I have already taken occasion to indoctrinate my reader on the subject
of what I deem the most perfect species of table d’hôte. May I now beg
of him, or her, if she will be kind enough, to accompany me to the
_table-monstre_ of Wiesbaden, Ems, or Baden-Baden? We are at the
Cursaal, or Shuberts, or the ‘Hof von Nassau’ at Wiesbaden. Four hundred
guests are assembled, their names indicative of every land of Europe,
and no small portion of America; the mixture of language giving the
impression of its being a grand banquet to the ‘operatives at Babel,’
but who, not satisfied with the chances of misunderstanding afforded by
speaking their own tongues to foreigners, have adventured on the more
certain project of endeavouring to being totally unintelligible, by
speaking languages with which they are unacquainted; while in their
dress, manner, and appearance, the great object seems to be an accurate
imitation of some other country than their own. Hence Frenchmen affect
to seem English, English to look like Prussians, Prussians to appear
Poles, Poles to be Calmucks. Your ‘elegant’ of the Boulevard de Ghent
sports a ‘cut away’ like a Yorkshire squire, and rides in cords; your
Londoner wears his hair on his shoulders, and his moustaches, like a
Pomeranian count; Turks find their way into tight trousers and
‘Wellingtons’; and even the Yankees cannot resist the general tendency
to transmutation, but take three inches off their hair behind.
Nothing is more amusing than these general congresses of European
vagrancy. Characters the most original meet you at every step, and
display most happily traits you never have the opportunity to inspect at
home. For so it is, the very fact of leaving home with most people seems
like an absolution from all the necessities of sustaining a part. They
feel as though they had taken off the stage finery in which they had
fretted away their hours before, and stand forth themselves _in
propria_. Thus your grave Chancery lawyer becomes a chatty pleasant man
of the world, witty and conversable; your abstruse mathematician,
leaving conic sections behind him, talks away with the harmless
innocence of a child about men and politics; and even your cold
‘exclusive’ bids a temporary farewell to his ‘morgue,’ and answers his
next neighbour at table without feeling shocked at his obtrusion.
There must be some secret sympathy--of whose operations we know nothing-
-between our trunks and our temperaments, our characters and our carpet-
bags; and that by the same law which opens one to the inspection of an
official at the frontier, the other must be laid bare when we pass
across it. How well would it have been for us, if the analogy had been
pushed a little further, that the fiscal regulations adopted in the
former were but extended to the latter, and that we had applied the
tariff to the morals, as well as to the manufactures, of the Continent.
It was in some such musing as this I sat in a window of the ‘Nassau,’ at
Wiesbaden, during the height of the season of----. Strangers were
constantly arriving, and hourly was the reply ‘no room’ given to the
disconsolate travellers, who peered from their carriages with the road-
sick look of a long journey. As for myself, I had been daily and nightly
transferred from one quarter of the hotel to another--now sleeping in an
apartment forty feet square, in a bed generally reserved for royalty,
now bivouacking under the very slates; one night exposed to the
incessant din of the street beside my windows, the next, in a remote
wing of the building, where there were no bells in the chambers, nor any
waiter was ever known to wander. In fact, I began to believe that they
made use of me to air the beds of the establishment, and was seriously
disposed to make a demand for some compensation in my bill; and if I
might judge from the pains in my bones I contracted in ‘Lit de Parade,’
I must have saved her Majesty of Greece, who was my successor in it, a
notable attack of rheumatism. To this shuttlecock state of existence the
easiness of my nature made me submit tamely enough, and I never dreamed
of rebellion.
I was sitting conning over to myself the recollections of some faces I
had seen before, when the head waiter appeared before me, with a request
that I would be kind enough to give up my place at the table, which was
No. 14, to a gentleman lately arrived, and who desired to sit near his
friends in that vicinity. ‘To be sure,’ said I at once; ‘I have no
acquaintance here, and 114 will do me as well as 14--place me where you
like.’ At the same time, it rather puzzled me to learn what the
individual could be like who conceived such a violent desire to be in
the neighbourhood of some Hamburg Jews--for such were the party around
me--when the waiter began to make room for a group that entered the
room, and walked up to the end of that table. A glance told they were
English. There was an elderly man, tall and well-looking, with the air
‘gentleman’ very legibly written on his quiet, composed features; the
carriage of his head, and a something in his walk, induced me to believe
him military. A lady leaned on his arm, some thirty years his junior--he
was about sixty-six or seven--whose dress and style were fashionable,
and at the same time they had not that perfect type of unpretending
legitimacy that belongs essentially to but one class. She was, in fact,
_trop bien mise_ for a table d’hote; for although only a morning
costume, there was a display about it which was faulty in its taste; her
features, without being handsome, were striking, as much for the
carriage of her head as anything in themselves. There was an air of good
looks, as though to say, ‘If you don’t think me handsome, the fault is
yours.’ Her eyes were of a bluish grey, large and full, with lightly
arched brows; but the mouth was the most characteristic feature--it was
firm and resolute-looking, closely compressed, and with a slight
protrusion of the lower lip, that said as plainly as words could say it,
‘I will, and that’s enough.’ In walking, she took some pains to display
her foot, which, with all the advantages of a Parisian shoe, was
scarcely as pretty as she conceived it, but on the whole was well
formed, and rather erring on the score of size than symmetry.
They were followed by three or four young men, of whom I could only
remark that they wore the uniform appearance of young Englishmen of good
class, very clean-looking faces, well-brushed hair, and well-fitting
frock-coats. One sported a moustache of a dirty-yellow colour, and
whiskers to match, and by his manner, and a certain half-shut-eye kind
of glance, proclaimed himself the knowing man of the party.
While they were taking their places, which they did at once on entering,
I heard a general burst of salutations break from them in very welcome
accent: ‘Oh, here he is, here he comes. Ah, I knew we should see him.’
At the same instant, a tall, well-dressed fellow leaned over the table
and shook hands with them all in succession.
‘When did you arrive?’ said he, turning to the lady.
‘Only an hour ago; Sir Marmaduke would stay at Frankfort yesterday, to
see Duvernet dance, and so we were detained beyond our time.’
The old gentleman half blushed at this charge, and while a look of
pleasure showed that he did not dislike the accusation, he said--
‘No, no; I stayed to please Calthorpe.’
‘Indeed!’ said the lady, turning a look of very peculiar, but
unmistakable, anger at him of the yellow moustache. ‘Indeed, my lord!’
‘Oh yes, that is a weakness of mine,’ said he, in an easy tone of
careless banter, which degenerated to a mutter, heard only by the lady
herself.
‘I ought to have a place somewhere here about,’ said the tall man.
‘Number 14 or 15, the waiter said. Hallo, _garçon_-----’
At this he turned round, and I saw the well-remembered face of my
fellow-traveller, the Honourable Jack Smallbranes. He looked very hard
at me, as if he were puzzled to remember where or when we had met, and
then, with a cool nod, said, ‘How d’ye do?--over in England lately?’
‘Not since I had the pleasure of meeting you at Rotterdam. Did you go
far with the alderman’s daughters?’
A very decided wink and a draw down of the brows cautioned me to silence
on that subject; but not before the lady had heard my question, and
looked up in his face with an expression that said--‘I’ll hear more of
that affair before long.’
‘Monsieur has given you his place, sir,’ said the waiter, arranging a
chair at No. 14. ‘I have put _you_ at 83.’
‘All right,’ replied Jack, as if no recognition were called for on his
part, and that he was not sorry to be separated from one with an
unpleasant memory.
‘I am shocked, sir,’ said the lady, addressing me in her blandest
accents, ‘at our depriving you of your place, but Mr. Carrisbrook will,
I ‘m sure, give you his.’
While I protested against such a surrender, and Mr. Carrisbrook looked
very much annoyed at the proposal, the lady only insisted the more, and
it ended in Mr. Carrisbrook--one of the youths already mentioned--being
sent down to 83, while I took up my position in front of the party in
his place.
I knew to what circumstance I was indebted for this favourable notice;
she looked up to me as a kind of king’s evidence, whenever the
Honourable Jack should be called up for trial, and already I had seen a
great deal into the history and relative position of all parties. Such
was the state of matters when the soup appeared.
And now, to impart to my readers, as is my wont, such information as I
possessed afterwards, and not to keep them waiting for the order in
which I obtained it: the party before me consisted of Sir Marmaduke
Lonsdall and his lady--he, an old general officer of good family and
connections, who, with most unexceptionable manners and courtly address,
had contrived to spend a very easy, good-for-nothing existence, without
ever seeing an hour’s service, his clubs and his dinner-parties filling
up life tolerably well, with the occasional excitement arising from who
was in and who was out, to season the whole. Sometimes a Lord of the
Treasury, with a seat for a Government borough, and sometimes
patriotically sitting among the opposition when his friends were out, he
was looked upon as a very honourable, straightforward person, who could
not be ‘overlooked’ when his party were distributing favours.
My Lady Lonsdall was a _soi-disant_ heiress, the daughter of some person
unknown in the city, the greater part of whose fortune was unhappily
embarked in Poyais Scrip--a fact only ascertained when too late, and,
consequently, though discoursing most eloquently in a prospectus about
mines of gold and silver, strata of pearl necklaces, and diamond ear-
rings, all ready to put on, turned out an unfortunate investment, and
only realised an article in the _Times_, headed ‘another bubble
speculation.’ Still, however, she was reputed very rich, and Sir
Marmaduke received the congratulations of his club on the event with the
air of a conqueror. She married him simply because, having waited long
and impatiently for a title, she was fain to put up at last with a
baronet. Her ambition was to be in the fashionable world; to be among
that sect of London elect who rule at Almack’s and dictate at the West
End; to occupy her portion of the _Morning Post_, and to have her name
circulated among the illustrious few who entertain royalty, and receive
archdukes at luncheon. If the Poyais investment, in its result, denied
the means of these extravagances, it did not, unhappily, obliterate the
taste for them; and my lady’s ambition to be fashionable was never at a
higher spring-tide than when her fortunes were at the ebb. Now, certes,
there are two ways to London distinction--rank and wealth. A fair union
of both will do much, but, without either, the pursuit is utterly
hopeless. There is but one course, then, for these unfortunate aspirants
of celebrity--it is to change the venue and come abroad. They may not,
it is true, have the rank and riches which give position at home. Still,
they are better off than most foreigners: they have not the wealth of
the aristocracy, yet they can imitate their wickedness; their habits may
be costly, but their vices are cheap; and thus they can assert their
high position and their fashionable standing by displaying the
abandonment which is unhappily the distinctive feature of a certain set
in the high world of London.
Followed, then, by a train of admirers, she paraded about the Continent,
her effrontery exalted into beauty, her cold insolence assumed to be
high breeding; her impertinence to women was merely exclusiveness, and
her condescending manner to men the simple acknowledgment of that homage
to which she was so unquestionably entitled.
Of her suite, they were animated by different motives. Some were young
enough to be in love with any woman who, a great deal older than
themselves, would deign to notice them. The noble lord, who accompanied
her always, was a ruined baron, whose own wife had deserted him for
another; he had left his character and his fortune at Doncaster and
Epsom; and having been horsewhipped as a defaulter, and outlawed for
debt, was of course in no condition to face his acquaintances in
England. Still he was a lord--there was no denying that; Debrett and
Burke had chronicled his baptism, and the eighth baron from Hugo de
Colbrooke, who carried the helmet of his sovereign at Agincourt, was
unquestionably of the best blood of the peerage. Like your true white
feather, he wore a most _farouche_ exterior; his moustaches seemed to
bristle with pugnacity, and the expression of his eye was indescribably
martial; he walked as if he was stepping out the ground, and in his
salute he assumed the cold politeness with which a second takes off his
hat to the opposite principal in a duel; even his valet seemed to favour
the illusion, as he ostentatiously employed himself cleaning his
master’s pistols, and arranging the locks, as though there was no
knowing at what moment of the day he might not be unexpectedly called to
shoot somebody.
This noble lord, I say, was a part of the household. Sir Marmaduke
finding his society rather agreeable, and the lady regarding him as the
cork-jacket on which she was to swim into the ocean of fashion at some
remote period or other of her existence.
As for the Honourable Jack Smallbranes, who was he not in love with-- or
rather who was not in love with him? Poor fellow! he was born, in his
own estimation, to be the destroyer of all domestic peace; he was
created to be the ruin to all female happiness. Such a destiny might
well have filled any one with sadness and depression; most men would
have grieved over a lot which condemned them to be the origin of
suffering. Not so, Jack; he felt he couldn’t help it--that it was no
affair of his if he were the best-looking fellow in the world. The thing
was so palpable; women ought to take care of themselves; he sailed under
no false flag. No, there he was, the most irresistible, well-dressed,
and handsomest fellow to be met with; and if they didn’t escape--or, to
use his own expression, ‘cut their lucky’ in time--the fault was all
their own. If queens smiled and archduchesses looked kind upon him, let
kings and archdukes look to it. He took no unfair or underhand
advantages; he made no secret attacks, no dark advances--he carried
every fortress by assault, and in noonday. Some malicious people-- the
world abounds in such--used to say that Jack’s gallantries were
something like Falstaff’s deeds of prowess, and that his victims were
all ‘in buckram.’ But who could believe it? Did not victory sit on his
very brow; were not his looks the signs of conquest; and, better than
all, who that ever knew him had not the assurance from his own lips?
With what a happy mixture of nonchalance and self-satisfaction would he
make these confessions! How admirably blended was the sense of triumph
with the consciousness of its ease! How he would shake his ambrosial
curls, and throw himself into a pose of elegance, as though to say,
‘’Twas thus I did it; ain’t I a sad dog?’
Well, if these conquests were illusions, they were certainly the
pleasantest ever a man indulged in. They consoled him at heart for the
loss of fortune, country, and position; they were his recompense for all
the lost glories of Crockford’s and the ‘Clarendon.’ Never was there
such a picture of perfect tranquillity and unclouded happiness. Oh, let
moralists talk as they will about the serenity of mind derivable alone
from a pure conscience, the peaceful nature that flows from a source of
true honour, and then look abroad upon the world and count the hundreds
whose hairs are never tinged with grey, whose cheeks show no wrinkles,
whose elastic steps suffer no touch of age, and whose ready smile and
cheerful laugh are the ever-present signs of their contentment--let them
look on these, and reflect that of such are nine-tenths of those who
figure in lists of outlawry, whose bills do but make the stamps they are
written on of no value, whose creditors are legion and whose credit is
at zero, and say which seem the happier. To see them one would opine
that there must be some secret good in cheating a coachmaker, or some
hidden virtue in tricking a jeweller; that hotel-keepers are a natural
enemy to mankind, and that a tailor has not a right even to a decimal
fraction of honesty. Never was Epicurean philosophy like theirs; they
have a fine liberal sense of the blackguardisms that a man may commit,
and yet not forfeit his position in society. They know the precise
condition in life when he may practise dishonesty; and they also see
when he must be circumspect. They have one rule for the city and another
for the club; and, better than all, they have stored their minds with
sage maxims and wise reflections, which, like the philosophers of old,
they adduce on every suitable occasion; and many a wounded spirit has
been consoled by that beautiful sentiment, so frequent in their mouths,
of--
‘Go ahead! for what’s the odds so long as you ‘re happy?’
Such, my reader, was the clique in which, strangely enough, I now found
myself; and were it not that such characters abound in every part of the
Continent, that they swarm at spas and infest whole cities, I would
scruple to introduce you to such company. It is as well, however, that
you should be put on your guard against them, and that any amusement you
may derive from the study of eccentricity should not be tarnished with
the recollection of your being imposed upon.
There happened, on the day I speak of, to be a man of some rank at
table, with whom I had a slight, a very slight acquaintance; but in
passing from the room he caught my eye, came over and conversed with me
for a few minutes. From that moment Lady Lonsdall’s manners underwent a
great change in my regard. Not only did she venture to look at me
without expressing any air of supercilious disdain, but even vouchsafed
the ghost of a smile; and, as we rose from table, I overheard her ask
the Honourable Jack for my name. I could not hear the first part of his
reply, but the last was couched in that very classic slang, expressive
of my unknown condition--
‘I take it, he hain’t got no friends!’
Notwithstanding this Foundling-hospital sentence, Sir Marmaduke was
instructed to invite me to take coffee--an honour which, having
declined, we separated, as do people who are to speak when next they
meet.
Meditating on the unjust impression foreigners must conceive of England
and the English by the unhappy specimens we ‘grind for exportation,’ I
sat alone at a little table in the park. It was a sad subject, and it
led me further than I wished or knew of. I thought I could trace much of
the animosity of foreign journals to English policy in their mistaken
notions of national character, and could well conceive how dubiously
they must receive our claim to being high-spirited and honourable, when
their own experiences would incline to a different conclusion; for,
after all, the Fleet Prison, however fashionable its inmates, would
scarcely be a flattering specimen of England, nor do I think Horsemonger
Lane ought to be taken as a fair sample of the country. It is vain to
assure foreigners that these people are not known nor received at home,
neither held in credit nor estimation; their conclusive reply is, ‘How
is it, then, that they are admitted to the tables of your ambassadors,
and presented at our courts? Is it possible you would dare to introduce
to our sovereigns those whom you could not present to your own?’ This
answer is a fatal one. The fact is so; the most rigid censor of morals
leaves his conscience at the Ship Hotel at Dover; he has no room for it
on a voyage, or perhaps he thinks it might be detained by a revenue-
officer. Whatever the cause, he will know at Baden--ay, and walk with--
the man he would cut in Bond Street, and drive with the party at
Brussels he would pass to-morrow if he met in Hyde Park.
This ‘sliding scale’ of morality has great disadvantages; none greater
than the injury it inflicts on national character, and the occasion it
offers for our disparagement at the hands of other people. It is in vain
that liberal and enlightened measures mark our government, or that
philanthropy and humanity distinguish our institutions, we only get
credit for hypocrisy so long as we throw a mantle over our titled
swindlers and dishonourable defaulters. If Napoleon found little
difficulty in making the sobriquet of ‘La Perfide Albion’ popular in
France, we owe it much more to the degraded characters of our refugee
English than to any justice in the charge against the nation. In a word,
I have never met a foreigner commonly fair in his estimate of English
character, who had not travelled in England; and I never met one unjust
in all that regarded national good faith, honesty, and uprightness, who
had visited our shores. The immunity from arrest would seem to suggest
to our runaways an immunity from all the ties of good conduct and
character of our countrymen, who, under that strange delusion of the
‘immorality of France,’ seem to think that a change of behaviour should
be adopted in conformity with foreign usage; and as they put on less
clothing, so they might dispense with a little virtue also.
These be unpleasant reflections, Arthur, and I fear the coffee or the
maraschino must have been amiss; in any case, away with them, and now
for a stroll in the Cursaal!