Memoirs | Page 7

shot. Well, the
shout--that voice--it was Alexandre Dumas' voice!" "Oh, nonsense!"
we all cried. But he stuck to it--and we resisted the violent inclination
to laugh that assailed us, convinced as we were that if the worthy man
really had recognized the voice, he had been the victim of a prank of
Alexandre Dumas, who had doubtless enjoyed the fun of seeing the
rout of his former chief and his brave "guernadiers"!
When our father did not take us to the Theatre Francais, we spent our
evenings in those beautiful rooms in the Palais-Royal where he had
gathered together so many admirable pictures and works of art,
plundered and dispersed since by the revolutionists and their tribe,
together with the splendid furniture which was used to burn a
detachment of the 14th Regiment of the Line alive, on the 24th of
February, on which day it was on guard at the Palais-Royal. And to
think that a French Chamber actually voted national rewards to people
who had made an AUTO DA FE of French soldiers who were guilty of
defending till death the post which duty and honour at once made
sacred to them! But let that pass; worse things happen nowadays, but at
the happy time I speak of nobody thought of the possibility of such
shameful doings. This is what men call progress! As far as we
ourselves were concerned, we spent our evenings in all the carelessness
of our youth, playing together merrily and noisily in the family
drawing-room, a large gallery running from the courtyard to the Rue de
Valois. The games were liveliest on Sundays and Thursdays, because,

those days being school holidays, our merry band was reinforced by my
brothers' class-mates, MM. de Laborderie, Guillermy, d'Eckmul, Albert,
&c., &c., and by Alfred de Mussetas well, whom I still seem to see,
with his blue coat and gilt buttons, his fair curly hair, and his
melancholy and somewhat affected ways. We generally played
"prisoners' base"--a game to which the great gallery was very well
suited. Sometimes there was dancing, and then my mother's eye was
always on de Musset, who seemed to scorn our games and to be
inclined to pay assiduous court to my big sisters.
Our games never interfered with the coming and going of visitors and
habitual guests and old friends of my father's, who had been his friends
before the Revolution. There was the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, "the
good Duke," as he was called, very much dreaded by us children
because he was always kissing us, and smelt so strongly of tobacco;
and M. de Lally- Tollendal; and then friends of more recent date,
General Gerard, Raoul de Montmorency, Madame de Boigne, the
Princesse de Poix, the Princesse de Vaudemont, besides many others,
soldiers, artists, diplomats, and ladies--every one, in fact, who was
distinguished either by their personal charm, by mental qualities, or by
the brilliancy of their career. Some amongst the number were more
congenial to me than others; such as Francois Arago, the astronomer,
inexhaustible in wit and humour, whether he was recounting his
adventures when he was in captivity in the Barbary States, or the way
he plagued his colleague Ampere, a soldier like himself in the regiment
of the "Parrots in mourning," as he dubbed the Institute, in his southern
accent, because of its green and black uniform. And then Macdonald,
Marmont, Molitor, and Mortier, the four Marshals whose name began
with M, the heroes of a hundred fights, the living embodiment of the
renown our arms had won. We used all of us to try and hear whatever
they said, whatever stories they told, and to gather up any information
or anecdote touching the military glory of our country.
The diplomats interested us less--I will not speak of M. de Talleyrand,
whose face and figure were striking enough, though they made but little
impression on our uninformed imaginations. Yet I remember the fits of
laughter we went into one day, when my father, in a fit of absence,

aped the great man's limp as he crossed the drawing-room to receive
him. We delighted in Pozzo di Borgo, the Russian Ambassador,
because as soon as his burly presence appeared his jokes and witty
sallies and his stories provoked loud and inexhaustible shouts of
laughter. All children love cheery people. There was another diplomat
whose arrival we always looked forward to, the Bailli de Ferrette,
Minister of the Grand Duke of Baden- -and this for two reasons. First
of all because of that title of "Bailli," which seemed to belong to
another world, or at all events to a harlequinade, and then on account of
the extraordinary appearance of the man--he looked like a skeleton in
powder. We were quite ignorant in those days, it is needless to remark,