Memoirs | Page 8

of the fact that this cool, proper-looking Bailli was a great musician, a
first-class performer of the STABAT MATER, whose inspiration
however depended on his having the shoulders, very DECOLLETEE
ones too, of a charming 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,