But I have white hair: so forgive the Baroness von Hohenhausen for having sketched me in my good days, although already she grants me years. The portrait, besides, is very handsome; but I owe it to my sincerity to say that it is not like. The house Unter den Linden was much too large for me, cold and dilapidated: I occupied only a small part of it. Among my colleagues, the ministers and ambassadors, the only one worthy of note was M. d'Alopeus[82]. I have since met his wife and daughter[83] in Rome with the Grand-duchess Helen[84]: if the latter had been in Berlin instead of the Grand-duchess Nicholas, her sister-in-law, I should have been better pleased. M. d'Alopeus, my colleague, had a gentle mania for believing himself to be adored. He was persecuted by the passions which he inspired: "Upon my word," he used to say, "I don't know what there is about me; wherever I go the women follow me. Madame d'Alopeus became obstinately attached to me." He would have been an excellent Saint-Simonian. Private society has its own aspect, like public society: in the former, it is always attachments formed and broken off, family affairs, deaths, births, private sorrows and pleasures; the whole varied in appearance according to the centuries. In the other, it is always change of ministers, battles lost or won, negociations with Courts, kings who disappear, or kingdoms that fall. Under Frederic II.[85] Elector of Brandenburg, surnamed "Iron-tooth"; under Joachim II.[86], poisoned by the Jew Lippold[87]; under John Sigismund[88], who added the Duchy of Prussia to his Electorate; under George William[89], "the Irresolute," who, losing his fortresses, allowed Gustavus Adolphus[90] to chat with the ladies of the Court and said, "What is to be done? They have guns;" under the Great Elector[91], who found nothing in his States but "heaps of ashes, which prevented the grass from growing[92]," who gave audience to the Ambassador of Tartary, "whose interpreter had a wooden nose and slit ears;" under his son, the first King of Prussia[93], who, startled out of his sleep by his wife, took the fever with fright and died of it: under all these reigns, the different Memoirs display only a repetition of the same adventures in private life. [Sidenote: The House of Hohenzollern.]