Our journey to Paris and our stay there were full of important incidents, and left indelible traces of our exceptionally devoted friendship.  After great difficulty we found rooms for the ladies in the Hotel des Princes, and Liszt then suggested that we should go for a stroll on the boulevards, which at that hour were deserted.  I presume that our feelings on this occasion must have differed as much as our reminiscences.  When I entered the sitting-room the next morning, Liszt remarked, with his characteristic little smile, that the Princess Marie was already in a great state of excitement at the thought of further readings.  Paris did not offer much attraction to me, and as Princess Caroline desired to arouse as little attention as possible, and Liszt was frequently called away on private business, we took up our reading, where we had left it off in Bale, on the very first morning of our stay in Paris, even before we had been outside the hotel.  I was not allowed to stop reading on the following days until the Ring des Nibelungen was quite finished.  Finally Paris claimed our attention, but while the ladies were visiting the museums I was unfortunately obliged to stay in my room, tortured by continually recurring nervous headaches.  Liszt, however, induced me occasionally to join them in their excursions.  At the beginning of our stay he had engaged a box for a performance of Robert le Diable, because he wanted the ladies to see the great opera house under the most favourable conditions.  I believe that my friends shared the terrible depression from which I was suffering on this occasion.  Liszt, however, must have had other motives for going.  He had asked me to wear evening dress, and seemed very pleased I had done so when at the interval he invited me to go for a stroll with him through the foyer.  I could see he was under the influence of certain reminiscences of delightful evenings spent in this selfsame foyer, and that the dismal performance of this night must have cast a gloom over him.  We stole quietly back to our friends, hardly knowing why we had started on this monotonous expedition.  One of the artistic pleasures I enjoyed most was a concert given by the Morin-Chevillard Quartette Society, at which they played Beethoven’s Quartettes in E flat major and C sharp minor; the excellent rendering of this work impressed me in very much the same way as the performance of the Ninth Symphony by the Conservatoire orchestra had once done.  I had again the opportunity of admiring the great artistic zeal with which the French master these treasures of music, which even to this day are so coarsely handled by the Germans.

This was the first time that I really became intimately acquainted with the C sharp minor quartette, because I had never before grasped its melody.  If, therefore, I had nothing else to remind me of my stay in Paris, this would have been an unfading memory.  I also carried away with me other equally significant impressions.  One day Liszt invited me to spend an evening with him and his children, who were living very quietly in the care of a governess in Paris.