and his son had gone to town, but we found the Empress.  How unlike the splendid, bejewelled, pomp-and-gloryfied Empress of the Tuileries:  her dress careless and common, her face little, if at all, painted, and thereby to my eye improved—­but so altered.  She seemed, however, in good spirits.  She did not talk of France, but feared for England anything tending to diminish authority of “powers that be.”

[83] Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie were living at Chislehurst.

On August 18, 1871, Lord Russell’s seventy-ninth birthday was celebrated at Pembroke Lodge by the school children under the cedar in the garden.  “His serene and cheerful mind, a greater blessing year by year as enjoyments one by one drop away.  He looks back with gratitude, he accepts the present with contentment.  He looks forward, I think, without dread.”  In September they went abroad, and took for the second time the house at Renens-sur-Roche, in Switzerland, where they had stayed in 1855.  Lady Russell’s mind was still full of horror of the recent war.

The first morning at Glyon (she writes to her sister, Lady Dunfermline) was one of merciless rain, but the afternoon did well enough for Chillon, to which use we all put it, and very interesting, grimly and horribly so, we found it.  Men are less wicked and less cruel, tyrants are less tyrannical nowadays than when so-called criminals, often the best men in their country, were chained by iron rings to dungeon stones for years and years, or fastened to pillars and tortured by slow fires, or thrown down “oubliettes” into the lake below, falling first on a revolving machine stuck full of sharp blades—­of all which horrors we were shown the scene and the remains.  But I hope that some centuries hence travellers will wonder at even the present use to which Chillon is put, that of an arsenal, and thank God that they did not live in an age when sovereigns and rulers could command man to destroy his brother-man.

From Switzerland they moved down to the South of France to get to a warmer climate.  They had taken a villa for the winter at Cannes, where they had a happy time, brightened during the Christmas vacation by the visits of their sons with friends from Oxford.  In his old age Lord Russell seemed to enjoy more and more the companionship of the young, and entered with spirit into their merry jests and their eager conversations on great subjects, discussed with the freshness and enthusiasm of youth.

Lord Russell, as the following letters show, was still taking keen interest in education questions: 

    Lord Russell to Colonel Romilly

    RENENS, September 27, 1871

I see the Bishop of Manchester has been speaking in favour of “a very moderate form of dogmatism” to be imposed on Dissenters who wish their children to have religious teaching.  I am quite against this moderate form, which consists in making a Baptist child own that he is to believe what his godfathers and godmothers promised for him—­he having neither godfathers nor godmothers.  Every form of persecution is in my eyes detestable, so that I shall have to fight a new fight for freedom of education.

    Lord Russell to Lady Minto