As the winter drew near, old Madame Dupin began to consider the question of their move to Paris, and what was to be done with the children. At length she decided that Hippolyte must be sent to school there, and that he should make the journey on horseback in company with M. Deschartres. As we know, Hippolyte loved to run wild, and was not anxious to lose his freedom and be shut up in a French school (which was much stricter than an English one), but all possible future pains were forgotten in the fact that if he rode he _must_ have a pair of high boots--for long the object of his dearest ambition. _How_ he pined for them may be guessed from the fact that he had tried when at Nohant to make some for himself. He had found an old pair of his tutor's, which he fancied might form the upper part, while he expected to get the foot-soles out of a large piece of leather--probably once the apron of a 'chaise'--that he picked up in the stables. For four days and nights the boy worked, cutting, measuring and sewing, till he succeeded in producing a pair of shapeless objects, worthy of an Esquimaux, which split the first day he wore them. 'Never,' writes his sister thirty years after, 'never did I see anybody so entirely happy as Hippolyte when the shoemaker brought him home _real_ riding-boots with heels clamped with iron, and tiny holes to receive the spurs. The prospect of the journey to Paris--the first he had ever taken--the joy of performing it on horseback, the idea of getting rid of Deschartres, all were as nothing in the light of those boots. Even now,' she continues, 'he will tell you himself that his whole life did not contain a joy to compare with the joy of that moment. "Talk of a first love!" he would cry; "_my_ first love was a pair of boots."'