In 1865 the fastest train from Paris to the Riviera took twenty-six hours to accomplish the journey, and then was limited to first-class passengers.  There were, of course, neither dining-cars nor sleeping cars, no heating, and no toilet accommodation.  Eight people were jammed into a first-class compartment, faintly lit by the dim flicker of an oil-lamp, and there they remained.  I remember that all the French ladies took off their bonnets or hats, and replaced them with thick knitted woollen hoods and capes combined, which they fastened tightly round their heads.  They also drew on knitted woollen over-boots; these, I suppose, were remnants of the times, not very far distant then, when all-night journeys had frequently to be made in the diligence.

The Riviera of 1865 was not the garish, flamboyant rendezvous of cosmopolitan finance, of ostentatious newly acquired wealth, and of highly decorative ladies which it has since become.  Cannes, in particular, was a quiet little place of surpassing beauty, frequented by a few French and English people, most of whom were there on account of some delicate member of their families.  We went there solely because my sister, Lady Mount Edgcumbe, had already been attacked by lung-disease, and to prolong her life it was absolutely necessary for her to winter in a warm climate.  Lord Brougham, the ex-Lord Chancellor, had virtually created Cannes, as far as English people were concerned, and the few hotels there were still unpretentious and comfortable.

Amongst the French boys of our own age with whom we played daily was Antoine de Mores, eldest son of the Duc de Vallombrosa.  Later on in life the Marquis de Mores became a fanatical Anglophobe, and he lost his life leading an army of irregular Arab cavalry against the British forces in the Sudan; murdered, if I remember rightly, by his own men.  Most regretfully do I attribute Antoine de Mores’ violent Anglophobia to the very rude things I and my brother were in the habit of saying to him when we quarrelled, which happened on an average about four times a day.

The favourite game of these French boys was something like our “King of the Castle,” only that the victor had to plant his flag on the summit of the “Castle.”  Amongst our young friends were the two sons of the Duc Des Cars, a strong Legitimist, the Vallombrosa boy’s family being Bonapartists.  So whilst my brother and I naturally carried “Union Jacks,” young Antoine de Mores had a tricolour, but the two Des Cars boys carried white silk flags, with a microscopic border of blue and red ribbon running down either side.  One day, as boys will do, we marched through the town in procession with our flags, when the police stopped us and seized the young Des Cars’ white banners, the display of the white flag of the Bourbons being then strictly forbidden in France.  The Des Cars boys’ abbe, or priest-tutor, pointed out to the police the narrow edging of red and blue on either side, and insisted on it that the flags were really tricolours, though the proportion in which the colours were displayed might be an unusual one.  The three colours were undoubtedly there, so the police released the flags, though I feel sure that that abbe must have been a Jesuit.