reading the newspapers, discussing the debates in the Chamber and the
coming "Prophete" of Meyerbeer at the opera; women were chatting
together in the boutiques, pretty grisettes hurrying home; little
blanchisseuses, with their neatly-napkinned baskets, tripping among
the crowd; strangers watched the gay groups, paused at the windows of
tailors and jewellers, and felt the fascination of Paris. It was the
moment of high-tide of Parisian life. It was an epitome of Paris, and
Paris is an epitome of the time and of the world.

At the corner of the Palais Royal is the Comedie Francaise, and to
that we were going. There Rachel was playing. There she had recently
recited the "Marseillaise" to frenzied Paris; and there, in the vestibule,
genius of French comedy, of French intellect, and of French life, sits
the wonderful Voltaire of Houdon, the statue which, for the first time,
after the dreadful portraits which misrepresent him, gives the spectator
some adequate idea of the personal appearance and impression of the man
who moulded an age. You can scarcely see the statue without a shudder.
It is remorseless intellect laid bare. The cold sweetness of the aspect,
the subtle penetration of the brow, the passionless supremacy of a figure
which is neither manly nor graceful, fill your mind with apprehension and
with the conviction that the French Revolution you have seen is not the
last.

The curtain rises, and Paris and France roll away. A sad, solitary
figure, like a dream of tragic Greece, glides across the scene. The
air grows cold and thin, with a sense of the presence of lost
antiquity. The feeling of fate, vast, resistless, and terrible, rises
like a suffocating vapor; and the hopeless woe of the face, the
pathetic dignity of the form, assure you, before she speaks, that this
is indeed Rachel. The scenery is poor and hard; but its severe