A special friend of both Tennyson and FitzGerald was Thackeray. With him FitzGerald had been intimate even earlier than with Tennyson. They were friends at college, and had gone as young men together to Paris, Thackeray ostensibly to study art. FitzGerald knew Paris of old. His father had a home there when he was a child, and went there for a few months every year for some years. When he was nearing seventy FitzGerald wrote the following delightful account of some of his recollections to Thackeray's daughter: WOODBRIDGE, _May 18th, 1875_. DEAR ANNIE THACKERAY--I suppose you love Paris as your Father did--as I used to do till it was made so other than it was, in the days of Louis XVIII. when I first lived in it. _Then_ it was all irregular and picturesque; with shops, hotels, _cafés_, theatres, etc. intermixed all along the Boulevards, all of different sorts and sizes. Think of my remembering the _then_ Royal Family going in several carriages to hunt in the Forest of St. Germain's--Louis XVIII. first, with his _Gardes du Corps_, in blue and silver: then Monsieur (afterwards Charles X.) with _his_ Guard in green and gold--French horns blowing--"tra, tra, tra" (as Madame de Sévigné says), through the lines of chestnut and limes--in flower. And then _Madame_ (of Angoulême) standing up in her carriage, blear-eyed, dressed in white with her waist at her neck--standing up in the carriage at a corner of the wood to curtsey to the English assembled there--my mother among them. This was in 1817. Now _you_ would have made a delightful description of all this; you will say _I_ have done so, but that is not so. And yet I saw, and see, it all. Whenever you write again--(I don't wish you to write now) tell me what you think of Irving and Salvini; of the former of whom I have very different reports, Macready's Memoirs seem to me very _conscientious_ and _rather dull_; _toujours Megready_ (as one W. M. T. irreverently called him). He seems to me to have had no humour--which I also observed in his acting. He would have made a better scholar or divine, I think: a very honourable, good man anywhere and anyhow.