CHAPTER II

FRANKFORT—PARIS—TROUVILLE

I was born on the 24th of February, 1837, in South Audley Street, in a house long since pulled down, which stood at the southern corner of Hill Street. My father had left the Diplomatic Service on his marriage and for some years my parents lived at Exbury, the old family place overlooking the Solent through vistas in the trees, where, sitting in the drawing-room, you could see the great battleships with their bellying sails—men-of-war of the pattern of Nelson’s days—the stately wooden walls of old England, the huge West Indiamen travelling to and from Southampton, “sailing between worlds and worlds with steady wing”—and the dainty little Cowes yachts pertly flitting among them like graceful white gulls.

Ships were indeed a thing of beauty in those days, and Exbury was an earthly paradise; but like diamond tiaras and ropes of pearls, it was a costly luxury, unremunerative. My people had to retrench, the lovely home was let, and they went abroad to economize. In this way it happened that I first awoke to life at Frankfort in 1840—that at any rate is my earliest dim recollection. Two years later my father left Germany and took us to live in France.

* * * * *

1842-1846.—I can hardly believe that it is only seventy-three years since we first went to live in France. When I think of the immense changes that have taken place in that beloved country since then, it seems more like seven hundred. The upheavals of wars and revolutions, two Dynasties gone, toppled over like houses of cards, sovereigns lauded up to the skies one year, hounded out of existence the next, followed by the howls and execration of infuriated mobs; 1848 and the barricades—the _coup d’état_ of 1851—the Second Empire—the Crimean War—Mexico and the murder of Maximilian—the war of 1870 followed by the Commune—France shorn of two great provinces—Paris improved out of all its picturesqueness by the commonplace uniformity of Hausmannism—only here a nook and there a corner left—all these seem to be transformation scenes which would need centuries to carry out, and yet they have all taken place in my lifetime. But not in France alone; in Europe, Asia, America, Africa and Australia, the seventy-eight years of my life have witnessed more changes than any similar period in the world’s history.

For four years we passed the winter and spring—the season in those days—in Paris—never twice in the same apartments, though we always remained in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine—a convenient quarter for our elders and for ourselves, for it was no great distance from the gardens of the Tuileries, where we used to play with a number of little French friends—I have forgotten the names of all of them save only one called Jules—I suppose he had a surname, but if he did I never knew it—he was always “le petit Jules.” He was of about my own age, very small, but of a quite demonic cleverness, and at marbles he was a hero. He broke us all, and many a time we went home with empty bags—not a bulge in ours—his bursting with wealth, and yet we loved him.

I remember one tragic episode of a beautiful white alley with rosy pink veins, the pride of my soul. The little villain challenged me to play him, offering to stake a superb agate against it. In less time than it takes to write the tale the alley was his. My beautiful white alley! I was but seven years old and I wept bitterly. I wonder whether “le petit Jules,” if he is yet alive, remembers how he avenged Waterloo that day in his victory over the English boy. I don’t suppose that he often plays marbles now, but if he is yet alive, I feel sure that his many talents have led him to great successes in all his endeavours, whatever they may have been.

Many merry days we spent among the trees and statues of those gardens, and often on a sunny morning we could see the old King, Louis Philippe, pacing the terrace fronting the river. He used generally to wear a long grey great-coat with a huge steeple hat covering the famous _Poire_[16]—an astute, none-too-reliable old man. He never had but one companion on his walks—probably General Baudrand, his most familiar friend—perhaps Guizot or some minister—talking earnestly, stopping every now and then to enforce a point with appropriate gesticulations. Hatching plots, Spanish marriage for Montpensier, or some other villainy? Probably. But that old grey coat covered a King, and we looked at it with awe.

As might be expected in the case of a King whose own people admitted that the one thing he lacked was dignity, his Court seems to have been the shoddiest affair that could be imagined; we used to hear many stories of its vulgarities. Old Lady Sandwich, grandmother of the present earl, spent much Irish wit upon it. Her descriptions of the bourgeois courtiers were inimitable. She happened to go to an audience just about the time that there was so much fuss about poor Queen Pomaré—the ex-Queen of Tahiti. The equerry who was to announce her asked the English lady’s name.

“La Comtesse de Sandwich.”

“Pardon, Madame, je n’ai pas bien compris.”

“La Comtesse de Sandwich.”

“Mille pardons, Madame—mais ces noms anglais sont si difficiles.”

The man was evidently determined to be insolent, but Lady Sandwich turned the tables on him by saying with a laugh:

“Mon Dieu! Monsieur, dites donc la Reine Pomaré!”

That smothered him—everybody laughed, and she stalked into the presence majestic and triumphant.

Another time at a court ball, she had struggled through the shabby crowd to the buffet and got herself an ice, when a big hand snatched it from her and from the mouth that belonged to the hand there issued, “Enfoncée la petite mère!” She turned round, furious—it was her bootmaker in the garb of the Garde Nationale. He had only seen her back, so had not recognized her. When he did see——!

Of the Royal Family in the Tuileries there were two members at whom nobody sneered, of whom nobody spoke an evil word—Queen Amélie and the Duc d’Aumale. Her goodness and dignity won universal respect and admiration. Of the Duc d’Aumale I shall have a word to say elsewhere. As for the rest, there was no great halo of majesty about them. The wily old fox himself was distrusted where he was not hated. The Legitimists spoke of him as the very incarnation of the Revolution, like his father Égalité, a traitor to his King and to his caste. How dared he call himself “King of the French” when his cousin was the lawful “King of France?” The sons, Nemours, Joinville, Montpensier, I used to hear spoken of with scant respect—no great harm about them; but poor creatures, commanding neither regard nor affection; nobody seemed to associate with them or to wish their friendship. When I came to know them later in life in this country I understood the talk to which I had listened as a child.

The death of the Duc d’Orléans excited sympathy from its tragic character, besides which he like the Duc d’Aumale, but in a lesser degree, had earned some credit in the Algerian campaign. I can just remember the horror with which the news of the fatal accident when he was thrown from his carriage, between Paris and Neuilly, was received. It was in 1842, just seventy-three years ago!

My father’s many accomplishments—music, painting, languages—made him welcome beyond the usual run of foreigners in French society. He was, moreover, wonderfully well-read in the old memoirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and quite an authority on historic French portraits. So much so that when I once said to him that I felt sure that if he were to find himself transported back to one of the famous salons of those times he would know almost all the people by sight, his answer was, “Upon my word, I believe I should.”

The society of the Faubourg in the early forties must have been very interesting; there were so many people still living who could talk as eye-witnesses of the horrors of the great Revolution: at the time of our sojourning in France there was less interval separating us from the Terreur than there is between to-day and the Crimean War.

A man of seventy years in 1842 was twenty years of age when the King was murdered; yet it seems difficult to believe now that, as a child, I often listened, my hair almost on end, to men and women telling how they had seen their nearest and dearest led off in the tumbrils to the shambles of Monsieur de Paris, and recounting the miracles by which they themselves had escaped. There were many such. Indeed, the Duchesse d’Angoulème herself—the woman of so many tears that to her dying day in 1851 her poor eyes suffered from the chronic weeping known as _gutta lachrymans_—who as a child had, with her unhappy mother, gone through the miseries of the Conciergerie, and seen the King and Queen, both her parents led away to the scaffold, was living, though not in France, and my father knew her well—in all respects a wonderful woman, of whom Napoleon said that she was “the only man in the family.”

It is now the fashion to laugh at the story that Robespierre, minded to marry her, sought an interview with her in prison. She, warned beforehand, maintained a dead silence, refusing to utter a word, and he left the room, banging the door and exclaiming, “Bégueule comme toute sa famille.” My father, who had exceptional relations with the old French Legitimists, firmly believed that this really happened, and he had good reason for his faith. Of people whom I actually knew and who had survived the Revolution, several were in various ways notable.

At Trouville we became very intimate with the family of the Marquis de Chaumont Quitry. The two sons, Félix and Odon, were splendid young men who, among others, made the place gay, and on a fine evening they would carry out their _trompes de chasse_ and make the rocks ring with the “Hallali,” the “Rendezvous des Chasseurs,” and other fanfares, to the great joy of us children.

The old Marquis had been a great figure among the _émigrés_. When still little more than a boy he had contrived to make his escape from the Terreur with his young wife, and landed in England with a few pounds in his pocket. Many friends were eager to help him, but he was as proud as his ancestor, Robert de Chaumont, the knight of the First Crusade, and he would accept nothing. With the little money that he had he bought cloth, thread, scissors, needles, and whalebone, and set up with the Marquise as a stay-maker somewhere in Soho—a hero, if ever there was one—and it became the fashion for fine ladies to have their stays made by the noble descendant of Crusaders whose pedigree could be traced back to Charlemagne.

There was another wizened little old gentleman, whose name I have forgotten, who used to tell us anecdotes of the straits to which he was put during his life in London; but after all, it might have been worse, and he was able to feed himself for very little money. In the cheap slum in which he lived there used to appear every morning a man with little pieces of meat on skewers; for two or three pence you could obtain “des petites portions,” quite enough for a meal, “et ma foi! ça n’était pas trop mauvais; ça s’appelle Kami.” He was dealing with the cat’s-meat man!

I used often to be taken to see the venerable Marquise du Mesnil, who had been lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. The old lady lived in a wonderful apartment full of glorious old furniture, Gobelins tapestry, Sèvres china, vernis Martin, fans and pictures, memorials of the old Court which would fetch a king’s ransom to-day. I sometimes wondered whether the windows of those rooms had ever been opened since the house was built, for the air was thick with a peculiar musty, stuffy, mousey smell, over which neither musk nor verveine could prevail. Here she sat bolt upright with a priceless snuffbox in her wizened hand, telling tales which made me gasp with terror, until I could almost see Judith carrying the bleeding head out of the tapestry in the boudoir to the music of the _carmagnole_ in the street below.

At the Musée Carnavalet, or looking at the Princess de Lamballe’s little pink slipper at the Cluny, I am reminded of that house of fear from which I used to escape trembling, but to which, such was its weird fascination, I always used to beg to be taken every time my people went to visit there. The old lady was always very kind to the little boy who never quite knew whether he feared or loved her, but who had a lurking suspicion that she must be some relation of that fairy who was not asked to the christening.

A great pleasure on our homeward walk from the Rive Gauche was to be allowed, after recrossing the river, to go through the Place du Carrousel, between the Louvre and the Tuileries, not then the magnificent, dull and highly respectable space that it now is, but a regular fair, with all sorts of cheap booths, where dogs and cats and monkeys, many strange beasts, birds from over-sea islands, parrots and fowls with gaudy plumage, snakes, tortoises, cheap and entrancing sham jewellery and rubbish were for sale. It was very picturesque, very smelly and very dirty, the screams of the macaws, the barking of the dogs, and the cries of the vendors made the day noisome and hideous, but we youngsters loved it with all its filth, and the present spick-and-spanness is no compensation for the magnets of attraction that have been swept away.

I wonder where these sweepings agglomerate into life again. There must be some place where the humble _piou-piou_ buys a cheap ring for his lady-love, some place where the _marchand de coco_ tinkles his bell among the crowd, where the distressful person who earns his living by picking up cigar-ends, now partially ruined by the cigarette craze and the end of snuff-taking, can ply his trade, and the cries of the old-clothes man and the dealer in stale fruit may be heard, some place from which modern ideas will drive them once more into the wilderness; for after all, it must be admitted that the picturesque charms of Petticoat Lane are hardly in harmony with the sedateness of an improving neighbourhood, let alone a great architectural quadrangle separating two palaces, one, alas! now gone for ever.

There were other walks—the Jardins des Plantes, the Bois de Boulogne, and so many pleasant expeditions. But what I grew to love most, as the years rolled on, were the quaint old nooks and corners that we used to come upon in remote and unexpected places, remnants of the old Paris of the Trois Mousquetaires—delightful people!—curiously gabled streets where the oil lanterns still swung from wires fastened to the houses on either side, places just fit for rufflers like d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, swaggering hand on hilt; dark, mysterious, labyrinthine quarters, very primitive and no doubt very unhygienic; but then you cannot have everything.

One not very judicious outing I remember when I was seven years old, and a sentimental tutor from Demler’s school, to which we were sent, took several of his pupils, myself among them, to the Morgue to see the corpse of a girl who had been murdered—stabbed to death—by her sweetheart. It was a horrid place, that old Morgue, where the dead bodies were laid out naked on marble slabs with a tiny trickle of water playing upon them, like salmon in a fishmonger’s shop, and their poor rags of clothing hung damp, empty and melancholy from the ceiling. The sight almost made me sick and fed me with nightmares for weeks.

One of my father’s best friends in Paris was the old Duchesse de Rauzan. She had recently built herself a house at Trouville, on the sands near the mouth of the river. Trouville was then a tiny fishing village. The only other house besides that of the Duchesse was one built close to hers by Doctor, afterwards Sir Joseph, Olliffe, the physician to the English Embassy. The Duchesse was anxious to get a few of her friends to camp for the summer in the fishermen’s cottages and make up a pleasant _coterie_. Amongst others, she persuaded my father to join the party. One day my father had taken me with him to call on the Duchesse, to inquire further before deciding, and as we were sitting there, a footman announced “Monsieur le Docteur Billard.”

“What a piece of luck!” said the Duchesse. “Monsieur Billard is the Trouville doctor, so you will be able to ask him all about it.”

Questioned, Billard answered, “Monsieur, Trouville est un trou!” and went into fits of laughter at the fullness of his own wit.

The answer, however, did not suit the Duchesse’s book, so the poor doctor was promptly snubbed and told not to talk nonsense. I was destined to see a good deal of that learned man of pills and noxious draughts in the next four years, and he became one of my most intimate enemies. He was a primitive, and so far as I was concerned he had but one remedy, a horrible decoction of gum arabic and sugar, called _sirop de gomme_, which presumably was intended to glue together any little portions of the human organization which might have got out of joint, and was his panacea for all ailments except the toothache; for that he had a dreadful instrument of torture called a German key—upon me he experimented with both.

He was a humorist: “N’ayez pas peur, mon petit ami; nous allons guérir ça avec un peu de baume d’acier.” In went the “baume d’acier” into my mouth, and with a great wrench out came the tooth. Howling with pain, rage and indignation at having been tricked, I wreaked an inadequate revenge upon M. Billard’s shins. But this is forestalling events. In spite of the doctor’s wit, the Duchesse easily talked over my father, and the result was five most happy summers in the brightest of surroundings.

And so it came to pass that one fine day in 1842 we all embarked on the railway, then a very new institution, which went no further than Rouen, where we slept, and on the following morning two huge yellow diligences, which my father had chartered to carry us and our fortunes to the Norman coast, were standing outside the old-fashioned inn. My father, my grandmother, two aunts, my two brothers and myself, besides a German tutor and a white poodle, made up the crew.

Greatly hindered was the packing of the crazy old coaches by that nondescript, motley crowd that used to fill an inn-yard on those occasions, a crowd quite unknown to the traveller of to-day, long since as extinct as the great auk, all shouting, swearing and spitting, all giving different opinions, with much gesticulation, as to what trunk should be placed where, in unison only when the question of _pourboires_ turned up, in unison then—not in harmony.

Off at last! The great lumbering diligences rattling over the cobble stones of the glorious old cathedral city, stopping now and then for pack-thread repairs to the harness, the coachman cracking a long whip, the stick made of twisted willow and garnished with red cotton tassels to match those on his horn, which he from time to time tootled distractingly, shouting at his horses, the near leader, a favourite, being addressed lovingly as “Coco,” the off leader held up to contempt as a “sacred canary-bird,” and the wheelers being left to jog on in peace as the spirit moved them, nibbling with fond kisses at one another’s ears, and all four merrily jingling their bells.

It was a weary journey, and we were all very tired, hungry, cross and scratchy (for the straw in the bottom of the diligence harboured a colony of greedy fleas), when we rolled along the quay in state and finally drew up at the chemist’s shop, kept by one Madame Gamard, the upper floors of which we were to occupy.

It was a mean old house, at the entrance to a curly street, the back windows of which overlooked a butcher’s shambles, where every morning at daybreak bovine sacrifices took place, a gruesome sight, which the German tutor used to wake us up to witness. He would not have missed a death-blow or a groan for anything. He revelled in blood like Ivan the Terrible. If only, as in the case of the cruel Tsar, it had been human blood, one felt that his treat would have been complete. At the back of the house slaughter; in the front drugs and potions in wonderfully inscribed gallipots, interspersed with fly-blown caramels and sugared almonds almost as nauseous as the salts and senna.

Only a maid and a cook, with my nurse and my father’s manservant, came with us from Paris, so as we were a largish party, my grandmother had to engage two additional women selected from the local talent. Her star was in the ascendant when for one of them her choice fell upon Marie Letac—and here I am at once met by a difficulty. How to spell the name? As no member of the Letac family had ever been taught to read or write, such superfluous accomplishments not being the fashion at Trouville, the spelling was a matter of debate. Should the name end with a _c_, or _que_, or _cque_, or _ques_, or _cques_? I take the line of least resistance and adopt the final _c_.

Marie was a dear, rosy-faced, good-humoured, very plump person of some forty years—snuff her one dissipation, her one extravagance. How she managed to stow away so much was a mystery; a large, flat nose and the stains on her apron would account for some of it, but surely not for all. Her union with a thin, red-haired, weasel-faced carpenter had been blessed by a numerous family, obviously hardy annuals. She was a great character, but when she came back the following year from Paris, whither she had insisted on accompanying us, she became a notable authority touching the glories of the capital, upon which she would descant to Weasel-face and a select circle of _commères_, listening open-mouthed, with their hands folded under their aprons upon their ample stomachs. What struck her most in Paris was the beauty of the potatoes. “Parlez-moi des pommes de terre de Paris! C’est si-z-aimable à cuir.” Of the servants’ quarters in a Paris house she did not approve so highly, and no wonder, for they were wretched dens under the roof, often not weathertight. She sometimes acted as my nurse, and I can hear her now, after bidding me good night, saying, “Où’s’qu’il est le parapluie?—allons nous coucher!”

One fine day there came to Trouville a travelling dentist and quack, a sort of Dr. Dulcamara, who established his cart on the quai near the fish market. He announced himself as “La Gloire de la Science,” the favourite medicine-man and confidant of the Emperor of Russia and the other Crowned Heads of Europe. He was dressed in an old ragged blue military coatee with scarlet worsted epaulettes, dirty white breeches and top-boots. On his head rested the dignity of a huge cocked hat with a tall tricolor plume. He carried a gigantic sword, and his warlike appearance was enhanced by a pair of phenomenal black moustachios. In attendance upon him were a performer on the key-bugle and a _pitre_, or jack-pudding, whose business it was at the psychological moment to bang a big drum and crash a pair of cymbals in order to drown the howls of the victims of dentistry.

Marie Letac, who had been suffering from toothache, was wild to go and consult the “Glory of Science.” My aunt promised to pay the fee, so off she went and mounted the learned doctor’s cart. A little while later we went out and met Marie Letac with a duster before her mouth, bleeding profusely, crying with pain, yet half laughing at her own plight—one might almost say weeping merrily.

“Well,” said my aunt, “so you have had it out?”

“Seven of them,” blurted out Marie.

“Seven! Impossible!”

“Oh! du moment que c’est mademoiselle qui régale!” and with that she went off bleeding but content.

The man of pills, potions, and forceps did a roaring trade that day; the drum and cymbals were never idle, and there was a great crowd of sailors and fishwives, standing unwearied for many hours, happy in the enjoyment of an exhibition which was free, and in the contemplation of the pain of their friends and neighbours.

I think, though it is anticipating by a good many years, that I must finish the story of our relations with Marie Letac. She remained with us all the time we were in France, and was heart-broken when we left—that was in 1846. We spent the summer holidays of that year at Tunbridge Wells, and one day, as we were all sitting at luncheon, there came a ring at the bell, and we were told that there was a French beggar-woman who wanted to see my aunt. She ran out of the room and presently came back with Marie, travel-stained, tired, footsore, and almost worn out, but crying for very happiness. She said that she could bear the separation no longer, so she had gone to Havre, taken boat for Southampton, and walked all the way to Tunbridge Wells. How she managed to find the road, not knowing a word of English and almost penniless, was a puzzle. She had an addressed envelope and that was all, but here and there she met with a kind person who knew a little French and helped her, and so at last the faithful creature reached us. She did not stay very long, for she had her husband and the hardy annuals to look after, and she was sent back to Normandy, this time travelling decently and in comfort.

The following summer we went back to Trouville, and of course she came to be with us. After that we never saw her again. But every Yuletide there came a letter to my aunt, written by the village scribe in pompous language, beginning, “Je croirais manquer à mon devoir si je ne m’empressais pas,” etc., etc., with many good wishes and felicitations. At last, after many years, there was a sad Christmas which brought no letter. Poor Marie “avait manqué à son devoir.” She was dead.

* * * * *

Of Trouville Alexandre Dumas père was the Columbus, la Mère Oseraie the George Washington. What the one discovered, the other made. The “Bras d’Or,” the solitary little inn over which Madame Oseraie shed the very sunshine of kindness, became famous as a summer resort for the long-haired denizens of the Quartier Latin of Paris. It was quite humble and very cheap, but it was specklessly clean, and the cooking was undeniable, for the hostess was a born _cordon bleu_. The elder Dumas was no mean judge, and when he gave her his blessing, her omelettes were said to be a dream, her _soupe aux choux_ a revelation. The great man had spoken, and the “Bras d’Or” became a sort of suffragan headquarters for some of the painters of the Barbizon school, and a small gang of imitative _rapins_ who followed in their wake. It suited their meagre purses; for three or four francs a day they were lodged and fed upon the fat of the land, with bread and cider _à discrétion_.

As for Madame Oseraie herself, round, fat, and fubsy, with a most genial smile and welcome, she looked as if she had been made to suckle the world on the milk of human kindness. The good inn was never empty, and the guests went back to Paris all the better for the rest, with a dip in the sea, fresh, strong air and good food, carrying a satchel full of sketches to work upon in their cock-loft _ateliers_ till the time should come round for another happy summer holiday. But after 1842 no more “Bras d’Or” for the poor _rapins_! The grandees from Paris had taken possession of Trouville; Madame Oseraie not unreasonably raised her prices, and the poor, long-haired, imperfectly-washed, but very merry ne’er-do-weels must move on to some other and, let us hope, equally happy hunting ground.

When the great people came they had perforce to accept the simple life. The fisher folk furbished up their cottages according to their humble ideas of æsthetic extravagance, and their lodgers, who had left behind them rooms rich with Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry, furnished with masterpieces by Riesener, Caffieri and Gouthières, had to content themselves with hideous cheap wall-papers the colour of which came off in dust upon their coats and gowns, and with such poor sticks and stocks as the modest homes could afford. What became of the owners, in what troglodytes’ dwellings they lay hidden, counting over their little harvest, is more than any man can say.

One or two artists, a little less hairy and a little better off than the old patrons of the inn, came with the mighty. There were the two brothers Mozin, Charles and Théodore, the one a clever painter, the other a musician, and Vogel, beloved of the none-too-critical Paris ladies for his sugary ballads all about love and cottages and despair—songs as sweet and smooth as the almond-paste in a wedding-cake. They brought a sort of mild æsthetic leaven into the general hotch-potch; the dandies copied their scarlet flannel blouses and their _bérets_; the smart ladies accepted their sketches and the dedications of their songs, feeling that in so doing they were laying a claim to a reputation for culture.

A vision of the _plage_ at Trouville was Madame de Contades, who came down from Paris one year to breathe a little health after some serious illness. She used to be carried on to the sands on a canvas litter by two sturdy fishermen in their blue jerseys and knitted caps, and when she was comfortably established with her book, her fan, her parasol, and her bottle of smelling-salts or some cunning essence, she would be surrounded by a bevy of children, pages and tiny maids of honour, all eager to render her homage and do her some small service—a lilliputian court quite as much in love with her as the dandy moths that singed their wings in her flame.

How beauty appeals to children! That sweet, pale face, framed in soft brown curls like the Cenci of Guido Reni, is a fascination to me to-day as it was seventy years ago and more. She should have remained a tender invalid; but the rough Norman breezes brought back the roses to her cheeks and strength to her shapely limbs, and the next I heard of our beautiful queen was swimming a race against another lady in the Seine at Paris. To her lilliputian court this seemed an outrage of _lèse-poésie_. Indeed, it was deemed a little unusual at that rather stiff period.

The Lubersacs, Barbantanes, Blacas, followed the lead of the Duchesse de Rauzan, as should beseem daughters and sons-in-law. Notable also was the Duchesse de Gramont Caderousse, with her two boys, daily playfellows of ours, the second of whom became the famous _viveur_, dandy, duellist, and eccentric of the Second Empire—I shall, perhaps, speak of him later. The elder brother died as a boy.

Sunday was a great day, when the little street and the _plage_ were quite alive with holiday folk who flocked in from the neighbouring farms and villages to see the fine people from Paris. It was a very picturesque crowd. Of course the sailor-men were all dressed in their best blue cloth, with their red knitted woollen caps throwing a tassel jauntily on one side. The well-to-do farmers’ wives and daughters were very smart. Striped petticoats coming down a little above the ankle, showing a neat little pair of wooden sabots, or even leather shoes; black-silk aprons; white fichus folded over their breasts; upon their heads the old, high twelfth-century caps, trimmed with lace, which our ladies said was beautiful, handed down from mother to daughter for generations.

A few years ago I was at Trouville once more upon a Sunday. Alas! the old costumes were no longer there. The present generation of farmers’ wives were all garbed and hatted in imitation of Paris fashions. It was too sad! They were a fine, strapping, healthy race of women, with beautiful skins and cheeks as rosy as the apples of their own orchards. Some of the girls were very handsome, sweet and modest-looking; rather shy of the foreigners. It may be said that I was not of an age to judge, but I was a long-eared little pitcher, and I heard what my elders said. The men were not so picturesquely attired, but there was a touch of local character about their get-up also.

A great ally of ours was a certain old Monsieur Pommier (I don’t suppose he was more than forty, but to us he seemed a Methuselah), who always came to see us dressed in his Sunday best. A brown coat as stiff as iron, and as uncomfortable as a strait waistcoat, with a ridiculous little pair of tails about six inches long sticking out behind almost at right angles to his waist; a phenomenally high collar reaching to his ears, a tall stock above a flowered white waistcoat; on his reddish, close-cropped head a black beaver hat, brushed the wrong way; in his hand a stick with the thick end downwards, held by a leathern thong at the small end; tiny side-whiskers, and a face and nose shining from recent soapsuds. He was the type of the prosperous Normandy farmers and cider-makers of his day. If they were proverbially a close-fisted race, they knew how to be hospitable, and there was an old-world courtesy which pierced through their roughness and was most attractive. To us they were very kindly, and the memory of them is still pleasant.

It was a motley crowd that came to mix with the grand ladies, the dandies, the _nounous_, the little bare-legged children making sand-castles, watching an itinerant Polichinelle or scrambling about the mussel-clad Roches Noires under the careful eyes of governesses and tutors.

But gay and bright and happy as the Sunday was out of doors, inside our house it was dreary and penitential. My grandmother, a Leslie-Anstruther by birth, had inherited all the bigotry of the old Covenanters, and under her rule, kind and loving as it was on week-days, the Sabbath was a day on which no expression of joy was permitted. Many hours were consumed by her in various forms of deadly dull worship. Even we, mere children, had to sit through a service which was made as forbidding as it could be. She began with the morning service read from beginning to end, including the priestly absolution, which she delivered with peculiar unction; then came the Litany, which the professional cleric omits when the morning prayer has been given in its entirety; then the Communion service. By that time most performers would have been exhausted—not so my grandmother; she proceeded to deliver one of Blair’s sermons, and woe be to us if we yawned, or fidgeted, or were guilty of inattention!

I remember one special Sunday. I must have been about six years old when I was promoted to a pair of trousers; they were made by the village tailor out of a hideous black-and-white check horse-cloth, very coarse and prickly, like the hair-shirt of a medieval saint. Every time I moved the sharp points entered into my tender flesh; to kneel was a penance, to get up again and sit down a torture. My fidgets and groans could not be restrained; they were a criminal interruption, and I was punished accordingly, but at any rate, in order that the punishment should be effective, the cruel trousers had to be taken down, and that was a consolation, though only temporary, and not unmixed with a counter-irritation of pain. In these circumstances religion was what the great Lord Halifax called “a _vertu_ stuck with bristles, too rough for this Age.”

* * * * *

In 1845 we stayed on at Trouville long after all the other summer visitors had fled, like the swallows. No one left but the fisherfolk and ourselves.

In the late autumn the sea became leaden, ugly, cruel-looking. One stormy day when I fought my way as usual against the wind down to the deserted sands, close to where the bathing-machines were drawn up in idleness, I came upon a group of fishermen carrying something blue and limp, a belated bather whom they had risked their own lives to rescue from the waves growling savagely upon the beach, lashing themselves, as it seemed to me, into a fury at being robbed of their prey. It was difficult to believe that it was the same sea that a few short weeks before had rippled so gently, kissing the pretty feet of the paddling children! On such days as those I felt very much alone and longed to get back to the Gardens of the Tuileries and the merry games with our little _camarades_.

But there were bright days in the waning year, when we made expeditions to neighbouring farm-houses, or tramped along the frosty riverside road to the little town of Touques, with its black-and-white timbered houses and the picturesque ruins of the old Norman castle.

What a joy it was when I was about eight years old to let my imagination run riot, peopling the old keep with visions of knights and dames and beautiful Jewesses! I was in the middle of reading “Ivanhoe” and here was indeed a setting for the book. I could fancy myself at Torquilstone and conjure up living pictures of the Black Knight, Front de Bœuf, the Templar, Athelstane, and Cedric the Saxon. There was a beautiful peasant girl in her high Norman cap, wandering down below among the now leafless apple orchards; could she be the Lady Rowena? And that sturdy, rather ruffianly vagabond standing in the ancient archway. Surely no other than Gurth the swineherd! Phantoms conjured up by the Wizard of the North.

* * * * *

In August, 1847, we were once more at Trouville, and it was for the last time. In former years we had been wont to see more of that romantic Norman coast than most people did; for we were not fashionable: we used to arrive in early spring, long before the orchards were brilliant with the bravery of the apple blossoms, and more than once we stayed on long after the last glorious red fruits had been gathered for the cider-vats, when the first frosts had coloured the falling leaves, and the hedges yielded no more blackberries with which to smear our small faces. This year our stay was bounded by the Eton holidays.

It was a fateful month—fateful for France—for it was the month in which the Praslin tragedy took place, a tragedy which might perhaps by now have been mercifully forgotten had it not played so important a part in the political history of that time.

One beautiful summer day, when all the little world of Trouville was gathered together upon the velvety sands, the terrible news arrived. Two young Irish ladies came running up to my aunts weeping bitterly—almost in hysterics. They were great friends of the Praslin family and had just heard that the poor Duchess had been murdered and the Duke arrested. I remember the thrill of horror with which the news was received on the _plage_, and that thrill throbbed through all France. The Duc de Praslin had driven the first nail in the coffin of the Orleans monarchy.

For some five or six years the Duke and Duchess, who had a large family, had had in their service as governess a certain Mademoiselle de Luzy. Of this lady the Duchess, with or without reason, but most probably with very good reason, at any rate so far as the transfer of her husband’s affections was concerned, had become furiously jealous: so much so that her father, Marshal Sebastiani, insisted upon Mademoiselle de Luzy’s dismissal. This, however, did not put an end to the intimacy, of whatever nature it may have been, between her and the Duke, for it was shown that on the arrival of the family in Paris from the country, he drove at once to her house. That night the murder was committed. When the servants entered the bedroom, they had to face a sight so appalling that M. Delessert, the Prefect of Police, whose business made him familiar with the horrors of crime, told Mr. Henry Greville that in all his experience he had not come across so ghastly a spectacle. There were signs of a desperate struggle, for the unhappy Duchess, a short but stout woman, had evidently fought fiercely for her life.

Suffice it to say here that the evidence against the Duke was damning. A pistol known to belong to him had been used as a bludgeon, and was clotted with blood and hair—some of the hair was his own, pulled out in the cruel fight! He had opened the window in order to excite the belief that the crime was the work of burglars; but it was pointed out to him that nothing had been stolen, and that a figure resembling his had been seen from the outside opening the casement—upon which he observed that the matter assumed a grave aspect. He was arrested and carried to prison, but managed to take a dose of poison which proved insufficient; a second dose was smuggled, as it was averred, into his cell, and of this he died; but there were many people who believed that the poison was a farce, and that he was spirited away to England, where he is supposed to have lived for many years in hiding somewhere in the Lake district. The possibility of this escape was strenuously denied both by M. Delessert and the Procureur-Général; but it is significant that the former did not himself see the Duke’s body, although it was his duty to do so. He was prevented by other business.

Mademoiselle de Luzy was arrested and kept in solitary confinement. But when she was examined she gave her evidence clearly and simply. Nothing was elicited to show that she was _particeps criminis_, or even that her relations with the Duke had gone beyond the bounds of propriety. She was of course released, and afterwards married very respectably.

All France was moved to the core by the horror of the crime; but what aroused even more indignation than the murder itself was, as I well recollect, the widespread idea that for political reasons there had been a miscarriage of justice and that the murderer, owing to his exalted position, had been allowed to disappear scot-free.

There were whisperings and mutterings, and grave doubts expressed even in high places; but in the lower strata of society, among the _bourgeoisie_ and the proletariat, there were sullen, ominous thunder-growls boding ill for a government which had long since forfeited all claim to popularity; the whole affair was shrouded in a mystery which was more than enough to excite the minds of a highly inflammable people. Republicans and Socialists had for some years been on the war-path: now they were goaded by laws gagging the press and proscribing public meetings. These laws, initiated by Guizot and furiously opposed by Thiers, brought about the final crash; the revolution broke out, and on the 22nd of February, 1848, the King and his Queen were hounded out by the mob of Paris. A few days later a slippery old gentleman with a curious pear-shaped head and profuse expressions of geniality—a commodity which he always kept in stock—landed at Newhaven. He said he was Mr. Smith.

Whether the Duc de Praslin died in prison, a suicide as well as a murderer, or whether his flight was connived at by the mighty, is one of those secrets which will remain hidden till the Day of Judgment. It used to be said that members of his family were in the habit of paying annual visits to him in England. The French authorities always scouted this idea; but many years later facts came to my knowledge which proved that one of his very near relations did make a practice of coming to England periodically, and that during those expeditions he was for the most part lost to the sight of his friends. Whither he went no one knew.

It is a strange coincidence that the fall of the last two monarchies in France—that of Louis Philippe and that of Louis Napoléon—should in each case have been heralded by a single murder. These were crimes which stirred the wildest passions, the fiercest and most unthinking resentments of the mob, and however unjustly, the penalty for them was paid by those who had no hand in them.