Madame Seraskier died of the cholera, and so did le Pere et la Mere Francois, and Madame Pele, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M. le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of our own, Therese, the devoted Therese, to whom we were all devoted in return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned in vain. The _maison de sante_ was broken up. M. le Major and his friends went and roosted on parole elsewhere, until a good time arrived for them, when their lost leader came back and remained--first as President of the French Republic, then as Emperor of the French themselves. No more parole was needed after that. My grandmother and Aunt Plunket and her children fled in terror to Tours, and Mimsey went to Russia with her father. Thus miserably ended that too happy septennate, and so no more at present of "_Le joli lieu de ma naissance_!" Part Two The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself, that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull reading, I fear. [Illustration:] My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged to educate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "English gentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason I did not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it was because he had injured my father through life in many ways, and my father had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it was because he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl, and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India for seven years, and just before his departure my father and mother were married, and a year after that I was born.) So Pierre Pasquier de la Mariere, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became Master Peter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where he spent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especially at that age. I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at the back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the cattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house, a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday morning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream of Passy, of my dear dead father and mother and Madame Seraskier.