By a "skirted wonder" of the port their luggage soon passed the customs next morning and they were started for Paris. They were charmed with the dark old sombre, mysterious towers and fantastic roofs of Rouen, where Cooper bought a large traveling carriage, in which they safely passed the "ugly dragons" that "thrust out their grinning heads from the Normandy towns" on the way to the heart of France. From the windmills of Montmartre they took in the whole vast capital at a glance.
A short stay was made at a small hotel, where soon after their arrival they engaged "a governess for the girls." She proved to be "
a furious royalist," teaching the children that "Washington was a rebel, Lafayette a monster, and Louis XVI a martyr." Under the rule of returned royalists was attempted the exclusion of even the name of Bonaparte from French history. "My girls," Cooper wrote, "have shown me the history of France—officially prepared for schools, in which there is no sort of allusion to him." Their next venture was
Hotel de Jumièges in a small garden, far from the Faubourg St. Germain, where they had an apartment of six rooms.
Cooper wrote: "The two lower floors were occupied as a girls' boarding-school;—the reason for dwelling in it, our own daughters were in the school; on the second floor there was nothing but our own apartment." And here, next door to their nun-neighbors of the convent St. Maur, Cooper wrote the last pages of "The Prairie." It was published in the autumn of 1826, by Lea and Carey, of Philadelphia.