On the 25th of July we had all been dining at Saint-Leu with M. le Duc de Bourbon, an old cousin of ours, who never meddled with politics, and led a leisured and delightful life between Chantilly and Saint-Leu, never coming to Paris except to pass through it, although the beautiful palace there which bears his name, the Palais Bourbon, belonged to him.  His great passion was for sport, in which he excelled; and my father had made a friend of him by giving him the hunting in all his forests.  There was another reason too, and perhaps after all it was the chief one, for this cordiality, that my parents had consented to receive the Baronne de Feucheres, who held great sway over the Duke, but who had never been admitted to Court.  I can see the handsome old man yet, laconic in speech, his profile of the most strongly marked Bourbon type, his hair and pigtail white, with his tightly buttoned blue coat, from which a lace frill escaped, and his trousers, which were always much too short, showing his white stockings underneath.  On the evening I speak of there had been a great gathering at Saint-Leu—­a big dinner, then a drawing-room play, acted by Madame de Feucheres and the Duke’s gentlemen.  In the audience were many officers of the Royal Guard, and numerous other persons, whose names were known to me from having heard them quoted as being amongst those ardent Conservatives called at that time the “Ultras.”  One of them, a M. de Vitrolles, attracted my attention by holding a long conversation with my father in one of the intervals between the acts.  He has since related this conversation in his Memoirs, and also the conviction it gave him of the horror with which the idea of a fresh revolution filled my father.  Their only disagreement was as to the means to avert it.  Which of the two was in the right?

That evening we went back to Neuilly, and the next morning, 26th of July, as we were just getting ready, Nemours and I, to start for school, somebody opened the door and launched the remark to our tutors:  “The coup d’Etat is in the Moniteur!” “What!” “Yes!  The Decrees.”  Whereupon the tutors rushed to the family drawing-room, whither we followed them.  There sat my father, thunderstruck, the Moniteur in his hand.  When he saw the tutors come in, he threw up his arms in despair, and let them fall again.  After a silence on his Part, during which my mother rapidly acquainted the gentlemen with the state of affairs, my father said:  “They are mad!” That was all, and after another silence, a long one—­ “They will get themselves banished again.  Oh! for my part, I have been exiled twice already.  I will not bear it again:  I stay in France!”

I heard no more, for it was schooltime, and we had to get into the carriage; but those words and that first impression remain graven on my memory.