It is difficult, indeed, for those of a later generation to realise the feelings of Englishmen of even seventy years ago towards our neighbours—now our friendly allies—across the Channel. To those who had lived through the time of the Napoleonic wars France was ever a rapacious and world-enslaving country, only awaiting another Buonaparte to make a descent upon the shores of England. To-day the name of the great Emperor, now almost a mythical figure, arouses as much admiration here as across the Channel, but to those who had actually experienced the feeling that a French invasion was immediately imminent, the French were brigands and Napoleon merely “Boney”—feared, hated, and despised. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when all England was in daily anticipation of a French invasion, Norwich was not behindhand in publicly demonstrating its hatred of the Corsican tyrant. At a celebration of his defeat in 1813 an effigy of Buonaparte was burned in the market-place, whilst a year later another effigy, loaded with fetters, was paraded in processions both at Yarmouth and Thetford. On the restoration of the Bourbons there was a great demonstration in the market-place at Norwich, the church bells being rung and bonfires lit, whilst amidst uproarious cheering the Chevalier de Bardelin, for some twenty years an exile from France who had supported himself by giving drawing and French lessons at Thurgar’s school, took his seat on the mail coach, free, as he said, once more to return to his beloved France. He received a real old English farewell, horses, guard, coachman, and passengers being decorated with the emblem of the Bourbons, the white cockade. Before he came to Norwich (where he was universally popular) the Chevalier de Bardelin had been a _garde du corps_ of Louis XVI., in which capacity he acted at Versailles on that memorable day, October 6, 1789, when the mob from Paris nearly assassinated the King and Queen. In 1816 M. de Bardelin married a Norfolk lady, Miss Sutton, and until his death in 1852, at the age of eighty-five, he kept in constant communication with his Norwich friends, whom he always delighted to welcome on their visits to France. His daughter became the Baroness de Fabry. As late as 1843 there died at Lynn a man who had been a schoolfellow of Napoleon, and who in the days of his boyhood was said to have taken part in many a rough and tumble with him. This was Mr. Peter Lewis Dacheux, who, having many years before immigrated into England, had, as a Roman Catholic priest, long attended to the religious wants of such of his co-religionists as resided in the old Norfolk town.