Germain on the 3d of September. W. said his funeral was a remarkable
sight--thousands of people followed the cortege--all Paris showing a
last respect to the liberateur du territoire (though there were still
clubs where he was spoken of as le sinistre vieillard). In August W.
went to his Conseil-General at Laon, and I went down to my
brother-in-law's place at St. Leger near Rouen. We were a very happy
cosmopolitan family-party. My mother-in-law was born a Scotch-woman
(Chisholm). She was a fine type of the old-fashioned cultivated lady,
with a charming polite manner, keenly interested in all that was going
on in the world. She was an old lady when I married, and had outlived
almost all her contemporaries, but she had a beautiful old age,
surrounded by children and grandchildren. She had lived through many
vicissitudes from the time of her marriage, when she arrived at the
Chateau of St. Remy in the Department of Eure-et-Loire (where my
husband, her eldest son, was born), passing through triumphal arches
erected in honour of the young bride, to the last days when the fortunes
of the family were diminished by revolutions and political and business
crises in France. They moved from St. Remy, selling the chateau, and
built a house on the top of a green hill near Rouen, quite shut in by
big trees, and with a lovely view from the Rond Point--the highest part
of the garden, over Rouen--with the spires of the cathedral in the
distance. I used to find her every morning when I went to her room,
sitting at the window, her books and knitting on a table near--looking
down on the lawn and the steep winding path that came up from the
garden,--where she had seen three generations of her dear ones pass
every day--first her husband, then her sons--now her grandsons. My
sister-in-law, R.'s wife, was also an Englishwoman; the daughter of the
house had married her cousin, de Bunsen, who had been a German
diplomatist, and who had made nearly all his career in Italy, at the
most interesting period of her history, when she was struggling for