hout the ceremony of dying first. I never did see such a
gentle, kind heart."

CHAPTER V.

RESIDENCE IN PARIS.

1855-1856.

Actors and Dramas--Criticism of Frederic
Lemaitre--Increase of Celebrity--French
Translation of Dickens--Conventionalities of
the Theatre Francais--_Paradise Lost_ at the
Ambigu--Profane Nonsense--French _As You Like
It_--Story of a French Drama--Auber and Queen
Victoria--Robinson Crusoe--A Compliment and its
Result--Madame Scribe--Ristori--Viardot in
Orphee--Madame Dudevant at the
Viardots--Banquet at Girardin's--National and
Personal Compliment--Second Banquet--The Bourse
and its Victims--Entry of Troops from
Crimea--Paris illuminated--Streets on New
Year's Day--Results of Imperial
Improvement--English and French Art--French and
English Nature--Sitting to Ary Scheffer--A
Reading in Scheffer's Studio--Scheffer's
Opinion of the Likeness--A Duchess murdered--A
Chance Encounter, and what came of it.

IN Paris Dickens's life was passed among artists, and in the exercise of
his own art. His associates were writers, painters, actors, or
musicians, and when he wanted relief from any strain of work he found it
at the theatre. The years since his last residence in the great city had
made him better known, and the increased attentions pleased him. He had
to help in preparing for a translation of his books into French; and
this, with continued labour at the story he had in hand, occupied him as
long as he remained. It will be all best told by extracts from his
letters; in which the people he met, the theatres he visited, and the
incidents, public or private, that seemed to him worthy of mention,
reappear with the old force and liveliness.

Nor is anything better worth preserving from them than choice bits of
description of an actor or a drama, for this perishable enjoyment has
only so much as may survive out of such recollections to witness for
itself to another generation; and an unusually high place may be
challenged for the subtlety and delicacy of what is said in these
letters of things theatrical, when the writer was especially attracted
by a performer or a play. Frederic Lemaitre has never had a higher
tribute than Dickens paid to him during his few days' earlier stay at
Paris in the spring.

"Incomparably the finest acting I ever