“My grandfather, who had known Agnes Jackson and all about her short-lived liaison with Lord Yarmouth, hunted up the boy, and finding he was a smart child, showed him to Lady Hertford, Maria Fagnani, and induced her to bring him up, much against the inclination of her son. “There is, and never was, the slightest foundation for the absurd legend that Maria Fagnani was Sir Richard Wallace’s mother, although the writer in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography,’ who cannot possibly know anything of the facts, adopts it. “One of the reasons sometimes given for assuming that Lord Hertford could not be Wallace’s father was that there was not more than eighteen or nineteen years between their ages. On the other hand, it was overlooked that Maria Fagnani was very nearly, if not quite, fifty years of age when Wallace was born. Anyway, I have no doubt whatever that the facts are as I have stated them. “They were corroborated, as far as I am concerned, by the evidence of Madame O—— de B——, a lady who for forty years lived on the _deuxième étage_ of the Rue Lafitte and in a beautiful villa, called St. James, close to Bagatelle. “She was a lady of irreproachable life, and virtue as stern as that of Madame de Maintenon, whom she resembled in many ways. I inherited some of the gifts which she had received from Lord Hertford; among them a fine ‘Garter George,’ which belonged to Prince Charles Edward, and was acquired by Francis, third Marquis, from the collection of Cardinal York. “It was destined for my grandfather and his children, and Madame O—— fulfilled her obligation. “I perfectly remember Sir Richard Wallace’s son, whose liaison with a French girl bitterly offended Sir Richard, although, as he was told by the young man when the quarrel was irremediable, he had only followed his father’s example. “Young Wallace came once or twice to London after 1870. He died of typhoid fever when still a young man. But Wallace would never recognize his son’s children or their mother; the former were amply provided for by Lady Wallace. Madame O—— de B—— had no children of her own, but she showed great kindness to her connections _de la main gauche_. I perfectly remember the advent of Sir John Scott into the Wallace household, and the subsequent course of a lifelong devotion to the interests of his employers that deserved and obtained its reward. “There is no need to enter into the story of Lady Wallace, a very refined, shy and excellent lady, although the facts were well known to my family.” “My French relations were intimate with Lord Hertford, Sir Richard Wallace and Sir John Scott, over a period extending from 1817 to Scott’s death.” “Yours ever, “ESHER.”