In the later reigns,çoisRené we find the Marble Palace, Frau Rietz[102], with her son, Alexander Count von der Marck, the Baroness von Stoltzenberg, mistress to the Margrave Schwed, and formerly an actress; Prince Henry[103] and his suspicious friends, Fräulein Voss, Frau Rietz's rival; an intrigue at a masked ball between a young Frenchman and the wife of a Prussian general; lastly Madame de F------, whose adventure we can read in the _Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin_[104]: who knows all those names? Who will remember ours? To-day, in the Prussian capital, octogenarians scarcely preserve the memory of that past generation.
The habits of Berlin society suited me: people "went to evening-parties" between five and six; all was over by nine, and I used to go to bed just as though I had not been an ambassador. Sleep devours existence, which is a good thing:
"The hours are short and life is long," says Fénelon.
Herr Wilhelm von Humboldt[105], brother of my illustrious friend the Baron Alexander, was in Berlin: I had known him as minister in Rome; suspected by the Government because of his opinions, he led a retired life; to kill time, he learnt all the languages and even all the dialects of the world. He reproduced the peoples, the ancient inhabitants of a soil, by means of the geographical denominations of the country. One of his daughters talked ancient and modern Greek with equal ease; if one had happened on a good day, one might have chatted at table in Sanskrit.
Adelbert von Chamisso[106] lived in the Botanical Gardens, some way from Berlin. I visited him in that solitude, where the plants froze in the hot-houses. He was tall, with rather agreeable features. I felt an attraction towards that exile, a traveller like myself: he had seen the Polar seas to which I had hoped to penetrate. An Emigrant like myself, he had been brought up in Berlin as a royal page. Adelberg, travelling through Switzerland, stopped for a moment at Coppet. He took part in an excursion on the lake, where he was in danger of being drowned. He wrote that same day:
"I clearly see that I must seek my safety on the high seas."
Herr von Chamisso had been appointed professor at Napoléonville by M. de Fontanes; later Greek professor at Strasburg; he rejected the offer in these noble words: