Jules Janin, the sparkling "J. J." of the _Journal des Débats_, and the grand seigneur of the Parisian _feuilletonistes_, leads the most loitering, pleasant life, and grows merry and fat thereby. He sits upon a luxurious ottoman, wrapped in a gorgeous _robe de chambre_, by the fire-place of his beautifully adorned study, and there among his books and bijoux of taste and art, gives audience to all the world. He has visits without end. He gives instruction and advice, hears all that every body has to say, applauds extravagantly, as he writes, all things in this world and some more, until it is time to go to dinner, or to see a new vaudeville. He has beside a beautiful wife, and suffers with the gout. Could his cup be fuller? The poet Beranger, too, who seems to Hiller the songfullest of song-writers, charmed him by the gravity, and sweetness, and nobility of his character. Beranger received him quietly at Passy, near Paris, where he resides, a hale old man of more than seventy years. His hair is white, but his face has the freshness of blooming health. In his features there is a remarkable blending of geniality and intelligent sharpness. They are largely moulded, and their general expression is as generous, fine, and graceful as his verses. The perfect simplicity of his household is very striking. The only hints of any luxury are some medallion portraits, among which Hiller observed Napoleon and Lamartine. Yet this severity is so evidently the result of taste and not of poverty, that it has no unpleasant effect. The beauty and richness of his conversation filled his visitor with the greatest regret that he could not record it all. His first great remembrance is the destruction of the Bastille. His essay in literature was by the songs which circulated universally in manuscript before they were printed. But his literary ambition was toward works of great scope and extent, and it was not until after thirty years of age that he felt distinctly what he could do best. Of his songs he said, "I present to myself a song, as a great composition--I sketch a complete plan, beginning, middle, and end, and make the refrain the quintessence of the whole." While Beranger was finding a letter, he opened a drawer, in which Hiller saw scraps of song and sketches of poems, which he longed to seize, as a wistful boy would grab at the money piles in a banker's window. The following is the letter in which Beranger speaks of the Marseillaise: "I thank you, Madame, for the pleasant letter which you addressed to me. It has revealed to me a noble heart, and although I do not believe such hearts as rare as many say, it is always a fair fortune to meet them.