 to read, but beyond that I had reached the age of
six knowing nothing or hardly anything. But I was a very good rider and
went out alone on a pony Lord Bristol had given my father, which I rode
boldly, and I might even say recklessly. The pony's name was Polynice.
He and I understood each other perfectly, and I was his friend to the
last. I took care he should end his days in the park at St. Cloud,
where he roamed in freedom, with a stable of his own to retire into if
the fancy took him. Often and often I have been to see him, in that
same stable, which he ended by never leaving except to come and greet
us, and warm himself in the sunshine. He died, there, fortunately for
himself, full of years, just before the pleasant revolutionary
occurrences of 1848, in which he would certainly have had his share.
But my father desired me to be something more than a mere horseman. He
got me a tutor, and from that day out, for several years, my
recollections are divided, to the exclusion of everything else, between
my education and my life with my family. My tutor was called M.
Trognon, and his name brought many a jest upon him, amongst others a
line of Victor Hugo's in Ruy Bias about that

 Affreuse compagnonne,
 Dont la barbe fleurit et dont le nez trognonne.

[Illustration: Looks a little like a courtroom unfortunately without a
caption.]

"Fleurit" was an allusion to Cuvillier-Fleury, my brother Aumale's
tutor, and Victor Hugo thought he owed both the gentlemen a grudge. M.
Trognon, a distinguished pupil of the Ecole Normale, had begun his
teaching career as professor of rhetoric at the college at Langres,
where, coming in one day to take his class, he found his desk occupied
by a donkey, which his pupils had established in his seat "Gentlemen,"
he said as he went out, "I leave you with a professor who is worthy of
you." Soon after, he was recalled to Paris, as assistant to M. Guizot
in his courses of historical lectures at the College of France.

He was not only an accomplished university man, but something else
besides, as we learnt from a copy of the Figaro, which our eldest
brother brought back from college. In this newspaper we read, in fact,
a set of verses by Baour-Lormian, beginning thus:--

 Que me veut ce Trognon, pedagogue en besicles,
 Dans la fosse du Globe enterrant ses articles!

There was no doubt about it. My tutor was a journalist, and these lines
a revengeful answer to an article of his in the Globe, a newspaper
which, as we soon learnt, he had founded in concert with Pierre Leroux,
Dubois, Jouffroy, Remusat, and some others. We discovered too that our
journalist was a freethinker as well, and author of a thick octavo book
which had been condemned by the Index at Rome, a fact which did not
prevent his dying in the most religious frame of mind possible, well
nigh in the odour of sanctity. My tutor was, in truth, of too lofty an
intelligence to persevere long in that religious nihilism, that denial
of the existence of a future state, which, spreading from religion to
family life, and from thence again to the affairs of the State, ends by
leaving nothing standing but animal man and his animal passions and
appetites. The long death-struggle of a passionately loved sister, who
was supported by the constant ministrations of the Bishop of Beauvais,
M. Feutrier, and her calm end, of which he was an eyewitness, began the
change within him. When, in later years, the Abbe Dupanloup, then Vicar
of the Church of the Assumption, was charged with the care of my
religious education, he and Trognon became very intimate, and death
alone interrupted the close communion then established between these
two great minds.

The first years of my education were very happy. Anything dry about it
was liberally compensated for by the constant intimacy of the family
circle. We were three sisters and six brothers (this last number soon
reduced to five by the death of my brother Penthievre), all living
together, eating together, often doing lessons together, together
always in all games and pleasure parties and excursions. What a joyous
band we were may easily be guessed. Each boy had his own tutor, and two
governesses were in charge of my sisters. So long as tutors and
governesses only had to deal with their own pupils, all went well, but
when the brothers and sisters were all together, and influenced by the
spirit of insubordination and love of playing pranks which the elder
ones brought back from school, we made life hard and sour to the
preceptorial body. But they got on, somehow. The GRANDSPARENTS, as we
called our parents, taken up as they were by their social engagements,
left all initiative to the tutors. Each of these was only expected to
enter daily in a book his report and opinion of the pupil committed to
his care. This book was seen by my father, and he added his own remarks
and orders, and then returned it.

Our day generally began at five o'clock in the morning. The elder ones
went to school to attend their classes, took their meals and played
with the boarders, and came home after evening school. The boys who
were not at school and the girls spent the day doing their lessons. In
the evening, pupils and teachers of both sexes all dined together, and
then went to the drawing-room, where there was always company, for my
parents received every evening. Thursdays and Sundays, which were
school holidays, were given up specially to lessons in what were known
as accomplishments: drawing, music, physical exercises, riding,
fencing, singlestick, dancing, &c. On Sundays, every one, great and
small, dined at "THE GREAT TABLE," and this life of ours was as regular
as clockwork summer and winter alike.

In winter time we lived in the Palais-Royal, which then was not at all
what it is nowadays. Where the Galerie d'Orleans is now to be seen,
there were hideous wooden passages, with muddy floors, exclusively
occupied by milliners' shops, and peopled, it was said, by thousands of
rats. To get rid of this collection of shanties, they were sawn through
below, and allowed to come down with a crash. Crowds of people came to
witness the collapse, in the hope of seeing the expected multitude of
rats rush out. There was not a single one! They had all cleared out in
good time. Such is the wisdom of the brute creation!

When I first lived at the Palais-Royal, I had a room in the Rue de
Valois, which overlooked the Boeuf a la Mode restaurant, and opposite
there dwelt an old lady, always dressed in black, who regularly every
day, at the very same hour, placed an indispensable article of domestic
use upon her window-sill, so that it was as good as a clock to us.
Later on, I changed my room for one looking over the courtyard, facing
the rooms occupied by an actor at the Comedie-Francaise named
Dumilatre, and his daughters; Dumilatre, whom I knew well, having seen
him play those small tragedy parts which consist in making a dignified
exit and saying, "Yes, my lord," had the same habits as my black lady,
and the same object used to appear upon his window-sill with equal
regularity. I had only changed my clock!

It was during the winter sojourn at the Palais-Royal, too, that our
masters and their lessons multiplied. And several of these masters were
oddities, amongst others our professor of German. Picture a little
bland-mannered old man, dressed all in black, with satin breeches,
woollen stockings, enormous shoes, and a broad-brimmed hat. He had been
tutor to Prince Metternich in his youth. I know not what chance had
later driven him into France--where, during the Terror, he became one
of the secretaries of the much-dreaded Committee of Public Safety at
Strasbourg. He lived alone with his daughter, whom he often sent to
Germany, not by the ordinary means of communication, but concealed in
the van which was sent periodically into Hungary to fetch supplies of
leeches for the hospitals, which circumstance made us conclude that the
simple name of "Herr Simon" by which he called himself probably
concealed some deep mystery. Nothing, alas! remains to me of his
German, nor of that of a valet of the same race, who had been put about
me, so ill adapted has my mental constitution always proved to any
foreign language.

Another oddity was our dancing master