Parliament was dissolved in June, 1877, but we remained in town until the end of July.  It wasn’t very warm and many people remained until the end of the session.  The big schools too only break up on the 15th of July, and many parents remain in Paris.  The Republican campaign had already begun, and there were numerous little dinners and meetings when plans and possibilities were discussed.  W. got back usually very late from Versailles.  When he knew the sitting would be very late he sent me word and I used to go and dine with mother, but sometimes he was kept on there from hour to hour.  I had some long waits before we could dine, and Hubert, the coachman, used to spend hours in the courtyard of the Gare St. Lazare waiting for his master.  We had a big bay mare, a very fast trotter, which always did the train service, and the two were stationed there sometimes from six-thirty to nine-thirty, but they never seemed the worse for it.  W., though a very considerate man for his servants generally, never worried at all about keeping his coachmen and horses waiting.  He said the coachmen were the most warmly dressed men in Paris, always took care to be well covered, and we never had fancy, high-stepping horses, but ordinary strong ones, which could wait patiently.  W. said the talk in the Chambers and in the lobbies was quite wild—­every sort of extravagant proposition was made.  There were many conferences with the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier, Duc de Broglie—­with Casimir Perier, Leon Say, Gambetta, Jules Ferry, and Freycinet—­where the best men on both sides tried hard to come to an agreement.  W. went several times in August to see M. Thiers, who was settled at St. Germain.  The old statesman was as keen as ever, receiving every day all sorts of deputations, advising, warning, encouraging, and quite confident as to the result of the elections.  People were looking to him as the next President, despite his great age.  However, he was not destined to see the triumph of his ideas.  He died suddenly at St. Germain on the 3d of September.  W. said his funeral was a remarkable sight—­thousands of people followed the cortege—­all Paris showing a last respect to the liberateur du territoire (though there were still clubs where he was spoken of as le sinistre vieillard).  In August W. went to his Conseil-General at Laon, and I went down to my brother-in-law’s place at St. Leger near Rouen.  We were a very happy cosmopolitan family-party.  My mother-in-law was born a Scotch-woman (Chisholm).  She was a fine type of the old-fashioned cultivated lady, with a charming polite manner, keenly interested in all that was going on in the world.  She was an old lady when I married, and had outlived almost all her contemporaries, but she had a beautiful old age, surrounded by children and grandchildren.  She had lived through many vicissitudes from the time of her marriage, when she arrived at the Chateau of St. Remy in the Department of Eure-et-Loire (where my husband, her eldest son, was born), passing through