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. ON THE TRACK OF THE REVIEWER. A TRUE STORY OF REVENGE, CONNECTED WITH THE FIRST PUBLICATION OF "JANE EYRE." BY DOCTOR WILLIAM WRIGHT.