I cannot close my journals of Paris without desultorily stringing together a few more of the contrasts and varieties of life and opinion which it is possible to embrace there within a small compass of time, if the world of people — not things — be entered. When the Stradella breakfast I have already mentioned broke up, one of its fashionable patrons of art was bound for the Arsenal—another to inquire after the well-doing of his brood mares. M. le Prince—, resolved to make a musical day of it, departed for one of M. Tilmant's delightful matinées, where some of the best chamber-music in Paris was that season to be heard. My flight took me further, in every sense of the word; yet, within half an hour, I was walking in the leafless alleys of Le Jardin des Plantes, as busily engaged among the traces left by its departed master-spirit, Cuvier, as if, so shortly before, I had not been entangled among the duets, choruses, and finales of the new opera, and the just-discovered chemical contrivance which was to get up a stage sunset, — like Nattier's rose, fifty times more beautiful than the reality.

I lingered late in Le Jardin, and left it all natural history. Dinner took me back, from the wonders of the vegetable and animal world, to the wonder of the operatic hemisphere.