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Updated: April 30, 2025
When I got up to our rooms I found my sisters at a window overlooking the courtyard of Mrs. Leare's hotel, and they all cried out with one voice, "Mrs. Leare's carriage is just ready to drive away." I looked. A travelling-equipage stood in the courtyard. On it the concierge was hoisting trunks, and into it was being heaped a promiscuous variety of knick-knackery and wearing apparel.
At the end of two hours we drove back to Mrs. Leare's hôtel, which was opposite our own apartment in the Rue Neuve de Berri, the hôtel that a few weeks later was occupied by Prince Jerome. Here Hermione insisted upon our coming in while the carriage drove to the dentist's for her mother. The reception-rooms in Mrs. Leare's hôtel were very showy.
Thus urged, what could my father do but suppose that Mrs. Leare knew Mr. Leare's views better than he did? He no longer held out on the point of honor. In twenty-four hours Hermione and I were engaged to be married. During the voyage to New York I learned to understand her father's character, and when he met us on the wharf I was no longer afraid of him.
Leare's salon was that the banquet of the Rue Chaillot would go off quietly, that the prefect of police would protest, and that the affair would then pass into the law-courts, where it would remain until all interest in the subject had passed away. One was sensible, however, that there was a general feeling of excitement in the atmosphere.
The Frenchmen among them were all men whose names were familiar in French political circles men of revolutionary tendencies and of advanced opinions. I afterward discovered they had taken advantage of Mrs. Leare's desire to be the head of a salon to use her rooms as a convenient rendezvous. It was safe ground on which to simmer their revolutionary cauldron.
There was no Englishman present, but myself, and only one or two Americans. I felt at once how out of place my mother, the country matron, and my father, ce respectable viellard, would have been in such a circle. But Mrs. Leare's guests were not the jeunesse dorée nor the dubious nobility I had expected to meet in her salon.
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