I have said that I never returned home during my three years’ school life in Paris; but portions of my holidays were spent with a French family, kind friends of my parents, who received me as an enfant de la maison among them.  They belonged to the petite bourgeoisie of Paris.  Mr. A——­ had been in some business, I believe, but when I visited him he was living as a small rentier, in a pretty little house on the main road from Paris to Versailles.

It was just such a residence as Balzac describes with such minute finish in his scenes of Parisian and provincial life:  a sunny little maisonnette, with green jalousies, a row of fine linden trees clipped into arches in front of it, and behind, the trim garden with its wonderfully productive dwarf espaliers, full of delicious pears and Reine Claudes (that queen of amber-tinted, crimson-freckled greengages), its apricots, as fragrant as flowers, and its glorious, spice-breathing carnations.

The mode of life and manners of these worthy people were not refined or elegant, but essentially hospitable and kind; and I enjoyed the sunny freedom of my holiday visits to them extremely.  The marriage of their daughter opened to me a second Parisian home of the same class, but with greater pretensions to social advantages, derived from the great city in the center of which it stood.

I was present at the celebration of Caroline A——­’s marriage to one of the head-masters of a first-class boarding-school for boys, of which he subsequently became the principal director.  It was in the Rue de Clichy, and thither the bride departed, after a jolly, rollicking, noisy wedding, beginning with the religious solemnization at church and procession to the mairie for due sanction of the civil authorities, and ending with a bountiful, merry, early afternoon dinner, and the not over-refined ancient custom of the distribution of the jarretiere de la mariee.  The jarretiere was a white satin ribbon, tied at a discreet height above the bride’s ankle, and removed thence by the best man and cut into pieces, for which an animated scramble took place among the male guests, each one who obtained a piece of the white favor immediately fastening it in his button-hole.  Doubtless, in earlier and coarser times, it was the bride’s real garter that was thus distributed, and our elegant white and silver rosettes are the modern representatives of this primitive wedding “favor,” which is a relic of ages when both in England and in France usages obtained at the noblest marriages which would be tolerated by no class in either country now;

    “When bluff King Hal the stocking threw,
     And Katharine’s hand the curtain drew.”

I have a distinct recollection of the merry uproar caused by this ceremony, and of the sad silence that fell upon the little sunny dwelling when the new-married pair and all the guests had returned to Paris, and I helped poor Madame A——­ and her old cuisiniere and femme de charge, both with tearful eyes, to replace the yellow velours d’Utrecht furniture in its accustomed position on the shiny parquet of the best salon, with the slippery little bits of foot-rugs before the empty bergeres and canapes.