THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
entrusted to the night-watchman patrolling the street, and that a tenant wishing to enter his house during the night had to apply to the watchman to open the door for him. Having been seen by our watchman once or twice coming home with my friends, I was regarded by him as legitimately belonging to the regular inhabitants of the street; and as it happened several times that, returning late in the night alone from my expeditions to Spandau, where I was preparing for the deliverance of a man sentenced to imprisonment for life, I called upon this same police officer to open for me—for me, who was then virtually an outlaw—the door of my abode, which he always did without the slightest suspicion. This afforded me and my friends much amusement, and, indeed, considering the great reputation of the Berlin police for efficiency, the situation was comical enough. It is, therefore, not surprising that I became a little reckless and did not resist the temptation to see the famous French actress, Rachel, who at that period, with a company of her own, was presenting the principal part of her repertoire to the Berlin public.
Rachel had then reached the zenith of her fame. Her history was again and again rehearsed in the newspapers: how that child of poor Alsatian Jews, born in 1820 in a small inn of the canton of Aargau in Switzerland, had accompanied her parents on their peddling tours through France; how she had earned pennies by singing with one of her sisters in the streets of Paris; how her voice attracted attention; how she was taken into the Conservatoire; how she soon turned from singing to elocution and acting, and how her phenomenal genius, suddenly blazing forth, at once placed her far ahead of the most renowned of living histrionic artists. We revolutionary youths remembered with especial interest, the tales that had come from Paris after those February days of 1848, when King Louis
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