Then we went by the steamer Jean Bart to Trouville and Deauville, and up the Seine in a steam‑launch to Rouen.
In the afternoons and evenings we took long country walks and caught moths, or went to Hâvre by tramway and cleared out all the pastry‑cooks in the Rue de Paris, and watched the transatlantic steamers, out or home, from that gay pier which so happily combines business with pleasure—utile dulci, as Père Brossard would have said—and walked home by the charming Côte d'Ingouville, sacred to the memory of Modeste Mignon.
And then, a little later on, I was a good Uncle Bob, and took the whole party to Auteuil, near Paris, and hired two lordly mansions next door to each other in the Villa Montmorency, and turned their gardens into one.
Altogether, with the Scatcherds and ourselves, eight children, governesses, nurses, and other servants, and dogs and the smaller animals, we were a very large party, and a very lively one. I like this sort of thing better than anything else in the world.
I hired carriages and horses galore, and for six weeks we made ourselves thoroughly comfortable and at home in Paris and around.
That was the happiest holiday I ever had since the vacation Barty and I spent at the Lafertés' in the Gué des Aulnes when we were school‑boys.
And such was our love for the sport he called "la chasse aux souvenirs" that one day we actually went there, travelling by train to La Tremblaye, where we spent the night.
It was a sad disenchantment!
The old Lafertés were dead, the young ones had left that part of the country; and the house and what remained of the gardens now belonged to another family, and had become formal and mean and business‑like in aspect, and much reduced in size.
Much of the outskirts of the forest had been cleared and was being cleared still, and cheap little houses run up for workmen; an immense and evil‑smelling factory with a tall chimney had replaced the old home‑farm, and was connected by a single line of rails with the station of La Tremblaye. The clear, pellucid stream where we used to catch crayfish had been canalized—"s'est encanaillé," as Barty called it—its waters fouled by barge traffic and all kinds of horrors.