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crowds, and the tasteful and brilliant displays of bronze, marble, jewels, costly silks and gossamer tissues in the shop windows. He was too often to be seen sauntering in the afternoon up and down the Passage des Panoramas, exchanging glances with the laughing Hortenses, Léonies, Dianes, and Angéliques of the Neue Gedichte, who never failed to be tripping along there. He visited the cathedrals, churches, historical monuments, and picture-galleries: he saw the exhibition of corpses,' he says, 'at the Morgue, and that other one too at the Académie Française,' which he calls a nursery for old authors grown children again. He saw too the chamber of peers, which he styles the Necropolis of the Luxembourg,' wherein he found all the mummies of perjury embalmed with the false oaths which they had sworn to all the dynasties of the Pharaohs.' And he did not fail to make queue night after night at the doors of all the theatres of Paris, one after another, theatres where the poet and the connoisseur would meet with such entertainment as could not be rivalled by all the theatres of the whole civilised world put together; and he soon became acquainted with the distinguishing excellences of the splendid graces of Mademoiselle Georges, the tragic passion of Rachel, the dashing vivacity of the immortal Dejazet, and the finished comedy-styles of Arnal and Bouffé, Debureau and Odry.

Indeed, Heine had come just at the right period of time, and at the right moment to enjoy the society and life of Paris. Moreover, his travels in Germany, England, and Italy; his poetic and æsthetic studies; the turn of his mind-all combined to prepare him for appreciating the beauty, the splendour, the art-glories, and the intellectual fascinations of the unrivalled metropolis of European taste. He at once, by means of introductions from Varnhagen and others, found, as we have said, entrance into some of the best salons of Paris. One of the salons he thus early frequented was that of Lafayette, who, as Heine relates, on his first visit to him, put into his hand at parting the Declaration of the Droits de

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l'Homme' of 1792; and through his uncle's recommendations the entrée was made easy for him into the salons of Rothschild, the great millionaire banker, whom he got to know, as he said, famillionairement, dining even sometimes with the financial Croesus tête-à-tête--a fact astounding to some of the greater as well as lesser notorieties of the financial world. But naturally the literary salons had for him a greater charm, and he became soon admitted into the fraternity of the musical world of Paris: and what a world it was at that time!

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a world in which Pasta and Malibran, Rossini and Meyerbeer, were the chief stars, around whom crowded hosts of lesser constellations, composed not only of Parisians, but of the chief artistes of every country in Europe, who flocked to Paris as to the metropolis of taste, without whose approving stamp no reputation was valid. In this world the German poet became especially intimate with Rossini and Meyerbeer. Felix Mendelssohn, the friend of his university days at Berlin, he used also to meet constantly at the commencement of his Paris life, and this not only in musical circles, but at the shop of the German booksellers, Heideloff and Campe, in the Rue Vivienne, which was a daily rendezvous at that time for travelling Germans of distinction in art and literature. At the same place he met Alexander von Humboldt and the Oriental scholar, Julius Klaproth. Here, too, he encountered Wilhelm von Schlegel, who had now become the silly old coxcomb whom he describes in his 'Confessions,' as already noticed. Besides these circles there was moreover a goodly band of refugees in Paris, of whom Börne was the recognised chief; men who, like himself, had found the political atmosphere of Fatherland dangerous to their constitution; they too had fled from visions of stone cells and fly-broth at Spandau, and had a presentient horror of iron chains on the legs, which gaolers might forget to warm in winter time. Heine, however, from the first instinctively shrank from intimate and frequent contact with these gentry, as will be seen when

we shall consider his relations with the German refugee world at Paris in treating of his famous quarrel with Börne. With his quick capacity for enjoyment, and his sympathetic poetic and artistic nature, he was in no mood for burying himself in dull and dirty haunts, amid the strong smelling pipes of unwashed German conspirators. Operas, theatres, balls, concerts, art-exhibitions, the best society in Paris, invited him, and he had the ever-moving streams of the boulevards to wander in under the bright sunshine. Such company and such scenes he preferred to herding with the envious Cassiuses and hairy unkempt Brutuses of Teutonic breed in the back dens of the faubourg Montmartre.

The impressions of life in Paris at this time, and the contrast he made of it with that of Hamburg, may be gathered from a letter to Varnhagen written at this time:-'I have lately had in Hamburg a most desolate existence. I did not feel myself secure, and since a journey to Paris had for some time dawned upon my spirit, so was I easily persuaded when a great hand beckoned for me considerately. My deepest sorrow consisted in the fact that I was obliged to leave my little family, and especially my sister's youngest child. And yet duty and prudence advised my departure. I had the choice between laying down my arms completely and a life-long conflict; and I chose the latter, and in truth not in levity of spirit. However, if at last I seized my weapons I was impelled thereto by the arrogance of strangers, by the insolence of pride of birth-in my cradle lay my line of march marked out for my whole life. It cannot be worse here for me than in my home and country, where I have nothing before me but struggle and want, and where I cannot sleep in security, and where all the sources of life are poisoned for me. Here, in truth, I am steeped in the whirlpool of events, of the waves of time, of the roaring Revolution; moreover, I now seem wholly made up of phosphorus, and while I am drowning in the wild ocean of humanity I am burning away of my own nature.'

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CHAPTER II.

HEINE AND FRENCH ART.

THIS first experience of the charms of the Parisian capital lasted for Heine three months-from the beginning of May till the beginning of August, when he went to Boulogne-surmer, to brace his spirits anew with the sea-breezes which he loved so well. On his return to the capital in the autumn he set about completing a series of articles on the Exhibition of French Paintings in the salon of 1831, which he had already commenced before leaving Paris for the seaside.

In spite of the tragic and pathetic interest of the political events of the time, Heine could not but feel emotion on making acquaintance with the masterpieces of the great modern French school of the Restoration, whose importance was not even then suspected in Germany, and was even slower to obtain recognition in other parts of Europe. Although Heine, by reason of his acquaintance with Cornelius and the artists of Munich, and by means also of his subsequent travels in Italy, was in a measure prepared for the business of art-critic, yet, as might be expected, his criticism rather turns on the ideal qualities of the pictures of which he treats than on their technical merits. That the poet was impassioned with admiration even to enthusiasm by the aspect of the productions of French artists then to be seen in the Louvre was natural enough, when we learn that Ary Sheffer then for the first time exhibited his Faust and Mar

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guerite;' that Eugène Delacroix put forward all his opulence of colour in the Revolution of July ;' that Paul Delaroche then showed his fine historic faculty of conception in the picture of the dying Richelieu in his barge on the Rhone, trailing behind him his victims Cinq Mars and De Thou, and in that of its contrast, the 'Deathbed of Mazarin,' surrounded by card-playing ladies and frivolous courtiers; and also in the imposing representation of Cromwell gazing on the features of Charles I. in his coffin. Horace Vernet, too, then for the first time exposed to public gaze his grand picture of 'Judith and Holofernes;' the deep, rich, varied, and fertile genius of Décamps was then in its noonday splendour; and the glorious picture of Léopold Robert, The Harvesters of the Campagna,' that heroic pastoral of Roman life, was then fresh from the easel, resplendent with Italian sun and colour glowing through the noble lines of classic form. These productions of the chiefs of a school greater than any since the decline of the grand period of Italian art, were accompanied with such a crowd of pictures of lesser merit as must needs have impressed a stranger with the wondrous activity of French artistic nature, and of the universality of taste in the country.

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Nevertheless the anxious state of politics all over Europe was such that political considerations were seldom absent from Heine's inind in forming his art-judgments. Delaroche's picture of Cromwell and Charles I.' necessarily called up a crowd of comparisons between Charles I. and Louis XVI., between Cromwell and Napoleon, between the wonderful similarity of the cause of the English and French Revolutions, and the quasi-legitimate Royalty in which both had resulted. He has stated in this essay that he intended to give to the world some day the conversation which he had overheard among the spectators in front of Delaroche's picture, and which he describes as being characteristic of the period; and this perhaps he has done in his 'Memoirs.' One only

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