Memoirs | Page 8

nightingale, over whom the Opera and Opera-Comique fought for many a day, as the desk he laid his music on. Sometimes when the evening was half over a bell was heard like the one in the fourth act of the HUGUENOTS. "There's the big bell," we would cry. It was the signal that Madame la Dauphine or Madame la Duchesse de Berri was coming to pay us a visit, and my father would tear off, with all of us after him, to receive the visitor on the staircase. But our season at the Palais-Royal closed with the winter, and the first fine days saw us migrate to Neuilly, to the general delight.
Neuilly! I can never write the word without feeling moved, for it is bound up with all the happiest memories of my childhood, and I salute that name with respect akin to that which I would show a dead man! Those who never knew the Neuilly of which I would speak must imagine to themselves a very large country house, of no architectural pretension, consisting almost exclusively of sets of ground-floor rooms, tacked one on to the other on much the same level, with delightful gardens, and standing in the middle of a very large park which stretched from the fortifications to the Seine, just where the Avenue Bineau now runs. Within the park walls there were fields and woods and orchards, and even islands, the chief of which was called the "Ile de la Grande Jatte," and the whole of one reach of the Seine, the whole within a quarter of an hour's journey from Paris. This beautiful demesne, the favourite residence of my father and mother, who had made it, and were always adding new beauties to it, and who lived there in those days, far from political cares, and surrounded by their many children, who were all devoted to them, was also the place that we loved best. We were so near town that our education, our masters, our lessons at home or in school, went on just as if we were in Paris, while we had the advantage of fresh air and country life, with all its liberty and its natural and spontaneous exercise. At five o'clock in the morning, before lessons or school began, we were galloping about in the big park. In play hours, and on the Thursday and Sunday holidays, the whole troop of children roamed the fields, almost unaccompanied, the older ones looking after the youngest. We used to make hay, and get on the hay-cocks, and dig potatoes, and climb the fruit-trees, and beat the walnut-trees. There were flowers everywhere, fields of roses, where we gathered splendid bouquets every day, without their ever being missed even. Then we used to go boating and swimming. Boys and girls, equally good swimmers all, would plunge in turn into the little arm of the Seine enclosed within the park, and nothing more delicious can be imagined than to cast oneself into deep water near the bridge at Neuilly, and to let oneself drift down almost as far as Asnieres, under the great willows, returning afterwards on foot by the "Ile de la Grande Jatte."
This island, laid waste now and turned into a slum, was covered then with venerable trees, and intersected by those "shady paths" sung by Gounod, in which we loved to lose ourselves in all the carelessness of our childhood, and perhaps too in the first awakening instincts of our youth. Nothing but a memory remains of that enchanting spot. It was confiscated by Napoleon III. on some flimsy pretext or other, and forthwith cut to pieces, so as to destroy every trace of those who had owned and lived in it. It is as much as I can do, as I drive along the Avenue Bineau, to find, among the villas which have been built all over it, some well-known tree or other, behind which I used to lie in wait to shoot the hares, which a big dog I had trained to the work used to put up for me As for the house itself, after being the scene of a terrible orgie, it was sacked and burnt down by the conquerors in the glorious fight of February 1848. Not a stone of it remains. All the works of art within it were destroyed But I know of one stray bit saved from the wreck. The traveller who goes to see the museum at Neufchatel, in Switzerland, may observe, alongside of the picture which represents M. de Montmolin, an officer of the Swiss Guard, allowing himself to be murdered on the 10th of August, sooner than give up the flag which was intrusted to his loyal care, a very small canvas, carefully mended up. That fragment is the principal