“When I arrived in the Rue de Cléry, where Madame de Krudener then resided, I found the street impassable—a crowd of carriages of every description filling it from one end to the other. I immediately perceived among the number admitted into the courtyard the plain green carriage and unpretending liveries of the Emperor Alexander. It is an extraordinary thing how time and place will suddenly tend to the development of certain sentiments, which, even if they have existed before, have, perhaps, been rather repulsed than encouraged. Thus it was with me on the night in question. No sooner had I beheld the pressure of the crowd, the difficulty of obtaining admittance into the sanctum of Madame de Krudener, than I was seized with an indescribable longing to press forward, and a regret that I had never been to her receptions before. It was some time before I could force my way through the dense mass of visitors which obstructed the staircase. However, in all matters, great or small, everything happens, to those who know how to wait with patience, and my turn did come in due course, and I also found myself ushered into the mighty presence. How different did I find this _huitaine_ from those I had witnessed at her former residence! “The whole scene of former days flashed upon me, as I made my way through the rooms towards the sanctorum wherein the divinity of the place sat enshrined in mysterious and hallowed seclusion. When I had last beheld her, before her departure for Riga, she was in the bloom of youth and beauty; her complexion, of exquisite fairness, bespoke her northern origin, while the delicate and graceful form bore all the softness of the south. The long ringlets of golden hair which shaded her face in such rich luxuriance had been the theme of many an ode and sonnet, while her grace in the dance had made many an unhappy ‘Gustave’ among the sad _incroyables_ of the day. “I now found her, after a lapse of years, the same in all things, and yet, how strangely altered! Her youth was gone; and her beauty, of which she still possessed some little share, no longer satisfied that ardent thirst of admiration, that morbid, eager craving for popularity, which had possessed her soul from her childhood upwards. She had been greeted with divine honours, and divinity she would insist upon remaining, in spite of the change which had taken place both in herself and in her worshippers. She had exchanged her pedestal of alabaster, wreathed with roses, for one of mere painted paste-board, and only maintained her _àplomb_ upon its narrow surface by the strangest efforts and contortions. It was a curious scene; such a one as I should have thought it impossible to see enacted in the nineteenth century.