MEN OF NOTE IN BERLIN -1879 -1881 559 



by gas, oil, or wax; also how the lights were placed whe- 

 ther high or low ; and what the principal dishes were to be : 

 and on the answer depended his acceptance or declination. 

 Dining with him one night, I was fascinated by his wife ; it 

 seemed to me that I had never seen a woman of such 

 wonderful and almost weird powers : there was something 

 exquisitely beautiful in her manner and conversation ; and, 

 on my afterward speaking of this to another guest, he an- 

 swered : ' ' Why, of course ; she is the daughter of Goethe '& 

 Bettina, to whom he wrote the ' Letters to a Child. ' 



Another historian was Treitschke, eminent also as a 

 member of parliament a man who exercised great power 

 in various directions, and would have been delightful but 

 for his deafness. A pistol might have been fired beside 

 him, and he would never have known it. Wherever he was, 

 he had with him a block of paper leaves and a pencil, by 

 means of which he carried on conversation ; in parliament 

 he always had at his side a shorthand-writer who took 

 down the debates for him. 



Some of the most interesting information which I re- 

 ceived regarding historical and current matters in Berlin 

 was from the biologist Du Bois-Reymond. He was of 

 Huguenot descent, but was perhaps the most anti-Gallic 

 man in Germany. Discussing the results of the expulsion 

 of the Huguenots under Louis XIV, the details he gave me 

 were most instructive. Showing me the vast strength 

 which the Huguenots transferred from France to Ger- 

 many, he mentioned such men as the eminent lawyer 

 Savigny, the great merchant Ravene, and a multitude of 

 other men of great distinction, who, like himself, had re- 

 tained their French names; and he added very many 

 prominent people of Huguenot descent who had changed 

 their French names into German. He then referred to a 

 similar advantage given to various other countries, and 

 made a most powerful indictment against the intolerance 

 for which France has been paying such an enormous price 

 during more than two hundred years. 



Interesting in another way were two men eminent in 



