There were still some slums we had loved; one or two of them exist even now. Only the other day I saw the Rue de Cléry, the Rue de la Lune, the Rue de la Montagne—all three on the south side of the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle: they are still terrible to look at from the genial Boulevard, even by broad daylight—the houses so tall, so irregular, the streets so narrow and winding and black. They seemed to us boys terrible, indeed, between eight and nine on a winter's evening, with just a lamp here and there to make their darkness visible. Whither they led I can't say; we never dared explore their obscure and mysterious recesses. They may have ended in the cour des miracles for all we knew—it was nearly fifty years ago—and they may be quite virtuous abodes of poverty to‑day; but they seemed to us then strange, labyrinthine abysses of crime and secret dens of infamy, where dreadful deeds were done in the dead of long winter nights. Evidently, to us in those days, whoever should lose himself there would never see daylight again; so we loved to visit them after dark, with our hearts in our mouths, before going back to school.
We would sit on posts within call of the cheerful Boulevard, and watch mysterious women hurry up and down in the cold, out of darkness into light and back again, poor creatures—dingy moths, silent but ominous night‑jars, forlorn women of the town—ill‑favored and ill‑dressed, some of them all but middle‑aged, in common caps and aprons, with cotton umbrellas, like cooks looking for a situation.
They never spoke to us, and seemed to be often brutally repulsed by whatever men they did speak to—mostly men in blouses.
"Ô dis‑donc, Hôrtense! qu'y faît froid! quand donc qu'y s'ra ônze heures, q'nous allions nous coûcher?"
So said one of them to another one cold, drizzly night, in a raucous voice, with low intonations of the gutter. The dimly felt horror and despair and pathos of it sent us away shivering to our Passy omnibus as fast as our legs could carry us.
That phrase has stuck in my memory ever since. Thank Heaven! the eleventh hour must have struck long ago, and Hortense and her friend must be fast asleep and well out of the cold by now—they need walk those evil streets no more....
When we had exhausted it all, and we felt homesick for England again, it was good to get back to Marsfield, high up over the Thames—so beautiful in its rich October colors which the river reflected—with its old trees that grew down to the water's edge, and brooded by the boat‑house there in the mellow sunshine.
And then again when it became cold and dreary, at Christmas‑time there was my big house at Lancaster Gate, where Josselins were fond of spending some of the winter months, and where I managed to find room for them all—with a little squeezing during the Christmas holidays when the boys came home from school. What good times they were!
"On May 24th, at Marsfield, Berks, the wife of Bartholomew Josselin, of a daughter"—or, as Leah put it in her diary, "our seventh daughter and ninth child—to be called Martia, or Marty for short."