis Philippe more than any of them. And this is the countenance the man has himself had perpetuated! It is a strange historical irony. All the old Bourbons, even the two last Louises and Charles X. looked noble, or at least like noblemen, in the expression of their features, compared with this essentially common physiognomy. Their faces, at any rate, expressed the decided and undeniable consciousness of high descent, whilst the predominating expression in Louis Philippe's countenance is that of a cunning shopkeeper. And this expression is everywhere the same, in all the pictures, &c. &c." There is more in the same strain. Some may be disposed to quarrel with Mr Stahr for pressing so hard upon a dead man; but, living or dead, kings are fair subjects of criticism; and, unsparing and savage as are often the professor's strictures on the character and policy of Louis Philippe, they yet are the most truthful and just of all the political portions of his book. Messrs Montalivet and Miraflores, and the other unscrupulous panegyrists of the late King of the French, would have too good a game left them if it were forbidden to reply by more exact and impartial statements to their exaggerated encomiums.

Passing from the deceased sovereign to his family, we are led to an apparently remote subject – namely, Mr Stahr's visit to Alexander Dumas, who, as is well known, was a favourite and intimate of the dukes of Orleans and Montpensier. When reviewing, a few years ago, the Paris diary of a countryman of Mr Stahr's – a gentleman of similar politics and equal discretion – we noticed an offensive practice common amongst modern German writers, many of whom, on return from foreign travel, scruple not to commit to print the most confidential conversation and minute domestic details of persons who have hospitably welcomed them, and imprudently admitted them to intimacy. No consideration of propriety checks these impudent scribblers. Delicacy and reserve are things unknown to them. The persons concerning whom they flippantly babble may dwell within a day's railroad of them, and be sure to see their books – may be equally sure to feel vexed or disgusted by their unwarrantable revelations and offensive inferences; no matter, they speak of them as though Pekin were their domicile. As regards the radical professor from Oldenburg, we sincerely trust that he may fall in, at an early day, with the martial author of the Mousquetaires, and receive from him, as guerdon for his gossip, a delicately administered estocade. We never heard whether Janin chastised Mr Carl Gutzkow, either with pen or pistol, for his slipshod and indecent chatter concerning him and Madame Janin; but we remember somebody doing it for him in the Revue des Deux Mondes, where we suspect Mr Stahr has a fair chance of being in his turn gibbeted. Here is the German professor's account of Dumas's personal appearance and private residence. It is a curious bit of miniature-painting. "In person he is tall and powerful; his movements, once unquestionably very flexible, are now characterised by an easy negligence. His bright complexion and large prominent light-blue eyes contrast with the mouth and nose, which betray his African origin. Good-nature, and a combination of intellectuality with a keen relish of life, are the most prominent characteristics of his broad round face. His thick woolly hair, now all but grey, seems to have been formerly light-coloured. He sits in a very large room on the first floor of the last house in the Avenue Frochot. His apartment is reached through a dark corridor. On the side that looks out upon the very quiet street, is a glass gallery, which serves as a greenhouse. There was nothing remarkable in it. Mignonette and heliotropes were growing in the tubs in which a few large oleander bushes were planted. Of the magnificent tropical vegetation of which report has spoken, there was no sign. The room was decorated, and divided into two parts, with brown woollen hangings. In the largest division, into which visitors are conducted, and in front of the greenhouse windows, stands a vast writing-table. Ancient and modern arms deck the walls. But of Oriental luxury there was not the least appearance. And some other apartments through which he afterwards took me, to show me his winter reception-room, were by no means so luxuriously fitted up as has been reported in Germany."

"I found his bookseller with him. 'Look well at the man,' said Dumas, 'who pays to one author a hundred thousand francs a-year. Such men are not to be seen every day.' Notwithstanding this little bit of brag, I hear that his finances are in no very brilliant state, and that the failure of his Théatre Historique, especially, threatens him with heavy losses. In the course of conversation, he humourously complained of the total absence of repose in his laborious existence, of which we easy-going, comfortable, German authors could scarcely form an idea. So many newspapers, a theatre of his own, the contract-romances, and the stipulated dramas – truly, it amounts to a considerable total. On subsequent visits, I never found his room and antechamber free from a throng of visitors – booksellers, printers, managers, actors, secretaries, and others – all of whom he knew how to despatch with great rapidity, and without interrupting the thread of our conversation for more than a few moments at a time." Conversations with so lively and versatile a genius as M. Dumas, turned, as may be supposed, on a vast variety of subjects, but that of which Mr Stahr has given us most details related to the ex-royal family of France. "In a side-room he showed us some very pretty pen-and-ink drawings – hunting subjects, by the late Duke of Orleans. This gave him opportunity to speak of his high respect for the mental endowments of the prince, with whom it is well known that he was on a footing of intimacy. 'He had wit enough for ten,' said Dumas. 'When we were five or six hommes d'esprit de Paris together,' added he, with amusing naiveté, 'it was quite impossible to distinguish which was the prince and which the wit. The prince was the incarnation of French esprit, and of the Parisian-French esprit, which includes all possible qualities. Her inability to understand and appreciate this esprit Parisien was a drawback upon the domestic happiness of the Duchess of Orleans, notwithstanding her many excellent qualities. Her heavier German nature did not harmonise with her husband's light elastic disposition. It put her beside herself when he transgressed in the presence of a third person the rules prescribed by the etiquette of little German courts.' Dumas told some interesting examples of this – examples, however, not adapted for publication, as they related to the prince's private life. The Duke of Orleans foresaw a revolution, in a republican sense, as a consequence of his father's system. His testamentary arrangements with respect to the education of his son were all made in anticipation of such an event coming to pass. In any case, he wished his wife to have nothing to do with the government of the country. The passage of his will relating to this point is conceived quite in the spirit of the words with which Homer's Telemachus consigns his mother Penelope to the society of her women. 'If, unhappily, the king's authority could not watch over my son until his majority, Helen should prevent her name being pronounced for the regency. Leaving, as it is her duty and her interest, all the cares of government to virile hands, accustomed to handle the sword, Helen should devote herself entirely to the education of our children.' The Duke of Orleans' death was pregnant with fatal consequences for the dynasty, because he, the most highly gifted of all the old king's sons, was perhaps the only one who would have been capable of giving things a different turn in the event of a conflict like the February revolution. He knew his brothers too well not to be convinced that they were unequal to such an emergency. 'Nemours,' said he to one of his confidants, 'is the man of rule and etiquette: he keeps step well, and keeps himself behind me with scrupulous attention. He will never assume the initiative.' He held the Dukes of Nemours and Aumale to be brave soldiers. Of the Prince de Joinville he said: 'He has a passion for danger: he will commit a thousand acts of brilliant imprudence, and will receive a ball in his breast at the assault of a barricade,' – a fate which Joinville escaped in February probably only by his absence from Paris. 'Now that younger sons are no longer made abbés,' continued the Duke of Orleans, referring to little Montpensier, 'I am at a loss to imagine what is to be done with them.'

"Of none of his sons was the old king more jealous," says Mr Stahr, "than of the heir to the crown. Letters found in the Tuileries in February 1848 show that he kept him in the strictest dependence, and had spies observing him wherever he was. In the year 1839 the duke complained 'that he had less power than any private citizen who had a vote at elections; that he did nothing but the commissions of the ministers; that everything was in danger, nothing gave promise of durability, and that it was impossible to say what might happen from one day to the other.' The prince, expressed himself thus whilst upon a journey, in a confidential circle of officers of rank. Two days later his words, set down in writing, were in the hands of the king. The surprising irresolution and want of presence of mind displayed by the other princes in the hour of danger, can only be accounted for by the slavish dependence in which the old monarch had kept them."

Although easy and affable in his intercourse with his friends, a certain jealous vigilance with regard to the respect due to his rank formed a feature in the character of the Duke of Orleans. The anecdote told to Mr Stahr by Dumas, as an illustration of this trait, can hardly, however, be admitted to prove undue susceptibility, but rather the prince's consciousness that his house stood upon an unstable foundation. It was at a hunting-party at Fontainebleau. The chase was very unsuccessful. The Duke of Orleans turned to an Italian nobleman, to whose family Louis Philippe had obligations of ancient date, and who on that account was on a friendly footing at court. "Well! Monsieur de – ," said the duke, "how are we hunting to-day?" "Like pigs, Monseigneur, (comme les cochons,)" was the Italian's coarse reply. The duke, evidently annoyed, said to Dumas: "And you believe our monarchy possible, when a De … dares thus to answer the heir to the throne?" Mr Stahr was interested to find that Dumas, notwithstanding his monarchical friendships and associations, believed in the necessity and durability of the republic. "It seems," said the ingenious and versatile author of Monte Christo, "as if Providence had resolved to let us try all manner of monarchies, in order to convince us that not one of them is adapted to our character and condition." Then he gave his auditors a detailed sketch of all the French monarchies previous to the Revolution of 1789. "Since that Revolution," he went on, "we have had the monarchy of Genius: it lasted ten years. We have had the restoration of the monarchy of esprit and chivalrous gallantry: it lasted fifteen years; and was succeeded by the citizen-monarchy, which lasted eighteen. What would you have us try now? This republic is bad. But a child in swaddling-clothes matures into a man." Sensibly enough spoken for a romance-writer, indulgently remarks Mr Stahr, who is always glad to obtain a suffrage in favour of republican institutions. We attach the same degree of value to M. Dumas's political vaticinations as to his Frenchified rifaccimenti of Shakspeare's plays. Shakspeare in French, as Mr Ford remarks in his Spanish Handbook, "is like Niagara passed through a jelly-bag." A miracle of degradation which reminds us to turn to a scornful and indignant chapter suggested to Mr Stahr by a certain Monsieur Michel Carré's version of Goethe's Faust, performed at the Gymnase theatre. "Goethe is unknown in France," says the Countess d'Agoult, one of the few competent French appreciators of German literature, in her Esquisses Morales et Politiques. Nothing, according to Mr Stahr, could be better fitted to confirm and perpetuate French ignorance of the great German than such dramas as that which he painfully endured at the Gymnase. According to Madame d'Agoult, her countrymen will not take the trouble to study Goethe. To do so they must first learn a language. "Why did he not write in French? He has only what he deserves, after all. How is it possible to be a German? – (comment est on Allemand?)" "If this is not exactly out-spoken," says Madame d'Agoult, "it is at least privately thought in a country where the arrogance of ignorance attains proportions unknown to other nations." "La superbe de l'ignorance," "der Uebermuth der Unwissenheit!" cries Mr Stahr in an ecstasy: "I kiss the fair lady's hand who wrote the word, for, without it, I should never have hit upon the appropriate term for this newest French atrocity of M. Michel Carré, perpetrated upon the most profound work of German genius. I am not without experience of the theatrical sufferings of our day; but such torture as was yesterday inflicted, at the Gymnase theatre, upon every German fibre in our frames, I never before in my whole life witnessed or underwent. I was prepared for little that was good, and for much that was laughable; but my expectations and fears were surpassed to an extent it was impossible to anticipate. Marsyas flayed by Apollo is no very pleasing picture, but the Belvidere Apollo flayed by a Marsyas is a spectacle which it takes all the nerve of German critical observation to endure." Mr Stahr then proceeds to dissect the drama, act by act, and almost scene by scene, with considerable acuteness and humour. The specimens of fustian he gives, the execrable French taste he exposes, fully justify the intensity of his disgust. The Gymnase drama is evidently worse than a tame translation; it is an obscene parody of Goethe's great poem. It is a compound, as Mr Stahr expresses it, of "dirt and fire – that sort of fire, namely, which is lighted by the brandy-bottle." We believe it impossible that Faust should ever be done justice to in a French version. But if translators, owing to the want of power of the French language, and to the utter absence of affinity and sympathy between it and the German, must ever fall to a certain extent, they at least may avoid degrading and distorting the tone and sentiments of the original. This M. Carré, of whom we now hear for the first time, seems to have cultivated his taste and sought his inspirations in the worst school of modern French literature, and in the orgies of Parisian rakes. The inference is inevitable from the scenes and passages described and quoted by Mr Stahr. As to the verbal spirit and fidelity of the translation, the following may serve as a specimen. "In the church-going scene, the lines, so charming in the original: —

'Mein schónes Fräulein, darf ich wagen,
Arm und Geleite anzutragen?'

are thus rendered in M. Carré's French: Oserai-je, Mademoiselle, vous offrir mon bras, pour vous conduire jusqu'à chez vous? For Gretchen's exquisitely graceful and saucy reply —

'Bin weder Fräulein, weder schön,
Kann ungeleitet nach Hause gehn!'

which so completely captivates Goethe's Faust, this Frenchman has been able to discover no better equivalent than, 'Pardon, Monsieur, je puis fort bien rentrer seule à la maison' – an answer too flat and insipid even for a Paris Lorette of the present day." Mr Stahr was tolerably well pleased with the bearing of the audience who had come to partake of this pitiable French hash. They may have felt a natural curiosity to know something about the Faust and Margaret whose acquaintance they had made in the print-shop windows, but their sympathy with the piece went no farther. Even the Rose of the Gymnase, the Rose Chéri, so cherished by the Parisian public, failed to extract applause as M. Carré's Margaret. "It is very romantic," Mr Stahr heard some of his neighbours remark, "but it is a little too German; Monsieur Goethe's poetry does not suit the French taste." Poor public! Poor Goethe! introduced to each other under such dismal auspices. It must have been a relief to Mr Stahr to quit this miserable travesty, and turn to the native drama; although even by this, judging from a letter on theatrical subjects addressed to his friend Julius Mosen, he does not appear to have been much gratified. "I know not," he says, "whether my taste for theatres is gone by, or what is the reason, but as yet I have been scarcely half-a-dozen times to the play. Beginning with the Théatre Français, I might place as a motto at the beginning of this letter the words of Courier: 'The fact is that the Théatre Français, and all the old theatres of Paris, the Opera included, are excessively wearisome.' To be sure, Rachel is not here. She is gathering laurels in Germany; and when I complained confidentially to an acquaintance that the tragedy of the Théatre Français did not move me, he endeavoured to console me by telling me of Madlle. Rachel, and of her speedy return to Paris. She stands alone, incomparable, a phenomenon. But the phenomenon is absent; and the Paris stage is consequently darkened. It is always a bad sign for the condition of an art when it thus entirely depends upon one of its professors." Mr Stahr was better pleased with the lively performances at the four Vaudeville theatres, and gives an amusing analysis of La Fille bien gardée, the little one-act piece which, for many weeks of last year, nightly drew crowds to the Théatre Montansier. It belongs to a class of dramatic trifles in which French playwrights and actors are perfect and inimitable; trifles which only grow upon French soil, and will not bear transplanting.

After his savage attacks upon Louis Philippe and the French President, it would be quite out of character if Mr Stahr – who evidently bears monarchy a grudge, and will tolerate no government that can possibly be identified with the cause of order – had not a fling at Henri Cinq. Perhaps it is because he deems the Legitimist interest less formidable to his views than the Orleanist or Buonapartist, that he adopts a different mode of attack, and exchanges ferocity for raillery. The German tongue being but indifferently adapted to the lighter manner of warfare, he glides into French, in which language he writes nearly a whole chapter. Stepping one day into a hair-dresser's rooms, he was so fortunate as to come under the hands of the master of the establishment, an eager politician and a red-hot Legitimist, voluble and communicative as only a Frenchman and a barber can be. With the very first clip of the scissors an animated conversation began, which Mr Stahr has set down so far as his memory serves him, although he much doubts that his pen has conveyed all the minuter comical touches of the dialogue. This began with the usual exordium of Frenchmen of all classes since the revolution – "You, Monsieur," said the man of wigs, "are a foreigner, and consequently uninterested in our quarrels. Tell me what you think of our situation?"

"I think," replied I, "that the President will never willingly resign power."

"But, Monsieur, what is to be hoped for from such an imbécile?"

"I do not say he will succeed; I say he will make the attempt."

"And I say that he will fail. Henry the Fifth for me! à la bonne heure! There is a man for you."

"What do you know about him? You are very anxious, then, to make tonsures?"