The next day I went to Rotten Row. It was glorious weather, and all Hyde Park seemed to be strewn with enormous bouquets. There were the flower- beds wonderfully arranged by the gardeners; then there were the clusters of sunshades, blue, pink, red, white, or yellow, which sheltered the light hats covered with flowers under which shone the pretty faces of children and women. Along the riding path there was an exciting gallop of graceful thoroughbreds bearing along some hundreds of horsewomen, slender, supple, and courageous; then there were men and children, the latter mounted on big Irish ponies. There were other children, too, galloping along on Scotch ponies with long, shaggy manes, the children’s hair and the manes of the horses streaming in the wind of their own speed. The carriage road between the riding-track and the foot passengers was filled with dog-carts, open carriages of various kinds, mail-coaches, and very smart cabs. There were powdered footmen, horses decorated with flowers, sportsmen driving, ladies, too, driving admirable horses. All this elegance, this essence of luxury, and this joy of life brought back to my memory the vision of our Bois de Boulogne, so elegant and so animated a few years before, when Napoleon III. used to drive through on his _daumont_, nonchalant and smiling. Ah, how beautiful it was in those days—our Bois de Boulogne, with the officers caracoling in the Avenue des Acacias, admired by our beautiful society women! The joy of life was everywhere—the love of love enveloping life with an infinite charm. I closed my eyes, and I felt a pang at my heart as the awful recollections of 1870 crowded to my brain. He was dead, our gentle Emperor, with his shrewd smile. Dead, vanquished by the sword, betrayed by fortune, crushed with grief. The thread of life in Paris had been taken up again in all its intenseness, but the life of elegance, of charm, and of luxury was still shrouded in crape. Scarcely eight years had passed since the war had struck down our soldiers, ruined our hopes, and tarnished our glory. Three Presidents had already succeeded each other. That wretched little Thiers, with his perverse _bourgeois_ soul, had worn his teeth out with nibbling at every kind of Government—royalty under Louis Philippe, Empire under Napoleon III., and the executive power of the French Republic. He had never even thought of lifting our beloved Paris up again, bowed down as she was under the weight of so many ruins. He had been succeeded by MacMahon, a good, brave man, but a cipher. Grévy had succeeded the Marshal, but he was miserly, and considered all outlay unnecessary for himself, for other people, and for the country. And so Paris remained sad, nursing the leprosy that the Commune had communicated to her by the kiss of its fires. And our delightful Bois de Boulogne still bore the traces of the injuries that the national defence had inflicted on her. The Avenue des Acacias was deserted.