i2 4 MORE POT-POURRI 



was established in a fair-sized house with grounds round 

 it, something like a superior villa at Putney, near the Arc 

 de Triomphe and to the north of the Champs Elyse"es. 

 It was distinguished as No. 15 Avenue Chateaubriand, 

 Quartier Beaujon, and has long since disappeared. The 

 whole region has become the site of the fine hotels of the 

 magnates of finance who have since the 'Forties peopled 

 the neighbourhood of the Champs Elysees. When I was 

 at school, the Bois de Boulogne was a scrubby waste. 

 The only road of importance through it from the Arc de 

 Triomphe was that to Neuilly. 



' A few sorry hacks and donkeys stood saddled for hire 

 at the fringe of the Bois. There were no houses of any 

 size farther up the Champs Elysees than the Rond Point, 

 and near the Arc was a waste occupied by the earth 

 thrown out of the road in the levelling operations of its 

 construction. I remember it well, for it was on the heaps 

 resulting from the excavations that we stood one bitterly 

 cold day in the winter of 1840 from 8 A.M. to 1.30 to see 

 the funeral of the great Napoleon pass through the arch 

 on its way down the Champs Elysees to his burial-place 

 in the crypt of the Invalides. 



' Augustus followed me to the same school. I do not 

 think I can have been there more than eighteen months, 

 but it was long enough to have the recollection of the 

 journeyings in the diligence to and from Tours at Christ- 

 mas and at midsummer. -Very happy migrations they 

 were on the way home, and very much the reverse on the 

 return to school. 



' In the winter my father and mother used to come to 

 Paris, and take an apartment for a time in the Hotel 

 Mirabeau in the Eue de la Paix. And every Saturday 

 while they were there we passed the afternoon and the 

 following day with them, sleeping in the hotel. There 

 was not much of the present luxury of washing at schools 



