I left Cherbourg for Newfoundland on May 19th, 1841.  It had been arranged that I was to go by the North Sea, to put into the Texel, and to go to the Hague to pay my respects in person to the King of the Netherlands.  Almost as soon as I had disembarked at the Helder, I went on board the royal yacht, which was to take me to Alkmaar by the Noord Holland Canal.  This yacht, commanded by a very pleasant fellow, a naval lieutenant, M. Dedel, was really charming.  She had been built in the seventeenth century, and had been used by Admirals Van Ruyter and Van Tromp when they went to take up their commands.  She was covered all over with gilt carvings, the deckhouse in the stern especially, and looked as if she had started freshly painted out of one of Backhuysen’s pictures.  Once on board her, a legion of horses towed her along, full trot, and I went to bed.  When I awoke, I found the yacht moored beside the quay at Alkmaar, the city of cheeses, whence a carriage took me to Haarlem and Amsterdam, along the Haarlem Zee, which has been drained dry since then, and transformed into splendid meadow land, as the Zuider Zee will some day be.  At Amsterdam I rushed to the museum, where I was received by M. Apostol, the director, who had known the Scheffers’ father intimately at Rotterdam.  Oh that museum!  Oh those prints!  But M. de Bois-le-Comte, the French Minister, was pitiless.  He tore me away from all those masterpieces, and forced me to follow the millround of the programme he had laid out for me.  He dragged me off to Zaandam (Saardam in French).  This pretty Japanese-looking village, in the midst of a wide polder, surrounded by over five hundred windmills, looking like a row of gigantic sharpshooters, is a resort of pilgrims, and the holy spot is the hut of Peter the Great.  The wretched wooden house, shut up in a sort of casemate, was the property of the Queen, sister of the Emperor Nicholas, and the shanty was never mentioned by her or to her but in the most feeling manner.  Flectamus genua!  Leva...ate!  Amongst other inscriptions there, I found the names of two French actors, Dormeuil and Monval, which recall anything but pious memories to my mind.

From Zaandam I went to the palace, to Van Ruyter’s tomb, to the pelicans in the Zoological Gardens, and then I escaped from the furious Bois-le-Comte, who would have liked me never to go about except in a glass case labelled “Ecce the Prince de Joinville.”  Very kind and very witty he was, all the same, one of those finished diplomatists of the old school--a disciple of M. de Talleyrand.  He had been everywhere, seen everything, observed everything, and he kept me under the charm of his conversation all through my hasty trip in Holland.  During the last preceding years he had represented France in Portugal and Spain successively, and had been with the two Queens—­my future sister-in-law--Dona Maria in Portugal, and the Regent Christina in Spain, through all the most violent disturbances, struggles, and dangers of the