It was a weary journey, and we were all very tired, hungry, cross and scratchy (for the straw in the bottom of the diligence harboured a colony of greedy fleas), when we rolled along the quay in state and finally drew up at the chemist’s shop, kept by one Madame Gamard, the upper floors of which we were to occupy. It was a mean old house, at the entrance to a curly street, the back windows of which overlooked a butcher’s shambles, where every morning at daybreak bovine sacrifices took place, a gruesome sight, which the German tutor used to wake us up to witness. He would not have missed a death-blow or a groan for anything. He revelled in blood like Ivan the Terrible. If only, as in the case of the cruel Tsar, it had been human blood, one felt that his treat would have been complete. At the back of the house slaughter; in the front drugs and potions in wonderfully inscribed gallipots, interspersed with fly-blown caramels and sugared almonds almost as nauseous as the salts and senna. Only a maid and a cook, with my nurse and my father’s manservant, came with us from Paris, so as we were a largish party, my grandmother had to engage two additional women selected from the local talent. Her star was in the ascendant when for one of them her choice fell upon Marie Letac—and here I am at once met by a difficulty. How to spell the name? As no member of the Letac family had ever been taught to read or write, such superfluous accomplishments not being the fashion at Trouville, the spelling was a matter of debate. Should the name end with a _c_, or _que_, or _cque_, or _ques_, or _cques_? I take the line of least resistance and adopt the final _c_. Marie was a dear, rosy-faced, good-humoured, very plump person of some forty years—snuff her one dissipation, her one extravagance. How she managed to stow away so much was a mystery; a large, flat nose and the stains on her apron would account for some of it, but surely not for all. Her union with a thin, red-haired, weasel-faced carpenter had been blessed by a numerous family, obviously hardy annuals. She was a great character, but when she came back the following year from Paris, whither she had insisted on accompanying us, she became a notable authority touching the glories of the capital, upon which she would descant to Weasel-face and a select circle of _commères_, listening open-mouthed, with their hands folded under their aprons upon their ample stomachs. What struck her most in Paris was the beauty of the potatoes. “Parlez-moi des pommes de terre de Paris! C’est si-z-aimable à cuir.” Of the servants’ quarters in a Paris house she did not approve so highly, and no wonder, for they were wretched dens under the roof, often not weathertight. She sometimes acted as my nurse, and I can hear her now, after bidding me good night, saying, “Où’s’qu’il est le parapluie?—allons nous coucher!”