Memoirs of the Prince of Joinville. Prince of Joinville
gilt buttons, his fair curly hair, and his melancholy and somewhat affected ways. We generally played "prisoners' base"—a game to which the great gallery was very well suited. Sometimes there was dancing, and then my mother's eye was always on de Musset, who seemed to scorn our games and to be inclined to pay assiduous court to my big sisters.
Our games never interfered with the coming and going of visitors and habitual guests and old friends of my father's, who had been his friends before the Revolution. There was the Duc
de la Rochefoucauld, "the good Duke," as he was called, very much dreaded by us children because he was always kissing us, and smelt so strongly of tobacco; and M. de Lally-Tollendal; and then friends of more recent date, General Gerard, Raoul de Montmorency, Madame de Boigne, the Princesse de Poix, the Princesse de Vaudemont, besides many others, soldiers, artists, diplomats, and ladies—every one, in fact, who was distinguished either by their personal charm, by mental qualities, or by the brilliancy of their career. Some amongst the number were more congenial to me than others; such as Francois Arago, the astronomer, inexhaustible in wit and humour, whether he was recounting his adventures when he was in captivity in the Barbary States, or the way he plagued his colleague Ampere, a soldier like himself in the regiment of the "Parrots in mourning," as he dubbed the Institute, in his southern accent, because of its green and black uniform. And then Macdonald, Marmont, Molitor, and Mortier, the four Marshals whose name began with M, the heroes of a hundred fights, the living embodiment of the renown our arms had won. We used all of us to try and hear whatever they said, whatever stories they told, and to gather up any information or anecdote touching the military glory of our country.
The diplomats interested us less—I will not speak of M. de Talleyrand, whose face and figure were striking enough, though they made but little impression on our uninformed imaginations. Yet I remember the fits of laughter we went into one day, when my father, in a fit of absence, aped the great man's limp as he crossed the drawing-room to receive him. We delighted in Pozzo di Borgo, the Russian Ambassador, because as soon as his burly presence appeared his jokes and witty sallies and his stories provoked loud and inexhaustible shouts of laughter. All children love cheery people. There was another diplomat whose arrival we always looked forward to, the Bailli de Ferrette, Minister of the
Grand Duke of Baden—and this for two reasons. First of all because of that title of "Bailli," which seemed to belong to another world, or at all events to a harlequinade, and then on account of the extraordinary appearance of the man—he looked like a skeleton in powder. We were quite ignorant in those days, it is needless to remark, of the fact that this cool, proper-looking Bailli was a great musician, a first-class performer of the STABAT MATER, whose inspiration however depended on his having the shoulders, very DECOLLETEE ones too, of a charming nightingale, over whom the Opera and Opera-Comique fought for many a day, as the desk he laid his music on. Sometimes when the evening was half over a bell was heard like the one in the fourth act of the HUGUENOTS. "There's the big bell," we would cry. It was the signal that Madame la Dauphine or Madame la Duchesse de Berri was coming to pay us a visit, and my father would tear off, with all of us after him, to receive the visitor on the staircase. But our season at the Palais-Royal closed with the winter, and the first fine days saw us migrate to Neuilly, to the general delight.
Neuilly! I can never write the word without feeling moved, for it is bound up with all the happiest memories of my childhood, and I salute that name with respect akin to that which I would show a dead man! Those who never knew the Neuilly of which I would speak must imagine to themselves a very large country house, of no architectural pretension, consisting almost exclusively of sets of ground-floor rooms, tacked one on to the other on much the same level, with delightful gardens, and standing in the middle of a very large park which stretched from the fortifications to the Seine, just where the Avenue Bineau now runs. Within the park walls there were fields and woods and orchards, and even islands, the chief of which was called the "Ile de la Grande Jatte," and the whole of one reach of the Seine, the whole within a quarter of an hour's journey from Paris. This
beautiful demesne, the favourite residence of my father and mother, who had made it, and were always adding new beauties to it, and who lived there in those days, far from political cares, and surrounded by their many children, who were all devoted to them, was also the place that we loved best. We were so near town that our education, our masters, our lessons at home or in school, went on just as if we were in Paris, while we had the advantage of fresh air and country life, with all its liberty and its natural and spontaneous exercise. At five o'clock in the morning, before lessons or school began, we were galloping about in the big park. In play hours, and on the Thursday and Sunday holidays, the whole troop of children roamed the fields, almost unaccompanied, the older ones looking after the youngest. We used to make hay, and get on the hay-cocks, and dig potatoes, and climb the fruit-trees, and beat the walnut-trees. There were flowers everywhere, fields of roses, where we gathered splendid bouquets every day, without their ever being missed even. Then we used to go boating and swimming. Boys and girls, equally good swimmers all, would plunge in turn into the little arm of the Seine enclosed within the park, and nothing more delicious can be imagined than to cast oneself into deep water near the bridge at Neuilly, and to let oneself drift down almost as far as Asnieres, under the great willows, returning afterwards on foot by the "Ile de la Grande Jatte."
This island, laid waste now and turned into a slum, was covered then with venerable trees, and intersected by those "shady paths" sung by Gounod, in which we loved to lose ourselves in all the carelessness of our childhood, and perhaps too in the first awakening instincts of our youth. Nothing but a memory remains of that enchanting spot. It was confiscated by Napoleon III. on some flimsy pretext or other, and forthwith cut to pieces, so as to destroy every trace of those who had owned and lived in it. It is as much as I can do, as I drive along the
Avenue Bineau, to find, among the villas which have been built all over it, some well-known tree or other, behind which I used to lie in wait to shoot the hares, which a big dog I had trained to the work used to put up for me As for the house itself, after being the scene of a terrible orgie, it was sacked and burnt down by the conquerors in the glorious fight of February 1848. Not a stone of it remains. All the works of art within it were destroyed But I know of one stray bit saved from the wreck. The traveller who goes to see the museum at Neufchatel, in Switzerland, may observe, alongside of the picture which represents M. de Montmolin, an officer of the Swiss Guard, allowing himself to be murdered on the 10th of August, sooner than give up the flag which was intrusted to his loyal care, a very small canvas, carefully mended up. That fragment is the principal figure in Leopold Robert's first picture, and his masterpiece, L'IMPROVISATEUR, which used to hang in the billiard-room at Neuilly. Either a salvage man, or a looter of enlightened taste, cut it out with a penknife, in the midst of the conflagration, and it is the only thing that was saved.
But let me come back to my story.
In my father's sitting-room at Neuilly, and the billiard-room more especially, with the doors on the terrace open, the evenings used to be spent, in a circle of neighbours, friends, and habitual visitors.
These evenings had such a decisive influence on my future destiny that
I cannot do otherwise than speak of them.
That billiard-room is before me now, with the pictures that adorned it, all of them masterpieces—L'Improvisateur, by Leopold Robert; La Feeme du Brigand, by Schnetz, Faust and Marguerite, by Ary Scheffer; Venice, by Ziegler—hanging round.
I see the most frequent guests too. First two abbes, whose names—the Abbe de Saint-Phar and the Abbe de Saint-Albin—were a significant inheritance due to the frailty of their great-grandparents many years before the Revolution And yet another abbe, with powdered side curls, L'Abbe de Labordere, a former Grand Vicar of Frejus' who somehow or other, I know not how, had become mayor of Neuilly. Then there was the Marechal de Gouvion de Saint-Cyr, our near neighbour, who always had a circle round him; and admirals too, the Comte de Sercey, with his pigtail—an Indian veteran, Admiral Villaumetz; and generals and officers besides, whose stories of their campaigns used to fill us with enthusiasm. Amongst the generals who were friends of the family there was General Drouot, who was very fond of me, and would take me on his knee and tell me stories. I had seen Horace