[Illustration:  William E. Gladstone.  From a photograph by Samuel A. Walker, London.]

We were often asked for permits by our English and American friends to see all the places of historical interest in Paris, and the two places which all wanted to see were the Conciergerie and Napoleon’s tomb at the Invalides.  When we first came to Paris in 1866, just after the end of the long struggle between the North and South in America, our first visits too were for the Conciergerie, Invalides, and Notre Dame, where my father had not been since he had gone as a very young man with all Paris to see the flags that had been brought back from Austerlitz.  They were interesting days, those first ones in Paris, so full of memories for father, who had been there a great deal in his young days, first as an eleve in the Ecole Polytechnique, later when the Allies were in Paris.  He took us one day to the Luxembourg Gardens, to see if he could find any trace of the spot where in 1815 during the Restoration Marshal Ney had been shot.  He was in Paris at the time, and was in the garden a few hours after the execution—­remembered quite well the wall against which the marshal stood—­and the comments of the crowd, not very flattering for the Government in executing one of France’s bravest and most brilliant soldiers.

All the Americans who came to see us at the Quai d’Orsay were much interested in everything relating to General Marquis de Lafayette, who left an undying memory in America, and many pilgrimages were made to the Chateau de la Grange, where the Marquis de Lafayette spent the last years of his life and extended a large and gracious hospitality to all his friends.  It is an interesting old place, with a moat all around it and high solid stone walls, where one still sees the hole that was made in the wall by a cannon-ball sent by Marechal de Turenne as he was passing with his troops, as a friendly souvenir to the owner, with whom he was not on good terms.  So many Americans and English too are imbued with the idea that there are no chateaux, no country life in France, that I am delighted when they can see that there are just as many as in any other country.  A very clever American writer, whose books have been much read and admired, says that when travelling in France in the country, he never saw any signs of wealth or gentlemen’s property.  I think he didn’t want to admire anything French, but I wonder in what part of France he has travelled.  Besides the well-known historic chateaux of Chaumont, Chenonceaux, Azay-le-Rideau, Maintenon, Dampierre, Josselin, Valencay, and scores of others, there are quantities of small Louis XV chateaux and manoirs, half hidden in a corner of a forest, which the stranger never sees.  They are quite charming, built of red brick with white copings, with stiff old-fashioned gardens, and trees cut into all sorts of fantastic shapes.  Sometimes the parish church touches the castle on one side, and there is a private entrance for the seigneurs.  The interior