Of the Royal Family in the Tuileries there were two members at whom nobody sneered, of whom nobody spoke an evil word—Queen Amélie and the Duc d’Aumale. Her goodness and dignity won universal respect and admiration. Of the Duc d’Aumale I shall have a word to say elsewhere. As for the rest, there was no great halo of majesty about them. The wily old fox himself was distrusted where he was not hated. The Legitimists spoke of him as the very incarnation of the Revolution, like his father Égalité, a traitor to his King and to his caste. How dared he call himself “King of the French” when his cousin was the lawful “King of France?” The sons, Nemours, Joinville, Montpensier, I used to hear spoken of with scant respect—no great harm about them; but poor creatures, commanding neither regard nor affection; nobody seemed to associate with them or to wish their friendship. When I came to know them later in life in this country I understood the talk to which I had listened as a child. The death of the Duc d’Orléans excited sympathy from its tragic character, besides which he like the Duc d’Aumale, but in a lesser degree, had earned some credit in the Algerian campaign. I can just remember the horror with which the news of the fatal accident when he was thrown from his carriage, between Paris and Neuilly, was received. It was in 1842, just seventy-three years ago! My father’s many accomplishments—music, painting, languages—made him welcome beyond the usual run of foreigners in French society. He was, moreover, wonderfully well-read in the old memoirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and quite an authority on historic French portraits. So much so that when I once said to him that I felt sure that if he were to find himself transported back to one of the famous salons of those times he would know almost all the people by sight, his answer was, “Upon my word, I believe I should.” The society of the Faubourg in the early forties must have been very interesting; there were so many people still living who could talk as eye-witnesses of the horrors of the great Revolution: at the time of our sojourning in France there was less interval separating us from the Terreur than there is between to-day and the Crimean War.