How well I remember another beauty walking up that staircase; Greuze’s Crûche Cassée in person, a frightened child of seventeen, with great, wondering eyes new to the world which one day she was to command! Among the elder women notable were the three glorious Sheridan sisters, Mrs. Norton, to look upon whom was a joy, to talk with her an education. Lady Dufferin, who seemed to be an incarnation of one of her own poems: “Oh! Bay of Dublin, my heart your troublin’, Your beauty haunts me like a fever dream,” and the Duchess of Somerset, the lovely Queen of the Eglinton Tournament, whose witty sayings ran round the town like a veritable _feu follet_. Of course the very pick of the diplomatic body was represented. Count Apponyi, the Austrian ambassador, a grand representative of the proud Hungarian noblesse—his wife, a Russian by birth, great amongst great ladies; the Persignys, he the close and well-beloved friend of Louis Napoléon, and his wife—a delightful madcap—a grand-daughter of Marshal Ney—the _brave des braves_—were the most popular of the Ambassadors. D’Azeglio, tall, handsome and rather pompous, the intimate friend of the Shaftesburys, was always a marked figure. Count Nicholas Pahlen, brother of the hero of the conspiracy against the Emperor Paul in 1801—a man of great stature, though bowed by age, pale, stony-eyed and rather grim-looking, with a most surprising knowledge of the family histories of all Europe, must be famous for having, though a foreigner, by his influence forbidden smoking in the morning-room of the St. James’s Club for something like a quarter of a century—indeed, so long as he lived. Another great character was old Count Sztreletzki—a great traveller, diner-out and raconteur. He had a capital story which he used to tell, interlarded, as all his talk was, with little jerky “H’m! H’m’s!” given in what the Chinese call the “rising tone,” about the Duc de Malakoff who preceded the Duc de Persigny’s second appointment as French Ambassador.