After having spent some
further time in Germany, he returned to Paris and published a number of
historical and critical writings.
Philarete Chasles, as librarian to the Mazarin Library, had his
apartments in the building itself, that is, in the very centre of Paris;
in the Summer he lived in the country at Meudon, where he had had his
veranda decorated with pictures of Pompeian mosaic. He was having a
handsome new house with a tower built near by. He needed room, for he
had a library of 40,000 volumes.
His niece kept house for him; she was married to a German from Cologne,
Schulz by name, who was a painter on glass. The pair lived apart. Madame
Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter, the
fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and
mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was
charmed with her, and it was always full of guests, young students from
Alsace and Provence, young negroes from Hayti, young ladies from
Jerusalem, and poetesses who would have liked to read their poems aloud
and would have liked still better to induce Chasles to make them known
by an article.
Chasles chatted with everyone, frequently addressing his conversation to
me, talking incessantly about the very men and women that I most cared
to hear about, of those still living whom I most admired, such as George
Sand, and Merimee, and, in fact, of all the many celebrities he had
known.
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