Page:Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906.djvu/95

LADY JOHN RUSSELL She was throughout her life peculiarly susceptible to the beauties of external nature, and was never really happy in a town. She used to say later that Minto was the happiest and most perfect home that children ever had.

Not only did Lady Fanny Elliot hear politics freely discussed, and with childish enthusiasm enter into the great causes which the leaders with whom she came in contact had so much at heart, but early in life she began to have experience of affairs in her own person and at close quarters. At fourteen years of age she commenced keeping a journal. In 1830 the family were in Paris, and she has recorded the aspect of things there in the months following the deposition of Charles X. At a children's ball at the Palais Royal she saw the King and Queen, and described them as "nice-looking old bodies." She heard the people in the streets singing Casimir Delavigne's "Parisienne," the Marseillaise of 1830. But, notwithstanding all the glories and excitements of the French capital at that period. Lady Fanny was delighted to get back to Scotland in June 1831.

The next year her father was appointed minister at Berlin, and here again in the Prussian 65