Even at the present day, France is still the refuge of the most intellectual and refined culture in Europe, it remains the high school of taste: but one must know where to find this France of taste. The _North-German Gazette_, for instance, or whoever expresses his sentiments in that paper, thinks that the French are “barbarians,”—as for me, if I had to find the _blackest_ spot on earth, where slaves still required to be liberated, I should turn in the direction of Northern Germany.… But those who form part of _that select_ France take very good care to _conceal themselves_; they are a small body of men, and there may be some among them who do not stand on very firm legs—a few may be fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids; others may be enervated, and artificial,—such are those who would fain be artistic,—but all the loftiness and delicacy which still remains to this world, is in their possession. In this France of intellect, which is also the France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is already much more at home than he ever was in Germany, his principal work has already been translated twice, and the second time so excellently that now I prefer to read Schopenhauer in French (—he was an _accident_ among Germans, just as I am—the Germans have no fingers wherewith to grasp us; they haven’t any fingers at all,—but only claws). And I do not mention Heine—_l’adorable Heine_, as they say in Paris—who long since has passed into the flesh and blood of the more profound and more soulful of French lyricists. How could the horned cattle of Germany know how to deal with the _délicatesses_ of such a nature!—And as to Richard Wagner, it is obvious, it is even glaringly obvious, that Paris is the very _soil_ for him, the more French music adapts itself to the needs of _l’âme moderne_, the more Wagnerian it will become,—it is far enough advanced in this direction already.—In this respect one should not allow one’s self to be misled by Wagner himself—it was simply disgraceful on Wagner’s part to scoff at Paris, as he did, in its agony in 1871.… In spite of it all, in Germany Wagner is only a misapprehension.—who could be more incapable of understanding anything about Wagner than the Kaiser, for instance?—To everybody familiar with the movement of European culture, this fact, however, is certain, that French romanticism and Richard Wagner are most intimately related. All dominated by literature, up to their very eyes and ears—the first European artists with a _universal literary_ culture,—most of them writers, poets, mediators and minglers of the senses and the arts, all fanatics in _expression_, great discoverers in the realm of the sublime as also of the ugly and the gruesome, and still greater discoverers in passion, in working for effect, in the art of dressing their windows,—all possessing talent far above their genius,—virtuosos to their backbone, knowing of secret passages to all that seduces, lures,