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Rh people assembled there on the most friendly footing, it seemed as if I were in a curiosity-shop, where the relics of all ages are huddled higgledy-piggledy all together, a Greek Apollo by a Chinese pagoda, a Mexican Vilzliputzli by a Gothic Ecce Homo, Egyptian idols with dogs' heads, holy horrors of wood, ivory, and metal, and so on. There I saw old mousquetaires who had once danced with Marie Antoinette, Republicans of mild observance who were regarded as gods in the Assemblée Nationale, Montagnards without money and without reproach, former members of the Directory who had been enthroned in the Luxembourg, bearers of great dignities under the Empire before whom all Europe had trembled, ruling Jesuits of the Restoration—in short, actual faded and mutilated divinities of all eras, in whom no one any longer believed. The names howl on coming into contact, but the men looked peaceably and stood together in peace, like the antiquities of which I have spoken in the bric-à-brac shops of the Quai Voltaire. In Germanic lands, where passions are less amenable to discipline, such a social assemblage of such heterogeneous persons would be simply impossible. Neither is the need of conversation so great with us in the cold North, as in warmer France, where the bitterest enemies, when they meet in a salon,