I think that I saw Paris and the Parisians much more satisfactorily on this occasion than during my first visit; and I suspect that some of the recollections recorded in these pages as connected with my first visit to Paris, belong really to this second stay there, especially I think that this must have been the case with regard to my acquaintance with Chateaubriand, though I certainly was introduced to him at the earlier period, for I find the record of much talk with him about Brittany, which was a specially welcome subject to him.

It was during this second visit that I became acquainted with Henry Bulwer, afterwards Lord Dalling, and at that time first secretary of the British legation.  My visits were generally, perhaps always, paid to him when he was in bed, where he was lying confined by, if I remember rightly, a broken leg, I used to find his bed covered with papers and blue-books, and the like.  And I was told that the whole, or at all events the more important part of the business of the embassy was done by him as he lay there on the bed, which must have been for many a long hour a bed of suffering.

Despite certain affectations—­which were so palpably affectations, and scarcely pretended to be aught else, that there was little or nothing annoying or offensive in them—­he was a very agreeable man, and was unquestionably a very brilliant one.  He came to dine with me, I remember, many years afterwards at my house in Florence, when he insisted (the dining-room being on the first floor) on being carried up stairs, as we thought at the time very unnecessarily.  But for aught I know such suspicion may have wronged him.  At all events his disability, whatever it may have been, did not prevent him from making himself very agreeable.

One of our guests upon that same occasion (I must drag the mention of the fact in head and shoulders here, or else I shall forget it), was that extraordinary man, Baron Ward, who was, or perhaps I ought to say at that time had been, prime minister and general administrator to the Duke of Lucca.  Ward had been originally brought from Yorkshire to be an assistant in the ducal stables.  There, doubtless because he knew more about the business than anybody else concerned with it, he soon became chief.  In that capacity he made himself so acceptable to the Duke, that he was taken from the stables to be his highness’s personal attendant.  His excellence in that position soon enlarged his duties to those of controller of the whole ducal household.  And thence, by degrees that were more imperceptible in the case of such a government than they could have been in a larger and more regularly administered state, Ward became the recognised, and nearly all-powerful head, manager, and ruler of the little Duchy of Lucca.  And I believe the strange promotion was much for the advantage of the Duke and of the Duke’s subjects.  Ward, I take it, never robbed him or any one else.  And this eccentric specialty, the Duke, though he was no Solomon, had the wit to discover.  In his cups the ex-groom, ex-valet, was not reticent about his sovereign master, and his talk was not altogether of an edifying nature.  One sally sticks in my memory.  “Ah, yes!  He was a grand favourite with the women.  But I have had the grooming of him; and it was a wuss job than ever grooming his hosses was!”