The people who come to see him--the deputies, the ministers, the
ambassadors, the writers, the artists, the simple _gens du monde_--come
more often not to his office, but to his warm and hospitable home.
Here, in one of the streets that wind about the Star Arch at the head
of the Champs Elysees, he receives all the world, rather as the
charming gentleman than the historic journalist de Blowitz. The
centre--I must add the admired centre--of a devoted family circle, he
discourses at his dinner-table of the serious events of the day,
volubly, picturesquely, and with conviction. Yet he is always ready to
listen, and even to alter his opinions at a moment's notice, though
that notice must be good. While he himself makes the coffee, the talk
becomes less exacting and more general. Often he tells you of his
pictures, and points out to you the panels set into the wall of the
room, works of his friends, great canvases by M. Clairin or Mme. Sarah
Bernhardt; and one, a sunny view of the Norman house on the cliff, by
M. Duphot. After dinner in the private study, with its high walls
covered with paintings and souvenirs and autograph photographs of the
greatest names of France, you smoke in the arms of your easy-chair,
the wood fire burning brightly in an ample chimney; while your host,
propped by divan cushions, and with one leg curled under him, drops
grandly into pleasant reminiscences. One has visions of Bagdad. After
an hour like this, you wonder when M. de Blowitz works. But he has been
working all the time. He has been thinking in one half of a very
capacious brain and talking from another. The chances are that he will
have planned a column article for the "Times" newspaper, left you for
a half hour to rummage in his books while he dictates the article,
telephoned for his carriage to await him at nine o'clock in the court
below, and asked you to accompany him to the opera--all before he has
finished his cigar. But then the cigar is a remarkably good one, and
knows not, as is the case with ambassadorial nicotine, the protective
customs of France.
Life means to M. de Blowitz a mental activity and alertness that never
sleep. Yet he is always amiable, tolerating everything except
stupidity. He is a journalist by "natural selection." But that, in the
Europe of his time, and given the accidents of his fortune, made him
the diplomatist that he has been and is. He can keep a secret as well
as tell one. I repeat, he disproves that masterly theory of Taine, who
drove facts like wild horses into a corral in order, having lassoed
them, to tame them to his own uses; for, like Taine himself, he has
made his own _milieu_, created his own series of facts, far more truly
even than he is himself the striking and delightful resultant of
others that have gone before.