A man of seventy years in 1842 was twenty years of age when the King was murdered; yet it seems difficult to believe now that, as a child, I often listened, my hair almost on end, to men and women telling how they had seen their nearest and dearest led off in the tumbrils to the shambles of Monsieur de Paris, and recounting the miracles by which they themselves had escaped. There were many such. Indeed, the Duchesse d’Angoulème herself—the woman of so many tears that to her dying day in 1851 her poor eyes suffered from the chronic weeping known as _gutta lachrymans_—who as a child had, with her unhappy mother, gone through the miseries of the Conciergerie, and seen the King and Queen, both her parents led away to the scaffold, was living, though not in France, and my father knew her well—in all respects a wonderful woman, of whom Napoleon said that she was “the only man in the family.” It is now the fashion to laugh at the story that Robespierre, minded to marry her, sought an interview with her in prison. She, warned beforehand, maintained a dead silence, refusing to utter a word, and he left the room, banging the door and exclaiming, “Bégueule comme toute sa famille.” My father, who had exceptional relations with the old French Legitimists, firmly believed that this really happened, and he had good reason for his faith. Of people whom I actually knew and who had survived the Revolution, several were in various ways notable. At Trouville we became very intimate with the family of the Marquis de Chaumont Quitry. The two sons, Félix and Odon, were splendid young men who, among others, made the place gay, and on a fine evening they would carry out their _trompes de chasse_ and make the rocks ring with the “Hallali,” the “Rendezvous des Chasseurs,” and other fanfares, to the great joy of us children. The old Marquis had been a great figure among the _émigrés_. When still little more than a boy he had contrived to make his escape from the Terreur with his young wife, and landed in England with a few pounds in his pocket. Many friends were eager to help him, but he was as proud as his ancestor, Robert de Chaumont, the knight of the First Crusade, and he would accept nothing. With the little money that he had he bought cloth, thread, scissors, needles, and whalebone, and set up with the Marquise as a stay-maker somewhere in Soho—a hero, if ever there was one—and it became the fashion for fine ladies to have their stays made by the noble descendant of Crusaders whose pedigree could be traced back to Charlemagne.