What I Remember, Volume 2 by Thomas Adolphus Trollope
page 52 of 379 (13%)
page 52 of 379 (13%)
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Poland, dined with us. He is eighty-four. When he said that he had
conversed with the Duc de Richelieu, I started as if he had announced himself as the Wandering Jew. But, in fact, he had had, when a young man, an interview with the Duc, then ninety. He was, Nymzevitch told me, dreadfully emaciated, but dressed very splendidly in a purple coat all bedizened with silver lace. He received me, said the old ex-Chancellor, with much affable dignity."' Then comes a breakfast with Pepe, at which I met the President Thibeaudeau, "a grey old man who makes a point of saying rude, coarse, and disagreeable things, which his friends call dry humour. He found fault with everything at the breakfast table." Then a visit to the Chamber (where I heard Soult, Dupin, and Teste speak, and thought it "a terrible bear-garden)" is followed by attendance at a sermon by Athanase Coquerel, the Protestant preacher whose reputation in the Parisian _beau monde_ was great in those days. He was, says my diary, "exceedingly eloquent, but I did not like his sermon;" for which dislike my notes proceed to give the reasons, which I spare the, I hope grateful, reader. Then I went to hear Bishop Luscombe at the Ambassador's chapel, and listened to "a very stupid sermon." I seem, somewhat to my surprise as I read the records of it, to have had a pronounced taste for sermons in those days, which I fear I have somehow outgrown. But then I have been very deaf during my later decades. Bishop Luscombe may perhaps however be made more amusing to the reader than he was to me in the Embassy chapel by the following fragment of his experience. The Bishop arrived one day at Paddington, and could not find his luggage. He called a porter to find it for him, telling |
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