It was a great success, whether by the Duke de Morny or by Offenbach, and was the funniest thing I ever saw. Every one was roaring with laughter, and when the delighted audience called for "l'auteur," the Duke came out leading Offenbach, each waving his hand toward the other, as if success belonged to him alone, and went off bowing their thanks together. Apropos of the Duke de Morny, he said of himself: "I am a very complicated person. Je suis le fils d'une reine, frère d'un Empereur et gendre d'un Empereur, et tous sont illégitimes." It does sound queer! But he really is the son of Queen Hortense (his father being Count Flahaut); he is in this way an illegitimate brother of Napoleon III., and his wife is the daughter of the Emperor Nicholas of Russia. There you have a complicated case. My young sister-in-law has just married Count Hatzfeldt, of the German Embassy (second secretary). He is very good-looking without being handsome, and belongs to one of the most distinguished families in Germany. Countess Mercy-Argenteau appeared, comet-like, in Paris, and although she is a very beautiful woman, full of musical talent, and calls herself une femme politique, she is not a success. The gentlemen say she lacks charm. At any rate, none of the élégantes are jealous of her, which speaks for itself. She is not as beautiful as Madame de Gallifet, nor as élégante as Countess Pourtales, nor as clever as Princess Metternich.
Madame Musard, a beautiful American, has a friendship (en tout déshonneur) with a foreign royalty who made her a present of some— what he thought valueless—shares of a petroleum company in America. These shares turned into gold in her hands.
The royal gentleman gnashes his false teeth in vain, and has scene after scene with the royal son, who, green with rage, reproaches him for having parted with these treasures. But the shares are safely in the clutches of papa in New York, far away, and furnishing the wherewithal to provide his daughter with the most wonderful horses and equipages in Paris. She pays as much for one horse as her husband gains by his music in a year, and as for the poor prodigal prince, who is overrun with debts, he would be thankful to have even a widowed papa's mite of her vast wealth. Another lady, whose virtue is some one else's reward, has a magnificent and much- talked-of hotel in the Champs Élysées, where there is a staircase worth a million francs, made of real alabaster. Prosper Mérimée said: "C'est par là qu'on monte à la vertu."
Her salons are filled every evening with cultured men of the world, and they say that the most refined tone reigns supreme—that is more than one can say of every salon in Paris.
I am taking lessons of Delle Sedie. He is a delightful teacher; he is so intelligent and has such beautiful theories, and so many of them, that he takes up about half the time of my lesson talking them over.
This is one of the things he says: "Take your breath from your boots." It sounds better said in French: Prenez votre respiration dans vos bottines. I don't think he realizes what he says or what he wants me to do. When I told him that I had sung somewhere unwillingly, having been much teased, he said: "You must not be too amiable. You must not sing when and what one asks. There is nothing like being begged. You are not a hand- organ, pardieu, that any one can play when they like." And this sort of talk alternates with my songs until time is up, when off I run or go, feeling that I have learned little but talked much. However, sometimes I do feel compensated; for when, to demonstrate a point, he will sing a whole song, I console myself by thinking that I have been to one of his concerts and paid for my ticket.
Yesterday I received the inclosed letter from the Duke de Morny, inviting us to go with him in his loge to see a new play called "Le déluge." It was not much of a play; but it was awfully amusing to see. Noah and his three sons and his three daughters-in-law marched into the ark dragging after them some wiry, emaciated débris of the Jardin des Plantes, which looked as if they had not eaten for a week. The amount of whipping and poking with sticks which was necessary to get them up the plank was amazing; I think they had had either too few or too many rehearsals. But they were all finally pushed in. Then commenced the rain—a real pouring cats-and- dogs kind of rain, with thunder and lightning and the stage pitch-dark. The whole populace climbed up on the rocks and crawled about, drenched to the skin, and little by little disappeared. Then, when one saw nothing but "water, water everywhere," the ark suddenly loomed out on top of the rocks (how could they get it up there?), and the whole Noah family stepped out in a pink-and-yellow sunset, and a dear little dove flew up to Noah's hand and delivered the olive branch to him. The dove was better trained than the animals, and had learned his rôle very well.
On coming out of the theater, we found, instead of the fine weather we had left outside, a pouring rain which was a very good imitation of the deluge inside. And none of us had an umbrella!
You see what the Duke de Morny writes: "I am making a collection of photographs of the young and elegant ladies of Paris. I think that you ought to figure among them, and though it is not an equal exchange, I am going to ask you to accept mine and give me yours." And he brought it to me last night.
An invitation for the ball at St. Cloud for the King of Spain, who is now in Paris to inaugurate the new rail road to Madrid, and another ball at the Tuileries will keep us busy this week.