When I left,
I said politely to him:
"I thank you for having so warmly defended my country; I am a Dane." The
next day the Pole came to look for me at the restaurant, and a closer
acquaintance resulted. We went for many walks together along the
riverside; he talking like a typical Polish patriot, I listening to his
dreams of the resuscitated Poland that the future was to see. I mention
this only because it affords an example of the remarkable coincidences
life brings about, which make one so easily exclaim: "How small the
world is!" This Pole became engaged several years afterwards to a young
Polish girl and left her, without any explanation, having got entangled
with a Russian ballet dancer. I made her acquaintance at Warsaw fifteen
years after I had met him at Florence. She was then twenty-six years of
age, and is one of the women who have taught me most; she told me the
story of her early youth and of the unengaging part my acquaintance of
1870 had played in it.
At Florence I saw Rossi as Hamlet. The performance was a disappointment
to me, inasmuch as Rossi, with his purely Italian nature, had done away
with the essentially English element in Hamlet. The keen English humour,
in his hands, became absurd and ridiculous. Hamlet's hesitation to act,
he overlooked altogether.
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