And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic, synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes and days gone by. Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an "_Air doux et tendre Jadis aime_!" Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff! * * * * * In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away and apart. Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. le Major to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dear Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen her since. * * * * * Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old. My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal irony of fate. So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come home at last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou (with a nice little old castle to match), called la Mariere, which had belonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we were Pasquier de la Mariere, of quite a good old family); and there we were to live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be French for evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary _pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his own again, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heaven knows what for!