Thirty years ago I had been presented to him as a Dervish who had visited Central Asia and spent many years among the Turcomans, at that time held in great fear by the Persians. I now appeared before him as representative of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and was not surprised that he did not at once recognise me. When at the head of the Academicians I welcomed him in a Persian speech in the pillared hall of the Academy palace, the good Persian monarch was quite amazed and hastily turning to his courtiers, inquired, "_In kist?_" ("Who is that?"). They told him my name and function, and made some comments in a low voice, whereupon the cunning Persian exclaimed, "_Belli! belli!_" ("Of course"), "Vambéry!" He maintained (which I take the liberty to doubt) that he remembered me; but he warmly shook hands with me, and said to the Hungarian Minister standing at his side, "_Il parle bien, très bien notre langue!_" I do not wonder that my speech, in the Shirazi dialect and delivered in true Oriental style, took him by surprise, for as he afterwards told me, on the whole Continent he had not met with any scholar who could speak Persian idiomatically and without foreign accent. What did seem to me somewhat odd was a remark in his Journal (p. 378) that there were, even in Persia, few orators who for elegance and force of speech could compete with me, a compliment which struck me as particularly strange from the mouth of the Persian king. I remained three days in attendance on Nasreddin Shah, and had ample opportunity to admire the marvellous progress made by this Oriental since the time when I knew him at Teheran in 1864. Nasreddin Shah was the first sovereign of the True Believers who had learned to speak French tolerably well, and if he did make a little too much show of this accomplishment, seeing that his knowledge was but very superficial, it must be admitted that his judgment in matters of art, his knowledge of geography and palæontology, and his acquaintance with the genealogical relationships of the various kingdoms of Europe was most astonishing. In any case, he surpassed in knowledge of our countries and towns, our manners and customs, all magnates and princes of the Moslem East, not excepting even the Khedive Ismail Pasha and the late Sir Salar Jung. As we saw more of one another he did not hesitate to express his opinion about many of our social and political views. So, for instance, being an Asiatic _pur sang_ he detested Liberalism, and if it had not been for the dangerous nearness which made him turn against Russia, he would have looked upon the Czar as the model of sovereign greatness and the Russian _régime_ as the ideal form of government. Naturally, the French republic was an abomination to him, the most woeful absurdity, and he could not understand how a society where, as he maintained, no one commands and no one obeys, a land without a ruler, _i.e._, a sovereign, can possibly exist.