Invalides. When we first came to Paris in 1866, just after the end of
the long struggle between the North and South in America, our first
visits too were for the Conciergerie, Invalides, and Notre Dame, where
my father had not been since he had gone as a very young man with all
Paris to see the flags that had been brought back from Austerlitz. They
were interesting days, those first ones in Paris, so full of memories
for father, who had been there a great deal in his young days, first as
an eleve in the Ecole Polytechnique, later when the Allies were in
Paris. He took us one day to the Luxembourg Gardens, to see if he could
find any trace of the spot where in 1815 during the Restoration Marshal
Ney had been shot. He was in Paris at the time, and was in the garden a
few hours after the execution--remembered quite well the wall against
which the marshal stood--and the comments of the crowd, not very
flattering for the Government in executing one of France's bravest and
most brilliant soldiers.

All the Americans who came to see us at the Quai d'Orsay were much
interested in everything relating to General Marquis de Lafayette, who
left an undying memory in America, and many pilgrimages were made to the
Chateau de la Grange, where the Marquis de Lafayette spent the last
years of his life and extended a large and gracious hospitality to all
his friends. It is an interesting old place, with a moat all around it
and high solid stone walls, where one still sees the hole that was made
in the wall by a cannon-ball sent by Marechal de Turenne as he was
passing with his troops, as a friendly souvenir to the owner, with whom
he was not on good terms. So many Americans and English too are imbued
with the idea that there are no chateaux, no country life in France,
that I am delighted when they can see that there are just as many as in
any other country. A very clever American writer, whose books have been
much read and admired, says that when travelling in France in the