“Oh, how pleasant are those summer afternoons, sitting under the blossomed limes, with the sun shedding a golden light through the broad branches, the bees murmuring overhead, roses and lilies all about us, and the choicest fruit served up in wicker baskets of her own making.... Those are pleasant meetings; nor are her little winter parties less agreeable, when to two or three female friends assembled round their coffee, she will tell thrilling stories of that terrible Revolution, so fertile in great crimes and great virtues. Or [relate] gayer anecdotes of the brilliant days preceding that convulsion, the days which Madame de Genlis has described so well, when Paris was the capital of pleasure, and amusement the business of life; illustrating her descriptions by a series of spirited drawings of costumes and characters done by herself, and always finishing by producing a group of Louis Seize, Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, and Madame Elizabeth, as she had last seen them at Versailles—the only recollections that ever bring tears into her smiling eyes. “Madame Thérèse’s loyalty to the Bourbons was in truth a very real feeling. Her family had been about the Court, and she had imbibed an enthusiasm for the royal sufferers natural to a young and warm heart—she loved the Bourbons and hated Napoleon with like ardour. All her other French feelings had for some time been a little modified. She was not quite so sure as she had been that France was the only country, and Paris the only city of the world; that Shakespeare was a barbarian, and Milton no poet; that the perfume of English limes was nothing compared to French orange trees; that the sun never shone in England; and that sea-coal fires were bad things.... Her loyalty to her legitimate king was, however, as strong as ever, and that loyalty had nearly cost us our dear mademoiselle. “After the Restoration, she hastened, as fast as steamboat and diligence could carry her, to enjoy the delight of seeing once more the Bourbons and the Tuileries; took leave, between smiles and tears, of her friends, and of Burley-Hatch, carrying with her a branch of the lime-tree, then in blossom, and commissioning her old lover, Mr. Foreclose, to dispose of the cottage: but in less than three months, luckily before Mr. Foreclose had found a purchaser, mademoiselle came home again. She complained of nobody; but times were altered. The house in which she was born was pulled down; her friends were scattered, her kindred dead; Madame (la Duchess d’Angoulême) did not remember her ... the King did not know her again (poor man! he had not seen her for these thirty years); Paris was a new city; the French were a new people; she missed the sea-coal fires; and for the stunted orange-trees at the Tuileries, what were they compared with the blossomed limes of Burley-Hatch!”[11] [Footnote 11: We think this place may have been intended for Burghfield Hatch.]