I had wished for years to see Paris, the city that roused my most
devout feelings. As a youth I had felt a kind of reverent awe for the
French Revolution, which represented to me the beginning of human
conditions for all those who were not of the favoured among men,--and
Paris was the city of the Revolution. Moreover, it was the city of
Napoleon, the only ruler since Caesar who had seriously fascinated me,
though my feelings for him changed so much that now admiration, now
aversion, got the upper hand. And Paris was the city, too, of the old
culture, the city of Julian the Apostate, the city of the middle ages,
that Victor Hugo had portrayed in _Notre Dame de Paris_--the first book
I had read in French, difficult though it was with its many peculiar
expressions for Gothic arches and buttresses--and it was the city where
Alfred de Musset had written his poems and where Delacroix had painted.
The Louvre and the Luxembourg, the Théâtre Français and the Gymnase
were immense treasuries that tempted me. In the Autumn of 1866, when
Gabriel Sibbern started to Paris, somewhat before I myself could get
away, my last words to him: "Till we meet again in the Holy City!" were
by no means a jest.