XXX.
HOMEWARDS.

My next visit in Constantinople was to Aali Pasha, the Grand Vizier of that time, to whom I intended to report on the political condition of Persia and of Central Asia. On my way from Pera to Constantinople—I mean to say to the offices of the Porte—I met with many of my previous acquaintances without being recognized by any one. The same happened with me on my passage through the corridor of that large building of the Sublime Porte, and it was only in consequence of my having been announced, that Aali Pasha was able to recognize in me the former Reshid Effendi—my official name in Turkey—the man whom he supported in his linguistic studies by lending him rare manuscripts out of his collection. He received me with great friendliness, and insisted on my staying in Constantinople, but, politely declining, I hurried back to the port in order to be in due time for departure of the vessel of the Austrian Lloyd Company bound for Kustendje. On arriving at the port near Fyndykly, I had to fulfil a most unpleasant duty, namely, to dismiss my faithful Tartar, who had accompanied me from Khiva to the shore of the Bosphorus—to say a final good-bye to the sincere and honest young man, who had shared with me all the fatigues and privations of my dangerous journey homewards from the banks of the Oxus, who never showed the slightest sign of discontent, and who really had become like a brother to me. It was an unspeakably painful moment of my life! I handed over to him nearly all my ready cash, keeping only enough to pay for my food until I arrived at Pesth—for the passage was free. I gave him all my dresses, my equipment, &c., made him a long speech as to his behaviour during his further journey to Mecca and concerning his way backward to Khiva; and I had just extended my arms to embrace him, when he burst out in a torrent of tears and said, "Effendi! forgive me, but I cannot separate from you. The sanctity of the holy places is certainly a much beguiling object; to see the tomb of our Prophet is worth a whole life; but I cannot leave you, I cannot go alone! I am ready to renounce all the delights of this and of the future world; I am ready to part even with my home, but I cannot separate from you." The reader may fancy my great astonishment when I heard the ci-devant young theological student of Central Asia speaking these words; and I said to him, "My dear friend, do you know that I am going to the country of unbelievers, to Frengistan, where the climate, the water, the language, the manners and customs of the different people will be utterly strange to you, and where you will find yourself speedily at an extraordinary distance from your own home, and will have to remain eventually, without any hope of revisiting again in your life your paternal seat in Khiva? Consider well what you are doing, for repentance will be too late, and I should not like to be the cause of your misfortune!" The poor Tartar stood pale and dejected for a few moments, the great struggle in his soul being noticeable only by the fiery rolling of his eyes; he pressed his lips spasmodically, and then burst out in the following words, "Believer or unbeliever, I care not which, wherever you go I go with you. Good men cannot go to bad places. I have implicit faith in your friendship, and I trust in God that he will take care of us both." Standing thus in the midst of my confusion, I heard the ringing of the bell at the vessel. The time for further consideration and argumentation was gone. I took my luggage and the Tartar on board the steamer, and no sooner had we arrived than the anchors were weighed; and away we steamed through the Bosphorus on the Black Sea to Kustendje.

My journey up the Danube to Pesth in the month of May, 1864, was full of delight and interest. By every step which brought me nearer to the frontier of Hungary, I met new friends and fresh admirers, for the news of my successful travels in Central Asia had already spread throughout Europe, and had in particular roused the attention of my countrymen, with whom the dim lore of their Asiatic descent is not all unknown, and who were now most anxious to get fresh information from the seat of their ancestors, the cradle of the Magyar race. On my arrival in Pesth, I was met first by Baron Joseph Eötvös, the Vice-President of our Academy, my noble-hearted patron, who had assisted me in my juvenile struggles, who had encouraged me to my travels, and who was now full of joy in seeing me safe, although he was much worn-out by fatigues at home. Baron Eötvös, the greatest literary genius of Hungary of the present century, the author of the brilliant philosophical work "The Reigning Ideas of the Nineteenth Century," did not at all conceal from me the difficulties I should yet have to contend with. "Go at once to London," he said, "and being provided, as you are, with letters of introduction to the leading personalities, you are almost sure of a warm reception, and of a real acknowledgment of your merits." Well, this plan had matured in me since my leaving Teheran, where the late Sir Charles Alison, and particularly Mr. Thompson, the present British Minister at the Persian Court, had likewise given to me similar suggestions. LONDON.I therefore took the firm decision to go to England as soon as possible—I mean to say as soon as I got the necessary means for the journey. This equipment proved, however, not an easy task. Marks of recognition in the papers, invitations to dinner-parties, &c., were not wanting on my arrival at Pesth; but the funds for my journey to London were not so easily got, and I was obliged to leave my Tartar behind in the care of a friend and to proceed alone to England. It was certainly a great pity not to be able to bring Mollah Ishak—this was the name of the Tartar—to the banks of the Thames, for he would have made a capital figure at Burlington House, before the Royal Geographical Society; but I had to accommodate myself to imperious necessity, and taking with me only my notes and a few Oriental manuscripts, I left Hungary towards the end of May, and proceeded without stopping to England.

XXXI.
IN ENGLAND.

With these and similar feelings I spent my first days in the English metropolis. My first care was to hand over the letters of introduction I got in Teheran to those distinguished savants and politicians who were connected with Central Asia, and who had a pre-eminent interest in the results of my travels. SIR HENRY RAWLINSON.My first visit was to Sir Henry Rawlinson, who was then, and is even now, the greatest living authority on all scientific and political questions associated with Central Asia. He received me in a most affable manner in his house in Berkeley Street, Berkeley Square, where he was living at that time; and although I was able to lead an English conversation, still for the sake of better fluency I preferred Persian, of which Sir Henry, late ambassador of Great Britain in Persia, was a perfect master, and which he really handled with exquisite refinement. The topic of our conversation was of course Bokhara, Khiva, Herat, and Turkestan, places of which the learned decipherer of the cuneiform inscriptions of Behistan had an astounding store of information. My details about the capture of Herat by Dost Mohammed Khan, about the campaign of the Emir of Bokhara against Kokhand in favour of Khudayar Khan, and particularly the rumours I heard about the approach of the Russian detachment under Tchernayeff, were the topics in which he seemed most interested. It was a kind of cross-examination which I had to go through; and after a conversation of nearly an hour's length, I took leave with the full conviction that my first début was not an unsuccessful one. SIR RODERICK MURCHISON.The next call I made was upon Sir Roderick Murchison, the President of the Royal Geographical Society at that time, whose house, at 16, Belgrave Square, gave me for the first time an idea of the comfort and luxury surrounding an English literary man of distinction. I need scarcely say that Sir Roderick, whose amiability is world-wide known, received me, not like a foreigner introduced to him by his friend, but like a fellow-traveller—as became the good-hearted patron of all those whose efforts were directed towards the furthering of geographical knowledge. He did not care much about the languages, the manners, and the habits of Asiatic people, but rather about orographical and hydrographical facts; and he actually showed some disappointment on hearing from me that I neither brought cartographical sketches nor specimens of the geological formations. Having been asked whether I had brought some drawings with me, I answered not quite to his satisfaction, that I carried only a small pencil not larger than the half of my thumb with me, concealed under the wadding of my dervish dress, and that if people had noticed my making any use of this contrivance, I certainly should not have had the pleasure of my present interview with him. The good old man was unable to realize the great dangers I ran in my disguise, for he always thought of his own journey to the Ural, executed under the princely protection of the Emperor of Russia—he being provided with ample means from home. The topic which he most decidedly shunned was politics; for whenever I touched the question of the Russian approach to the frontiers of India, and of the very near term of Russian encroachment upon Central Asia, he immediately said smilingly, "Oh, you must not believe that; the Russians are a nice people; their Emperor is an enlightened, noble prince, and the Russian plans in Asia cannot mean mischief against the interests of Great Britain." As to the enlightened character of the late Russian Emperor, nobody had any doubt. His esteem and consideration for science had an eloquent symbol in the pair of magnificent malachite vases which were in the house of Sir Roderick Murchison, who was much liked at the Court on the Neva; but, as events have since proved, these were only testimonials of personal feelings, which had no influence whatever upon the course of politics in Asia. Excepting that this single difference of opinion occurred, my first meeting with the President of the Royal Geographical Society succeeded beyond all my expectations. He invited me to lecture before the society at its concluding meeting, and asked me to dinner on an early evening. I confess the kind manner in which this noble-hearted gentleman treated me during my sojourn in London, and the rich hospitality which I so frequently enjoyed in his house, will be ever green in my memory.

LORD STRANGFORD.The third man upon whom I called was the late Viscount Strangford, the wonderful Oriental linguist and the brilliant writer. I say on purpose wonderful, for I rarely met a man in my life whose almost supernatural ability to speak and to write many European and Asiatic languages caused me so much astonishment. Our conversation began in the Turkish of Constantinople, in that refined idiom, whereof six or eight words out of every ten are certainly either Arab or Persian, only the others belonging to the genuine Turkish stock. To use this language in an elegant way, it is requisite to adapt one's mode of thinking entirely to that of thoroughbred Orientals, to have besides a proficiency in the standard works of Mohammedan literature, and, above all, to have moved a good deal in the so-called Effendi society. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that Lord Strangford, fully adequate to these exigencies, would have been taken by everybody for a downright Effendi, had it not been for the peculiarly Celtic shape of his head, and for the way in which he used to turn it to the right and to the left of his shoulders. Finding that I had come fresh from the East, where for many years I used Turkish as a colloquial and literary language, he was delighted to renew with me all his reminiscences of a long stay on the Bosphorus, and particularly to have somebody who was able to give him oral information about the language and literature of Central Asia, in which he was so much interested. Having flattered myself with the hope that I should become the only authority in Europe on Eastern-Turkish, the reader may fancy my astonishment when I heard from the mouth of an English nobleman the recital of such poems as those of Nevai, which had hitherto escaped my attention, and when he gave me the explanation of words which I had vainly looked for in the Eastern dictionaries. Lord Strangford was quite a riddle to me; for apart from his knowledge in Eastern tongues, he spoke almost all European languages; he was a Sclavonic scholar, he knew Hungarian, nay, even the language of the Gipsies; and what struck me most was his vast information concerning the various literatures and histories of these peoples. No wonder, therefore, that I felt from the beginning a particular attraction to the learned Viscount, and that he also, as I afterwards had ample opportunity to learn, took a fancy to me and became my most zealous and disinterested supporter in England. Envy and jealousy had no place in the noble heart of Lord Strangford; he gave himself all possible pains to introduce me everywhere, and to level the ground before me, and the standing I gained in London society was entirely due to his exertions.

Amongst the introductions which I had brought with me from Teheran was one to Mr., now Sir Henry, Layard, another to the late Sir Justin Sheil, formerly Ambassador at Teheran, and recommendations to several men of note connected in some way or other with the interior of Asia. Sir Henry Layard who was at that time Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, received me in his open, straightforward, British manner. Not many years having elapsed since the politician of high standing was himself a traveller in Asia, he behaved towards me like a colleague and like a former brother in arms. The same I must say in reference to the late Sir Justin Sheil and Lady Sheil; the latter was kind enough to give me the necessary hints as to the complicated laws and social tone of the West End; in one word, all my friends helped together to shape out of the rough material of the ci-devant dervish the lion of the London season. No easy task of course, if you consider that the said dervish, although a European by birth, had never before been west of his own country, and that his education and his continual studies were not made to facilitate such a change in his life. But what does not man attempt for the sake of success? Necessity and assistance had soon transformed the lame Mohammedan beggar into an admired lion of the British metropolis; and the man, who but a few months before had to wander about in tatters and to beg his daily bread by chanting hymns and by bestowing blessings upon true believers in Asia, became the wonder of the richest and the most civilized society of the Western world!

It is the details of this extraordinary change that I have to relate to my gentle reader.

The account of my adventures having become known in strictly scientific circles, my friends thought it necessary to bring me before the larger public, and the first forum in which I had to appear was the Royal Geographical Society. There was, however, a rather curious hindrance to the final settlement, an incident which I cannot leave untold. A few days after my arrival in London I noticed that some of my friends began to have a shy look, and that they treated me with a good amount of caution, if not suspicion. Having just finished the career of a dangerous disguise, and being accustomed to the suspicious looks of men, I did not at first feel disconcerted; but the fact nevertheless excited my curiosity, and speaking just then with General Kmethy, my countryman of Kars renown and a popular member of London Society at that time, about the strange attitude of people, I was told by the good man, in a half-laughing and joking manner, that I was probably unaware of the serious danger in which I found myself in London. I heard then that some, even the best of my friends, on seeing my sun-burned, swarthy face, and on hearing my unmistakably genuine Persian and Turkish conversation, got rather suspicious about me, and took me for some Persian vagabond who had learned English in India, and who, after having succeeded in getting letters of introduction, was now playing a comedy for English scholars and diplomatists. It was only the formal assurance of General Kmethy that I was a countryman of his and a member of the Hungarian Academy, which dissipated the doubts that had arisen. "Is it not strange?" said I to myself. "In Asia they suspected me to be a European, and in Europe to be an Asiatic; languages have really an immense power of fascination!" This difficulty having been removed and an unimpaired confidence having set in, I began to work out a short account of my travels in English, to be read before the Royal Geographical Society—a paper which Mr. Laurence Oliphant, who was acting at that time as foreign secretary of the Society, was kind enough to revise. A LION IN LONDON.I must say that it was with a good deal of impatience and anxiety that I looked forward to the evening of my first début before a select English audience such as the members of the London Geographical Society have been always, and are even now. My anxiety was the much more justified, as it happened that on the same evening a political question of a far-reaching interest, namely, whether England should side with Denmark in her struggle with Germany, was to be discussed in the House of Parliament, and my friends as well as myself apprehended the presence of a very small audience at our proceedings. The usual dinner at Willis's Rooms which preceded our meeting went off tolerably well. My health was proposed by Sir Roderick Murchison in very kind terms and drunk with much cheering; and, when I returned thanks, I concluded my little speech by conferring a Mohammedan blessing upon the dinner party—reciting the first Surah of the Koran with all the eccentricity of the Arabic guttural accent, and with all the queerness of genuine Moslem gesticulation. I need scarcely say that my mode of recital elicited a good deal of merriment. We left the table and went straight to Burlington House.

AT BURLINGTON HOUSE.Here I found a meeting much larger than I expected, an attendance which I ascribe to the novelty of the whole case. Before all, it was the sight of a European who had wandered about in the interior of Asia in the disguise of a holy beggar without a penny in his pocket, and who had succeeded in penetrating countries hitherto little or not at all known. Secondly, it was the curiosity to hear a foreigner, only a few days in England, address an English meeting in the language of the country; and last, if not least, it was the interest the British public felt at that time in Bokhara, the place of the martyrdom of two heroic sons of Great Britain—I mean of Conolly and Stoddart—and the town from which the Rev. Dr. Joseph Wolff had only returned a few years previously, after his most extraordinary adventures. Suffice it to say that the meeting was most respectable from a quantitative point of view. Sir Roderick opened it with a good humour quite in accord with his jolly and radiant after-dinner face; and whilst Mr. Clements Markham read my paper in his magnificent stentorian voice, I had plenty of leisure to observe the assembly and to prepare for the speech which had to follow. On being asked by the President to come before the public and to give an oral account of what had just been read, I confess that I experienced something of the position in which I stood before the Emir of Bokhara—with the essential difference of course, that in case of a failure the bloody tyrant would have handed me over to the executioner, whilst the indulgent English public would have expressed its displeasure by benignant laughter. I collected, therefore, all my linguistic powers, and, after the utterance of the first ten or fifteen words, the flood of oration went off uninterruptedly. For more than half an hour I spoke with animation of the salient incidents of my adventurous journey to Samarkand. Oh, glorious language of Shakespeare and Milton! I am sure nobody has ever tormented thee so much as I did in those thirty-five minutes; nobody has murdered the Queen's English in such a cruel way as the ex-dervish in Burlington House! And yet the English audience showed itself exceedingly kind towards the reckless foreigner. I was much applauded and cheered; and when, following the summons of Sir Roderick, I gave to the meeting my blessing with the genuine Arabic text, the whole society burst into a fit of laughter, which made the walls nearly tremble. Then followed the long business of handshaking and congratulations; and though all the futilities of this world may disappear from me, Lord Strangford's "Well done, dervish!" will never cease to resound in my ear like the sweetest music I ever heard in my life.

From this moment dates the beginning of my career in England. What followed was only the effect of this first successful step. In the report of the next morning's papers I noticed only a few reproaches of my foreign accent; as to the account of my travels there was a unanimous approval and admiration. No wonder, therefore, that a few weeks sufficed to make my name familiar over the whole of the United Kingdom. London society vied in the manifestation of all kinds of acknowledgment. Invitations to dinner-parties and to visit in the country literally poured in upon me, even from persons whom I never saw or met in my life; and it happened frequently that I had to write thirty letters of refusal and acceptance in one day. I got calls from all sorts of persons with well-sounding names, who, provided with a card of one of my friends, came to my humble lodging in Great Portland Street or to the Athenæum Club, where I enjoyed the hospitality of a guest, to shake hands and to have a conversation with me. Infinite was the number of those letters in which I was asked for my likeness or for my autograph.

Surprised by these various kinds of distinction, at the outset I endured the burdens of my reputation with patience, nay with a good amount of satisfaction, but in the end they began to be a little too wearisome—particularly as I had to write the account of my journey and to work up the meagre notes written on small paper scraps with lead pencil, which loose sheets, by having been worn concealed under the wadding of my beggar-dress, were somewhat obliterated and had become hardly legible. Assisted by a happy gift of memory, I succeeded, however, in writing down my adventures; and in three months I had revised the proof-sheets of my first book, entitled "Travels in Central Asia." THE SORROWS OF AUTHORSHIP.The task, I frankly own, cost me more trouble and exertion than many of the most trying parts of my travels. Only those who for months and years have moved about freely in the open air, and who have learned to appreciate the charms of a continually wandering life with all its exciting adventures—only those will know with what unspeakable pangs and sufferings a former traveller can shut himself up in a room, from which he sees only a small bit of the sky, and sit down to write consecutively for hours every day for weeks and months! I need scarcely say that I breathed more freely after having finished my book, and handed it over to Mr. John Murray, who became my publisher on the recommendation of Lord Strangford, and who behaved towards me in a satisfactory way. The honorarium of five hundred pounds which I got, and of which I spent nearly the half in London, did not make me rich at all. The truth is, my material situation was not very much changed: a dervish in Asia, I remained a fakir in Europe; but I gained by my book something more valuable than money, namely, the acknowledgments of the English public, and fame and reputation over the whole European and American Continents.

Upon the invitation of the friends I had in the meantime made I also went to satisfy the curiosity of leading political men, who were anxious to hear details about the threatening collision between England and Russia in the distant East, of which I threw out only a few hints in the concluding chapter of my book, but which nevertheless had aroused the greatest attention. It was in this way that I came into connection with politics and with the political men of that time, such as Members of Parliament, political writers, retired civilians and military officers of India, and, consequently, got the opportunity of an interview with Lord Palmerston, to whom I had already been cursorily introduced at a dinner-party in the house of Sir Roderick Murchison. His Lordship received me at his home in Piccadilly, and my visit was therefore of a strictly private character. He did not address me exactly as he did the late Dr. Livingstone, to whom he said, "You had a nice walk across Africa!" But his first remark was, "You must have gone through nice adventures on your way to Bokhara and Samarkand!" And he really listened with greatest attention to all that I said about Dost Mohammed Khan, about the haughtiness of the Emir of Bokhara and about the dangers I ran in the last-named town. On touching the question of the Russian advance towards Tashkend, I took the map out of my book which was on the table, and pointed to Chimkent as the place where the Russians stood at that time; but his Lordship showed, or at least feigned, great incuriosity, trying always to turn the thread of conversation to other insignificant topics. Whenever I thought I had caught his attention he immediately came forward with the question, "And did you not betray your European character?" or "How could you stand that long trial and those privations?" or with similar remarks. It was only after renewed attacks upon his taciturnity that he dropped, in a careless manner, a few allusions either to the barbarous state of affairs in Central Asia or to my over-sanguine opinions of the Russian strength in that quarter of the world. He succeeded in showing outward indifference, but he was far from convincing me of its existence. In my interview with Lord Clarendon I fared much better. It took place late in the Autumn of 1864, when the famous note of Prince Gortschakoff, after the Russian capture of Tashkend, had been made known, and when the public opinion of England seemed to have been roused suddenly from its stupor. His Lordship was frank enough to admit the truth of what I said in the last chapter of my book; but he added at the same time what has since become the standing principle of optimists in England: "Russia's policy in Central Asia is framed in the same way as ours in India; she is compelled to move gradually from the North to the South, just as we were obliged to do in our march from the South to the North. She is doing services to civilization, and we do not care much even if she takes Bokhara."

XXXII.
IN PARIS.

Paris society was more impressed with the novelty of my manner of travelling—namely, my having assumed the disguise of a dervish—than with the travels themselves; it viewed me in the light of a rather curious adventurer. I was spoken of as a man of restless spirit and of romantic proclivities, and I was gazed upon as some modern Robinson Crusoe. What heightened my reputation most was my happy gift of speaking many European and Asiatic languages. Happening one evening to meet in the salon of M. Guizot the representatives of ten different nationalities, and having conversed with them fluently in their mother languages, I was regarded by many as a real miracle. As to the intrinsic value of my reception in France, I noticed in the very beginning that I should remain a stranger there, for Bokhara and Samarkand, Uzbegs and Turkomans are totally unknown, except among a few learned men, in the best French society. Nevertheless, my book, which came out in a French translation under the title "Voyage d'un Faux Derviche," had a pretty good sale.

After having been introduced to some of the best circles, I was told by Prince Metternich that the Emperor would like to give me an audience; having read the English edition of my book, he would like to ask me a few questions. NAPOLEON III.One afternoon the Prince took me to the Tuileries, and we had just entered the gate of the Pavillon d'Horloge, when I saw Napoleon III. on the staircase as he took leave of the Queen of Spain, who had called upon him. On noticing Prince Metternich, with whom the imperial family was on very good terms, the Emperor seized his arm, and beckoning in a friendly manner to me, walked to the interior apartments. The Prince remained behind with the Empress, whom I found surrounded by a stately group of court ladies, in the midst of whom she was decidedly the tallest and the finest. I was led by the Emperor to a room which seemed to be his study; he sat upon an arm-chair, and bade me also to sit before a writing-desk filled with a large quantity of books, papers, maps, &c., not in any particular order. After having fixed me for a while with his whitish-grey eyes, he addressed me in a very slow voice, saying that he congratulated me on the courage I had shown in my perilous undertaking, and that having read my book he was the more astonished on finding that my slight and seemingly weak frame was not at all in proportion to the great hardships I had endured. I remarked upon this, that I was never ill in my life, and that I did not walk in Central Asia upon my legs, but upon my tongue, for it was only my linguistic study which had rescued me out of the clutches of the Central Asian tyrants. "I supposed that that must have been the case," said the Emperor; "but I believe there is also a good deal of dramatic skill in you, for otherwise you would not have played successfully the part of a mendicant dervish." The conversation turned to the ethnical conditions of Central Asia; and the Emperor, who had finished at that time his "Life of Cæsar," said that he was anxious to know whether the Parthians were really the ancestors of the present Turkomans; he was inclined to believe so, but he had been unable hitherto to establish their identity. From the Turkomans we passed over to the ruins of Balkh. I noticed that the imperial author was tolerably versed in the writings of Arrian as well as in Roman antiquities in general; but his knowledge of the modern geography of Asia was sadly deficient. He had only very dim notions about the principal names of towns and rivers, and he had palpably to take particular care not to betray his ignorance. On speaking of the Yaxartes I alluded to the serious political complication which might arise in the near future from the advance of Russia towards India, and although he tried in the beginning to conceal his interest in that question, he nevertheless listened with great attention, and afterwards remarked that he could hardly believe in a collision between England and Russia in that quarter of the world; at least not very soon,—for whereas the English had already got a firm standing in India, as proved by the Sepoy revolution of 1857, Russia was only on the eve of her conquests. Diverting our conversation from the Anglo-Russian rivalry, he continued to ask me sundry questions about Persia and Herat, and seemed to be much pleased when I assured him that the Persian people knew a good deal about Napliun, as they called Napoleon I., and that they look upon his great-uncle as a national hero, descended from Rustem, and that they laugh at the French, who vindicate him as their countrymen. I remained nearly half an hour with the Emperor. I am sorry to say he did not make upon me at all the impression of such a great man as he was then throughout the world supposed to be.

FRENCH SUSPICIONS.A few days later I called upon M. Drouyn de L'huys, who showed a more eager interest in the Central Asian question than his master. He started by asking me whether it was true that I had given a memorandum to Lord Palmerston on the Central Asian question, and whether I really believed in the imminent danger of collision between the two great European Powers in the distant East. I answered that I had not given, nor was I asked to write any communication to the British Government, and as far as I noticed from my conversation with the Prime Minister of the Queen of England, they had got on the other side of the Channel quite different views from those I held on the question.

Besides these two official receptions, I have to mention my interview with the Prince Napoleon, who received me in the Palais Royal, and who, whilst seated under the life-size portrait of his great-uncle, seemed to be watching to discover whether I noticed the likeness said to exist between him and his uncle. Well, I was really struck with the striking similitude existing between the prominent features of both. The two heads resembled each other, however, only in a very external form; and there was a difference in which the Emperor's cousin would never believe, and from this unbelief derived so many disagreeable adventures in his life. I need scarcely say that these official visits did not answer much to my taste. But still less did I like the intruding call of reporters, who interviewed me and published the next day totally false reports of my conversation with them, which I had afterwards to I contradict, particularly as some of them announced that I was entrusted by Lord Palmerston with a secret mission to the Tartars, and other similar nonsense. One writer—if I remember well, a Polish prince—went even so far as to write a novel about my travels, in which I was represented as a champion of romantic propensities, with whom a Tartar princess fell in love, and who, having obtained in this way some throne in Asia, was now on a political errand in Europe to secure the friendship of England and France in the contest against Russia. I laughed heartily at these exalted reports; but in the end I got tired of a dubious sort of reputation, and I left France to proceed through Germany to my native country, where I should have to decide whether I should settle down quietly or whether I should plunge again in new adventures and revisit the interior of Asia.

XXXIII.
IN HUNGARY.

I may conclude with the saying, "Dixi et salvavi animam." I hope I shall never have to repent the extraordinary fatigues and troubles with which I had to proceed on the thorny path; and if the last rays of the parting sun of my life approach, I still shall say, "It was a hot, but a fine day, sir!"

THE END.

UNWIN BROTHERS, PRINTERS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.

The "Lives Worth Living" Series
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THE STORY OF THE NATIONS.