“The next morning was the worst of all; the Prussians were making for here on the other side of the Loire. The first thing the General thought of doing was cutting their march, so he ordered the bridge to be burnt. We watched the arrival of the enemy, and quite enjoyed their disappointment at finding themselves the wrong side of the river. They fired over here, I did not feel very brave that day. This last week they have been firing on the castle; there is no danger for us, the walls are thick enough to resist.”
She writes again, 6 February 1872:—“We have been staying a few days at the Château of Sully. I enjoyed the visit more this time, we could walk about without fear of the Prussians.... Maréchal de MacMahon with his son, a very nice boy, has been here for a few days shooting.” There is much praise of MacMahon in her letters: he is kind and good and brave and noble, and he comes round to the nursery and tells the children tales.
She left our house when I was old enough to do without a nurse; but other servants never left, unless they were going to be married. Ann came to us when she was sixteen, and stayed till she was sixty-three, when she retired on a pension. In another household her sister Betsy did the same. They were both past ninety, when they died; and so also were Mary and Martha, who were fellow-servants with Ann. I went to tea with Mary on her ninety-fifth birthday; and she sang “I’m ninety-five,” a song well known in earlier times.
In their later years they lived a good deal in the past. At some dinner-party at our house in London the soup was handed round as mock-turtle, whereas it was real-turtle, and Mary was proud of having made it. She never let the others hear the last of that. There was to be another party there, for which great preparations had been made. But, as Ann told me quite angrily, “on the very morning of the party, King William went and died, and the party had to be put off, and all the things were spoilt.” And she was very cross about it still.
There were illuminations for Queen Victoria’s wedding; and the house was decked with night-lights in little globes of coloured glass. Ann put them carefully away, and brought them out in 1887 for the Jubilee. There were illuminations for the wedding of the Prince of Wales; and I had a night out, 10 March 1863. At the top of Trafalgar Square a wheel of our brougham got locked into the wheels of another carriage; and it was impossible to lift them clear, owing to the pressure of the crowd. We stayed there for hours.
The illuminations in 1863 were things that people would not look at now. There were gas-pipes twisted into stars and monograms and crowns, with little holes punctured for the gas: there were some transparencies, mostly with oil lamps behind; and there were a few devices in cut glass. The crowd was feebler also. People say we are degenerate now, but I think it is the other way: some of the worst types seem to be extinct.
We moved into a new house in London on 23 June 1864, and I meant to celebrate the jubilee by moving out on 23 June 1914, but was not ready then, and did not finish my move till 23 November. Being newly built, the house had a hot-water cistern in the bath-room, fed automatically by the kitchen boiler more than forty feet below. That was a novelty in 1864; and, when people came to call, they went upstairs to look at it, and could not make it out. A gifted Fellow of King’s was quite disturbed about it till he thought of Heracleitos and the maxim Panta Rhei, and that enabled him to place our cistern in its true position in the Universe. Of course, these people knew that hot water was lighter than cold, and would go up while cold went down, yet were unable to follow the theory into practice. I have noticed the same thing several times, when going to Gibraltar by the P. & O. People on board have said the clock was being altered because we were going south. They knew theoretically what the reason was, but could not apply their knowledge.
A good many of the people here are of opinion that the Earth is flat; and I do not know of any simple and decisive way of proving it to be a globe. I failed miserably with Aristotle’s argument (De Cælo, ii. 14. 13) from the shape of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon in an eclipse. They very soon showed me that they could cast as round a shadow with a platter or a pail as with a ball of wool. And this, I imagine, was the reasoning of Anaximander and those others, who suggested that we might be living on the flat surface of a cylinder or disk.
There is the Horizon argument; but that is not for people living in a region of high hills, where no horizon can be seen. And the Circumnavigation argument is answered in this way:—In thick mists on the moor you think that you are going straight on, but you always go round in a circle till you come back to where you were before. The other arguments are too subtle to be grasped at all.
When people have come up for their first visit to London, I have seldom found them much impressed with the big public buildings. They have seen photographs, generally taken from some favourable point of view: so they know what to expect, and the reality is not always equal to their expectation. The buildings that impress them are the private houses at the West End. The houses may not be finer than they had expected; but it is the cumulative effect of street on street and square on square of large and wealthy houses, stretching out for miles in all directions.