I heard “Les Huguenots” for the first time on the third evening of my first visit to Paris,— after a long morning spent in the indulgence of that eager appetite for sight-seeing which only confinement and inexperience can give. I had been exploring every corner of Notre Dame, and watching, with the curiosity of a newly-imported Englishman, a gipsy girl dancing in the Parvis with a crowd of picturesque figures round her, just where Esmeralda danced! And I had been roaming through the labyrinths of that strange building, the Palais de Justice, with its grim towers, and its spacious law courts, its exquisite Sainte Chapelle, and its long arcades where Law and Merchandise make so odd a mosaic, and where the grisette composedly tying her garters (as I saw her) on the step of a modiste's door, must abide the risk of being run down by some breathless advocate, with all the importance and hurry and twice the noise of the haunters of Chancery Lane and Westminster Hall.

Such a pilgrimage was certain to leave me bewildered by its novelty, and excited by thickcrowding associations to that point at which all first impressions of any work of art become indistinct and are worth little. To be honest, too, on the evening in question, I was staring at the stage, rather than listening to it; and with good cause.