Another vivid memory of his childhood days in Paris brought home the same truth. One day, as he watched at the window, he was thrilled to see a gorgeous equerry from the Palais Royal ride up in state to his door and hand a parcel to the butler. This package, he learned, contained the Cross of the Legion of Honor which the emperor had sent to his grandfather. Afterward, he noticed that his grandfather always wore a little red ribbon in his buttonhole. But when the small boy questioned him in regard to the reason for his wearing the decoration, he only smiled quizzically and said, “_Pour faire parler les curieux, mon enfant_” (“To give the curious a chance to talk, my child”). As for himself, this modest French physician preferred to let his deeds alone speak of what he had done.
The small boy who could scarcely remember the time when he did not live in France and whose relatives were all French did not forget for a moment that he was an American. The toy boats which he sailed in the fountains of the Tuileries all bore the Stars and Stripes. And his favorite playmates at the Lycée Bonaparte, where he went to school, were hardy American boys whose parents were living in Paris.
During the years at the French school the vague, inner yearning for a freer, more natural life, found vent in many pranks and covert rebellion not only against the class routine, but also, more openly, against the established order of things on the playground. Here some of the delicately aristocratic French boys were much disconcerted by the blunt and wholly effectual way in which Edward Trudeau and his chums, the Livingston lads, settled questions by argument straight from the shoulder.
When he returned to New York at eighteen, Edward could speak only broken English, but he felt so truly American that he wondered why his cousins laughed when he said, “Ze English is so hard a language to prononciate.”
Then came his “wander years” in which he tried, with a deep, unsatisfied longing after he knew not what, to find his proper niche in life. Something of the memory of the stirring day when the American lads in Paris had thrilled over the news of the capture of the privateer _Alabama_ by the United States cruiser _Kearsarge_ off the coast of France led him to think that he wanted to enter the Navy. So he went to a preparatory school at Newport, as the United States Naval Academy had been, on account of the war, removed from Annapolis to that city, together with the historic old ship _Constitution_, which furnished quarters for the cadets.