Our day generally began at five o’clock in the morning.  The elder ones went to school to attend their classes, took their meals and played with the boarders, and came home after evening school.  The boys who were not at school and the girls spent the day doing their lessons.  In the evening, pupils and teachers of both sexes all dined together, and then went to the drawing-room, where there was always company, for my parents received every evening.  Thursdays and Sundays, which were school holidays, were given up specially to lessons in what were known as accomplishments:  drawing, music, physical exercises, riding, fencing, singlestick, dancing, &c.  On Sundays, every one, great and small, dined at “The great table,” and this life of ours was as regular as clockwork summer and winter alike.

In winter time we lived in the Palais-Royal, which then was not at all what it is nowadays.  Where the Galerie d’Orleans is now to be seen, there were hideous wooden passages, with muddy floors, exclusively occupied by milliners’ shops, and peopled, it was said, by thousands of rats.  To get rid of this collection of shanties, they were sawn through below, and allowed to come down with a crash.  Crowds of people came to witness the collapse, in the hope of seeing the expected multitude of rats rush out.  There was not a single one!  They had all cleared out in good time.  Such is the wisdom of the brute creation!

When I first lived at the Palais-Royal, I had a room in the Rue de Valois, which overlooked the Boeuf a la Mode restaurant, and opposite there dwelt an old lady, always dressed in black, who regularly every day, at the very same hour, placed an indispensable article of domestic use upon her window-sill, so that it was as good as a clock to us.  Later on, I changed my room for one looking over the courtyard, facing the rooms occupied by an actor at the Comedie-Francaise named Dumilatre, and his daughters; Dumilatre, whom I knew well, having seen him play those small tragedy parts which consist in making a dignified exit and saying, “Yes, my lord,” had the same habits as my black lady, and the same object used to appear upon his window-sill with equal regularity.  I had only changed my clock!

It was during the winter sojourn at the Palais-Royal, too, that our masters and their lessons multiplied.  And several of these masters were oddities, amongst others our professor of German.  Picture a little bland-mannered old man, dressed all in black, with satin breeches, woollen stockings, enormous shoes, and a broad-brimmed hat.  He had been tutor to Prince Metternich in his youth.  I know not what chance had later driven him into France—­where, during the Terror, he became one of the secretaries of the much-dreaded Committee of Public Safety at Strasbourg.  He lived alone with his daughter, whom he often sent to Germany, not by the ordinary means of communication, but concealed in the van which was sent periodically into Hungary to fetch supplies of leeches for the hospitals, which circumstance made us conclude that the simple name of “Herr Simon” by which he called himself probably concealed some deep mystery.  Nothing, alas! remains to me of his German, nor of that of a valet of the same race, who had been put about me, so ill adapted has my mental constitution always proved to any foreign language.