The many affairs which were settled before the tribunal of the royal lieutenant had quite a peculiar charm, from his making it a point to accompany his decisions with some witty, ingenious, or lively turn.  What he decreed was strictly just, his manner of expressing it whimsical and piquant.  He seemed to have taken the Duke of Ossuna as his model.  Scarcely a day passed in which the interpreter did not tell some anecdote or other of this kind to amuse us and my mother.  This lively man had made a little collection of such Solomonian decisions; but I only remember the general impression, and cannot recall to my mind any particular case.

By degrees we became better acquainted with the strange character of the count.  This man clearly understood his own peculiarities; and as there were times in which he was seized with a sort of dejection, hypochondria, or by whatever name we may call the evil demon, he withdrew into his room at such hours, which were often lengthened into days, saw no one but his valet, and in urgent cases could not even be prevailed upon to receive any one.  But, as soon as the evil spirit had left him, he appeared as before, active, mild, and cheerful.  It might be inferred from the talk of his valet, Saint Jean, a small, thin man of lively good nature, that in his earlier years he had caused a great misfortune when overcome by this temper; and that, therefore, in so important a position as his, exposed to the eyes of all the world, he had earnestly resolved to avoid similar aberrations.

During the very first days of the count’s residence with us, all the Frankfort artists, as Hirt, Schuetz, Trautmann, Nothnagel, and Junker, were called to him.  They showed their finished pictures, and the count bought such as were for sale.  My pretty, light room in the gable-end of the attic was given up to him, and immediately turned into a cabinet and studio; for he designed to keep all the artists at work for a long time, especially Seekatz of Darmstadt, whose pencil, particularly in simple and natural representations, highly pleased him.  He therefore caused to be sent from Grasse, where his elder brother possessed a handsome house, the dimensions of all the rooms and cabinets; then considered, with the artists, the divisions of the walls, and fixed accordingly upon the size of the large oil-pictures, which were not to be set in frames, but to be fastened upon the walls like pieces of tapestry.  And now the work went on zealously.  Seekatz undertook country scenes, and succeeded extremely well in his old people and children, which were copied directly from nature.  His young men did not answer so well,—­they were almost all too thin; and his women failed from the opposite cause.  For as he had a little, fat, good, but unpleasant-looking, wife, who would let him have no model but herself, he could produce nothing agreeable.  He was also obliged to exceed the usual size of his figures.  His trees had truth, but the foliage was over minute.  He was a pupil of Brinkmann, whose pencil in easel pictures is not contemptible.