I.
I had wished for years to see Paris, the city that roused my most devout feelings. As a youth I had felt a kind of reverent awe for the French Revolution, which represented to me the beginning of human conditions for all those who were not of the favoured among men,--and Paris was the city of the Revolution. Moreover, it was the city of Napoleon, the only ruler since Caesar who had seriously fascinated me, though my feelings for him changed so much that now admiration, now aversion, got the upper hand. And Paris was the city, too, of the old culture, the city of Julian the Apostate, the city of the middle ages, that Victor Hugo had portrayed in Notre Dame de Paris--the first book I had read in French, difficult though it was with its many peculiar expressions for Gothic arches and buttresses--and it was the city where Alfred de Musset had written his poems and where Delacroix had painted. The Louvre and the Luxembourg, the Théâtre Français and the Gymnase were immense treasuries that tempted me. In the Autumn of 1866, when Gabriel Sibbern started to Paris, somewhat before I myself could get away, my last words to him: "Till we meet again in the Holy City!" were by no means a jest.