Never shall I forget my first outing in the little old-fashioned garden, filled with the perfume of ripe peaches and fading roses. Around me, poor invalid that I was, seated on the steps of a ladder laid against the fruited wall, they were hurrying on the departure, loading the vans, gathering the fruit and flowers in the unconscious preoccupation of leaving nothing for the enemy; even the child, with its arms full of toys, picking up a little spade forgotten in the grass. As for me, I inhaled the fresh air with delight; and with an emotion caused by my weak state and my returning health, I gazed at the grey house, and at the red flowers covering the Virginian jessamine interwoven round the bay window of the studio. I thought of the happy hours, so soft and tranquil, spent there the last three years, the hearty laughter, the æsthetic discussions so thoroughly in harmony with the little home, full of the memories of a great artist. Should we ever behold again the sunny path so often slowly paced with short and chatty steps, the verandah where we sat in the fine June evenings, in the brightness of a flowery Spanish broom which, ball-shaped, seemed like an enormous lustre lighted up in the fading twilight, the richness of its golden colour deepening as the light decreased! The family omnibus was filled up and loaded, all our cherished ones tightly pressed against each other, the child’s toys side by side with the parrokeet’s cage, the bird scared by the sharp-pointed ears of a favourite greyhound: we started, passing first through the little village with its closed and silent villas. The peasants still held out, although disturbed at the departures, watching them from their doorways with tears rising in their eyes, and a certain uneasiness depicted in the stolid cupidity of their countenances. What a return to Paris! The highway crowded with men and beasts, the sheep running loose between the wheels, the green of the market-gardeners’ carts mingling with the piled-up furniture in the vans. On the railway embankment, which lay on one side of our road, trucks upon trucks extending in interminable rows, halting and whistling calls, which were answered and re-echoed on the distant line. And then at last the _octroi_, where the belated droves of cattle and people and vehicles are accumulated before the too narrow gateway, and—for me a novel sight—men of the National Guard mixed with the customs officers—a Parisian militia, full of zeal and good nature, whose bayonets shine amidst the crowd and in the sunshine on the slopes of the fortifications, now heightened by gabions and bristling with guns.