Casimir Périer, Léon Say, Gambetta, Jules Ferry, and Freycinet--where the best men on both sides tried hard to come to an agreement. W. went several times in August to see M. Thiers, who was settled at St. Germain. The old statesman was as keen as ever, receiving every day all sorts of deputations, advising, warning, encouraging, and quite confident as to the result of the elections. People were looking to him as the next President, despite his great age. However, he was not destined to see the triumph of his ideas. He died suddenly at St. Germain on the 3d of September. W. said his funeral was a remarkable sight--thousands of people followed the cortège--all Paris showing a last respect to the libérateur du territoire (though there were still clubs where he was spoken of as le sinistre vieillard). In August W. went to his Conseil-Général at Laon, and I went down to my brother-in-law's place at St. Léger near Rouen. We were a very happy cosmopolitan family-party. My mother-in-law was born a Scotch-woman (Chisholm). She was a fine type of the old-fashioned cultivated lady, with a charming polite manner, keenly interested in all that was going on in the world. She was an old lady when I married, and had outlived almost all her contemporaries, but she had a beautiful old age, surrounded by children and grandchildren. She had lived through many vicissitudes from the time of her marriage, when she arrived at the Château of St. Remy in the Department of Eure-et-Loire (where my husband, her eldest son, was born), passing through triumphal arches erected in honour of the young bride, to the last days when the fortunes of the family were diminished by revolutions and political and business crises in France. They moved from St. Remy, selling the château, and built a house on the top of a green hill near Rouen, quite shut in by big trees, and with a lovely view from the Rond Point--the highest part of the garden, over Rouen--with the spires of the cathedral in the distance. I used to find her every morning when I went to her room, sitting at the window, her books and knitting on a table near--looking down on the lawn and the steep winding path that came up from the garden,--where she had seen three generations of her dear ones pass every day--first her husband, then her sons--now her grandsons. My sister-in-law, R.'s wife, was also an Englishwoman; the daughter of the house had married her cousin, de Bunsen, who had been a German diplomatist, and who had made nearly all his career in Italy, at the most interesting period of her history, when she was struggling for emancipation from the Austrian rule and independence. I was an American, quite a new element in the family circle. We had many and most animated discussions over all sorts of subjects, in two or three languages, at the tea-table under the big tree on the lawn. French and English were always going, and often German, as de Bunsen always spoke to his daughter in German.