At the time of his first stay in Paris, he had the privilege of inaugurating the famous Sovereigns' Palace, which the government had fitted up in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne for the entertainment of its royal visitors. The house was a comparatively small one; on the other hand, it was sumptuously decorated. The national furniture-repository had sent some of the finest pieces to be found in its historic store-rooms. In fact, I believe that the Shah slept in the bed of Napoleon I and washed his hands and face in the Empress Marie-Louise's basin; things that interested him but little. Great memories were a matter of indifference to him; he infinitely preferred futile realities in the form of useless objects, whose glitter pleased his eye, and of more or less harmonious sounds, whose vibrations tickled his ears. His tastes were proved on the day of his arrival by two quick decisions: he ordered to be packed up for Teheran the grand piano which adorned his drawing-room and the motor-car which awaited his good pleasure outside, after hearing the one, trying the other and lavishly paying for both. He would not be denied. His amazement was great when he visited the exhibition for the first time. The wonderful cosmopolitan city that seemed to have leapt into existence in the space of one of the thousand and one nights of the Persian legend stirred his eastern imagination, strive though he might to conceal the fact. The splendour of the exotic display exercised an irresistible attraction upon him; the glass-cases of jewellery also fascinated his gaze, although he himself, doubtless without realising it, was a perambulating shop-window which any jeweller might have longed to possess. On his long Persian tunic with its red edges and ample skirts creased with folds he wore a regular display of precious stones and one did not know which to admire the most, the gleaming sapphires that adorned his shoulder-straps, the splendid emeralds, the exquisite turquoises that studded the baldrick and the gold scabbard of his sword, the four enormous rubies that took the place of the buttons of his uniform, or the dazzling and formidable diamond, the famous Daria-Nour, the Sea of Light, fastened on to his _Khola_, the traditional head-dress, whence jutted like a fountain of light a quivering aigrette in brilliants. Thus decked out, Muzaffr-ed-Din was valued at thirty-four million francs net; and even then he was far from carrying the whole of his fortune upon his person: I have in fact been assured that, in the depths of the iron trunk of which four vigilant Persians had the keeping, there slumbered an equal number of precious stones, no less fine than the others and content to undergo the rigour of a temporary disgrace. At all events, in the guise in which he showed himself in public, he was enough to excite the admiring curiosity of the crowds.