for Berlin. I was
quite curious to see him.

One day I stepped into Rey's perfumery shop to buy some cologne water.
The rooms were crowded with fashionable ladies looking over the
glittering and fragrant assortment of _savons de toilette_, _pates
d'amandes_, _huiles essentielles_, _eaux de vie aromatisees_, etc. While
making my purchase, a very handsome fellow came in who excited unusual
attention. His toilette _recherchee_, his noble but modest air made one
look at him again and again. He spoke with Rey in a voice so harmonious
and in such French as one does not hear every day even in Paris. I
heard a lady whisper to another: "Ah, voila qui est parlez Francais
(that is the way to speak French)." The stranger was certainly
_somebody_, or so many furtive glances would not have been cast at him.
I might, by inquiry, easily have ascertained who he was, but I found a
kind of pleasure in prolonging my curiosity. The Emperor Nicholas of
Russia was daily expected. He was supposed to be the handsomest man in
the world. But he was six feet two, taller than this person. The Grand
Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin had arrived the previous afternoon; but, it
seemed to me, no German could speak French with just that modulation.
The Prince de Joinville was expected. Perhaps it was he.

"Will you kindly give yourself the trouble to send the box to M.
Delille, Friedrich strasse 30?"

Ah ha! _Le voila!_ There was my man. Strange I had not thought of him.

I had a season ticket at the French theatre for the purpose of learning
French, and I had been as much entertained as instructed (I mean
instructed in the language). Every one knows a Frenchman can infuse airy
elegance into a button, bestow a marketable value upon a straw, breathe
_esprit_ into a feather, and make ten dishes out of a nettle-top. So the
poet can transform any incident into an attractive vaudeville. The
tender _situation dramatique_, the humorous _coup de theatre_, _the jeu
d'esprit_ sparkling up into music, the elevated sentiment, the merciless
exposure of vice and folly, the purest and noblest morality, largely
mixed with an ostentatious ridicule of every sacred truth, and an
absolute disregard of every principle of decency and duty, give strange
glimpses into French social life.

As a school for the French student, however, the theatre is a useful
institution. For French has got to be learned somehow or other. A
dancing master of my acquaintance used always to commenc