Memoirs | Page 3

courses of historical lectures at the College of France.
He was not only an accomplished university man, but something else
besides, as we learnt from a copy of the Figaro, which our eldest
brother brought back from college. In this newspaper we read, in fact, a
set of verses by Baour-Lormian, beginning thus:--
Que me veut ce Trognon, pedagogue en besicles, Dans la fosse du
Globe enterrant ses articles!
There was no doubt about it. My tutor was a journalist, and these lines
a revengeful answer to an article of his in the Globe, a newspaper

which, as we soon learnt, he had founded in concert with Pierre Leroux,
Dubois, Jouffroy, Remusat, and some others. We discovered too that
our journalist was a freethinker as well, and author of a thick octavo
book which had been condemned by the Index at Rome, a fact which
did not prevent his dying in the most religious frame of mind possible,
well nigh in the odour of sanctity. My tutor was, in truth, of too lofty an
intelligence to persevere long in that religious nihilism, that denial of
the existence of a future state, which, spreading from religion to family
life, and from thence again to the affairs of the State, ends by leaving
nothing standing but animal man and his animal passions and appetites.
The long death-struggle of a passionately loved sister, who was
supported by the constant ministrations of the Bishop of Beauvais, M.
Feutrier, and her calm end, of which he was an eyewitness, began the
change within him. When, in later years, the Abbe Dupanloup, then
Vicar of the Church of the Assumption, was charged with the care of
my religious education, he and Trognon became very intimate, and
death alone interrupted the close communion then established between
these two great minds.
The first years of my education were very happy. Anything dry about it
was liberally compensated for by the constant intimacy of the family
circle. We were three sisters and six brothers (this last number soon
reduced to five by the death of my brother Penthievre), all living
together, eating together, often doing lessons together, together always
in all games and pleasure parties and excursions. What a joyous band
we were may easily be guessed. Each boy had his own tutor, and two
governesses were in charge of my sisters. So long as tutors and
governesses only had to deal with their own pupils, all went well, but
when the brothers and sisters were all together, and influenced by the
spirit of insubordination and love of playing pranks which the elder
ones brought back from school, we made life hard and sour to the
preceptorial body. But they got on, somehow. The
GRANDSPARENTS, as we called our parents, taken up as they were
by their social engagements, left all initiative to the tutors. Each of
these was only expected to enter daily in a book his report and opinion
of the pupil committed to his care. This book was seen by my father,
and he added his own remarks and orders, and then returned it.

Our day generally began at five o'clock in the morning. The elder ones
went to school to attend their classes, took their meals and played with
the boarders, and came home after evening school. The boys who were
not at school and the girls spent the day doing their lessons. In the
evening, pupils and teachers of both sexes all dined together, and then
went to the drawing-room, where there was always company, for my
parents received every evening. Thursdays and Sundays, which were
school holidays, were given up specially to lessons in what were known
as accomplishments: drawing, music, physical exercises, riding,
fencing, singlestick, dancing, &c. On Sundays, every one, great and
small, dined at "THE GREAT TABLE," and this life of ours was as
regular as clockwork summer and winter alike.
In winter time we lived in the Palais-Royal, which then was not at all
what it is nowadays. Where the Galerie d'Orleans is now to be seen,
there were hideous wooden passages, with muddy floors, exclusively
occupied by milliners' shops, and peopled, it was said, by thousands of
rats. To get rid of this collection of shanties, they were sawn through
below, and allowed to come down with a crash. Crowds of people came
to witness the collapse, in the hope of seeing the expected multitude of
rats rush out. There was not a single one! They had all cleared out in
good time. Such is the wisdom of the brute creation!
When I first lived at the Palais-Royal, I had a room in the Rue de
Valois, which overlooked the Boeuf a la Mode restaurant, and opposite
there dwelt an old lady, always dressed in black, who regularly every
day,