The diplomats interested us less—­I will not speak of M. de Talleyrand, whose face and figure were striking enough, though they made but little impression on our uninformed imaginations.  Yet I remember the fits of laughter we went into one day, when my father, in a fit of absence, aped the great man’s limp as he crossed the drawing-room to receive him.  We delighted in Pozzo di Borgo, the Russian Ambassador, because as soon as his burly presence appeared his jokes and witty sallies and his stories provoked loud and inexhaustible shouts of laughter.  All children love cheery people.  There was another diplomat whose arrival we always looked forward to, the Bailli de Ferrette, Minister of the Grand Duke of Baden--and this for two reasons.  First of all because of that title of “Bailli,” which seemed to belong to another world, or at all events to a harlequinade, and then on account of the extraordinary appearance of the man—­he looked like a skeleton in powder.  We were quite ignorant in those days, it is needless to remark, of the fact that this cool, proper-looking Bailli was a great musician, a first-class performer of the stabat Mater, whose inspiration however depended on his having the shoulders, very DECOLLETEE ones too, of a charming nightingale, over whom the Opera and Opera-Comique fought for many a day, as the desk he laid his music on.  Sometimes when the evening was half over a bell was heard like the one in the fourth act of the Huguenots.  “There’s the big bell,” we would cry.  It was the signal that Madame la Dauphine or Madame la Duchesse de Berri was coming to pay us a visit, and my father would tear off, with all of us after him, to receive the visitor on the staircase.  But our season at the Palais-Royal closed with the winter, and the first fine days saw us migrate to Neuilly, to the general delight.

Neuilly!  I can never write the word without feeling moved, for it is bound up with all the happiest memories of my childhood, and I salute that name with respect akin to that which I would show a dead man!  Those who never knew the Neuilly of which I would speak must imagine to themselves a very large country house, of no architectural pretension, consisting almost exclusively of sets of ground-floor rooms, tacked one on to the other on much the same level, with delightful gardens, and standing in the middle of a very large park which stretched from the fortifications to the Seine, just where the Avenue Bineau now runs.  Within the park walls there were fields and woods and orchards, and even islands, the chief of which was called the “Ile de la Grande Jatte,” and the whole of one reach of the Seine, the whole within a quarter of an hour’s journey from Paris.  This beautiful demesne, the favourite residence of my father and mother, who had made it, and were always adding new beauties to it, and who lived there in those days, far from political cares, and surrounded by their many children, who were all devoted to them,