We had a very pleasant three days in Paris ... including a most agreeable couple of hours with the Dufferins. Lord Dufferin showed me a number of relics of his Sheridan ancestry, and wound up by taking me into his special little den and telling me Persian stories with excellent grace and point! He is wild about Persian just now, and has just finished learning the whole dictionary by heart. He looks upon this as his chief _délassement_ from official work. Lady Dufferin, however, does not approve of it at all! His remarks to Humphry as to the ignorance and inexperience of the innumerable French Foreign Ministers with whom he has to do, were amusing. An interview with Berthelot (the famous French chemist and friend of Renan) was really, he said, a deplorable business. Berthelot (Foreign Minister 1891-92) knew _everything_ but what he should have known as French Foreign Minister. And Jusserand's testimony was practically the same! He is now acting head of the French Foreign Office, and has had three Ministers in bewildering succession to instruct in their duties, they being absolutely new to everything. Now, however, in Hanotaux he has got a strong chief at last. I recollect that in the course of our exploration of the Embassy, we passed through a room with a large cheval-glass, of the Empire period. Lord Dufferin paused before it, reminding me that the house had once belonged to Pauline Borghese. "This was her room and this glass was hers. I often stand before it and evoke her. She is there somewhere--if one had eyes to see!" And I thought, in the darkening room, as one looked into the shadows of the glass, of the beautiful, shameless creature as she appears in the Canova statue in the Villa Borghese, or as David has fixed her, immortally young, in the Louvre picture. But before I leave this second Roman visit of ours, let me recall one more figure in the _entourage_ of the Ambassador--a young attaché, fair-haired, with all the good looks and good manners that belong to the post, and how much else of solid wit and capacity the years were then to find out. I had already seen Mr. Rennell Rodd in the Tennant circle, where he was everybody's friend. Soon we were to hear of him in Greece, whence he sent me various volumes of poems and an admirable study of the Morea, then in Egypt, and afterward in Sweden; while through all these arduous years of war (I write in 1917) he has been Ambassador in that same Rome where we saw him as second Secretary in 1891.