Then a visit to the Chamber (where I heard Soult, Dupin, and Teste speak, and thought it “a terrible bear-garden)” is followed by attendance at a sermon by Athanase Coquerel, the Protestant preacher whose reputation in the Parisian beau monde was great in those days.  He was, says my diary, “exceedingly eloquent, but I did not like his sermon;” for which dislike my notes proceed to give the reasons, which I spare the, I hope grateful, reader.  Then I went to hear Bishop Luscombe at the Ambassador’s chapel, and listened to “a very stupid sermon.”  I seem, somewhat to my surprise as I read the records of it, to have had a pronounced taste for sermons in those days, which I fear I have somehow outgrown.  But then I have been very deaf during my later decades.

Bishop Luscombe may perhaps however be made more amusing to the reader than he was to me in the Embassy chapel by the following fragment of his experience.  The Bishop arrived one day at Paddington, and could not find his luggage.  He called a porter to find it for him, telling him the name to be read on the articles.  The man, very busy with other people, answered hurriedly, “You must go to hell for your luggage.”  Now, Luscombe, who was a somewhat pompous and very bishopy man, was dreadfully shocked, and felt, as he said, as if the porter had struck him in the face.  In extreme indignation he demanded where he could speak with any of the authorities, and was told that “the Board” was then sitting up stairs.  So to the boardroom the Bishop went straightway, and announcing himself, made his complaint.  The chairman, professing his regret that such offence should have been given, said he feared the man must have been drunk, but that he should be immediately summoned to give an account of his conduct.  So the porter in great trepidation appeared in a few minutes before the august tribunal of “the Board.”

“Well, sir,” said he in reply to the chairman’s indignant questioning, “what could I do?  I was werry busy at the time.  So when the gentleman says as his name was Luscombe, I could do no better than tell him to go to h’ell for his luggage, and he’d have found it there all right!”

“Oh!  I see,” said the chairman, “it is a case of misplaced aspirate!  We have spaces on the wall marked with the letters of the alphabet, and you would have found your luggage at the letter L. You will see that the man meant no offence.  I am sorry you should have been so scandalised, but though we succeed, I hope, in making our porters civil to our customers, it would be hopeless, I fear, to attempt to make them say L correctly.” Solvuntur risu tabulae.

I find chronicled a long talk with Mohl one evening at Madame Recamier’s.  The room was very full of notable people of all sorts, and the tide of chattering was running very strong.  “How can anything last long in France?” said he, in reply to my having said (in answer to his assertion that Cousin’s philosophy had gone by) that it had been somewhat short-lived.  “Reputations are made and pass away.  It is impossible that they should endure.  It is in such places as this that they are destroyed.  The friction is prodigious!”