DECEMBER 125 



I was eleven years old when my father took me to Paris, 

 to a school for English boys kept by a M. Rosin, a 

 Swiss. It 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 Elysees. 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 Jidtels 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 im- 

 portance through it from the Are 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 Blys6es than the Rond 

 Point, and near the Arc was a waste occupied by the 

 earth thrown out of the road in the leveling 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 Blys6es 

 to his burial-place, in the crypt of the Invalides. 



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

 think I could 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 

 Christmas 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 H6tel 

 Mirabeau in the Rue de la Paix. And every Saturday 



