Then we started on our return home; and one evening, towards the end of September, we entered Paris and drew up at our house in the Avenue Champs Elysées.
Though the Emperor and Empress were still away on their southern tour, the streets were gay—at least to my eyes. Oh, that Paris of the Second Empire—that lost city whose gaiety surrounds the beginning of my life, jewelled with gas-lamps or glittering in the sunlight! Whatever may have been its faults, its wickedness, its falsity, it knew at least the vitality and the charm of youth. Men knew how to laugh in those days, when the echoes of the Boulevard de Gand still were heard in the Boulevard des Italiens, when Carvalho was Director of the Opéra Comique, and Moray President of the Council.
"At last!" said my father, as we turned in at the gates and drew up at the doorway.
He had been depressed on the return journey—a depression caused, I believe, not in the least by the fact that he had slain his kinsman. The trouble at his heart was the blow. For a guest to strike his host in his own house was a breach of etiquette and good manners unpardonable in his eyes. Yet he had committed that crime.
However, with our entry into Paris this depression seemed to lift.
The major-domo came down the steps, and with his own august hands opened the door for us, and let down the steps, and gave us welcome with a real and human smile on his magnificent white, fat, stolid face—the face of a perfect servant, expressionless as a cheese, which would doubtless remain just the same were he, constrained by stress of circumstances, to open the door of the drawing-room and announce: "The Last Trumpet has sounded, sir."
In the great hall, softly lit and flower-scented, the footmen in their green-and-white livery stood in two gorgeous rows to give us welcome; and Jacko, the macaw, four foot from the crest of his wicked head to the tip of his tail-feathers, dressed also in the green-and-white livery of the house, screamed his sentiments on the matter. My father had a word for everyone. It was always just so. This grand seigneur, who had made his way to fortune less with his sword than with his brilliant personality, would speak to the meanest servant familiarly, jocularly, yet never would he meet with disrespect. There was that about him which inspired fear as well as love, and he was served as few other men are served. Witness our return that night to a house as well in order as though we had come back from a trip to Compiègne instead of a two months' journey to a foreign country.
He dismissed the servants with a word, and, with his hat on the back of his head, stood at the table where his letters were set out, tearing them open and flinging the unimportant ones on the floor.
Whilst he was so engaged, a ring came to the door, and the footman who answered it brought him a letter sealed with a great red seal, which he tore open and read.
"Aha!" muttered he. "De Morny wants to see me to-morrow. Wonder how he knew that I was back? But De Moray knows everything. Is the servant waiting, François?"