THE SCHOOL IN HANS PLACE
Monsieur and Madame St. Quintin, on removing the Abbey School from
Reading to London, established it in Hans Place, a small oblong square
of pleasant-looking houses with a garden in the centre. It was almost
surrounded by fields, for London proper terminated in those days with
the double toll-gates at Hyde Park Corner.
The school-house (No. 22) was one of the largest in the place, and
possessed a spacious garden abounding in fine trees, smooth lawns and
gay flower-beds. Thither the little Mary was sent on the reopening of
the school after the midsummer holidays of the year 1798. Writing in
later years she thus describes the event:—
“It is now more than twenty years since I, a petted child of ten years
old, born and bred in the country, and as shy as a hare, was sent to
that scene of bustle and confusion, a London school. Oh, what a change
it was! What a terrible change!... To leave my own dear home for
this strange new place and these strange new people ... and so many
of them!... I shall never forget the misery of the first two days,
blushing to be looked at, dreading to be spoken to, shrinking like a
sensitive plant from the touch, ashamed to cry, and feeling as if I
could never laugh again.
“These disconsolate feelings are not astonishing ... the wonder is
that they so soon passed away. But everybody was good and kind. In
less than a week the poor wild bird was tamed. I could look without
fear on the bright, happy faces; listen without starting to the clear,
high voices, even though they talked in French; began to watch the
ball and the battledore; and felt something like an inclination to
join in the sports. In short, I soon became an efficient member of the
commonwealth; made a friend, provided myself with a school-mother, a
fine, tall, blooming girl ... under whose protection I began to learn
and unlearn, to acquire the habits and enter into the views of my
companions, as well disposed to be idle as the best of them.”
M. St. Quintin taught the pupils French, history and geography, also as
much science as he was master of or as he thought it requisite for a
young lady to know. Madame St. Quintin did but little teaching at this
period, but used to sit in the drawing-room with a book in her hand
to receive visitors. After M. St. Quintin the mainstay of the school
was the English teacher, Miss Rowden, an accomplished young lady of
good birth, who was assisted by finishing masters for Italian, music,
dancing and drawing. She was admired and loved by the whole school,
and especially by Mary Mitford, over whom she exercised an excellent
influence.
“To fill up any nook of time,” writes Mary, “which the common demands
of the school might leave vacant, we used to read together, chiefly
poetry. With her I first became acquainted with Pope’s Homer, Dryden’s
Virgil and the _Paradise Lost_. She read capitally, and was a most
indulgent hearer of my remarks and exclamations;—suffered me to admire
Satan and detest Ulysses, and rail at the pious Æneas as long as I
chose.”
[Illustration: HANS PLACE]
The French teacher was a very different type of womanhood. “She was a
tall, majestic woman,” writes Mary, “between sixty and seventy, made
taller by yellow slippers with long slender heels.... Her face was
almost invisible, being concealed between a mannish kind of neck-cloth
and an enormous cap, whose wide, flaunting strip hung over her cheeks
and eyes;—to say nothing of a huge pair of spectacles. Madame, all
Parisian though she was, had the fidgety neatness of a Dutch woman,
and was scandalized at our untidy habits. Four days passed in distant
murmurs ... but this was only the gathering of the wind before the
storm. It was dancing day; we were all dressed and assembled when
Madame, provoked by some indications of latent disorder, instituted,
much to our consternation, a general rummage through the house for all
things out of their places. The collected mass was thrown together in
one stupendous pile in the middle of the schoolroom—a pile that defies
description or analysis. The whole was to be apportioned amongst the
different owners and then affixed to their persons!... Poor Madame!
Article after article was held up to be owned in vain: not a soul would
claim such dangerous property. Nevertheless, she did succeed by dint of
lucky guesses, [and soon] dictionaries were suspended from the necks of
the pupils _en médaillon_, shawls tied round the waist _en ceinture_,
and unbound music pinned to the frock _en queue_ ... not one of us but
had three or four of these appendages; many had five or six. These
preparations were intended to meet the eye of Madame’s countryman,
the French dancing master, who would doubtless assist in supporting
her authority.... She did not know that before his arrival we were to
pass an hour in an exercise of another kind, under the command of a
drill-sergeant. The man of scarlet was ushered in. It is impossible to
say whether the professor of marching or the poor Frenchwoman looked
most disconcerted. Madame began a very voluble explanatory harangue;
but she was again unfortunate—the sergeant did not understand French.
She attempted to translate: ‘It is, Sare, que ces dames, dat dese miss
be des traineuses.’ This clear and intelligible sentence producing
no other visible effect than a shake of the head, Madame desired the
nearest culprit to tell ‘ce soldat là’ what she had said, which caused
him of the red coat to declare that ‘it made his blood boil to see so
many free-born English girls dominated over by their natural enemy.’
Finally he insisted that we could not march with such incumbrances,
which declaration being done into French all at once by half a dozen
eager tongues, the trappings were removed and the experiment was ended.”
In spite of this comical exception, the general system of education
followed in Hans Place was greatly superior to that of the ordinary
boarding schools of the day, where all that could be said of a young
lady when her education was finished was that she “played a little,
sang a little, talked a little indifferent French, painted shells
and roses, not particularly like nature, danced admirably, and was
the best player at battledore and shuttle-cock, hunt-the-slipper and
blindman’s-buff in her county.”
Dr. and Mrs. Mitford visited their little daughter frequently
during the period of her school life—often taking lodgings in the
neighbourhood to be within easy reach. Mrs. Mitford writes on one of
these occasions to her husband: “=Mezza=” (a pet name for Mary), “who
has got her little desk here, and her great dictionary, is hard at her
studies beside me.... Her little spirits are all abroad to obtain the
prize, sometimes hoping, sometimes desponding. It is as well perhaps
you are not here at present, as you would be in as great a fidget on
the occasion as she herself is.”
Whether Mary won this particular prize we do not know, but that she
_did_ win prizes is proved by the fact that two of them are carefully
treasured by the descendants of some of her friends. One of these is
in our temporary possession. It is a large volume entitled, _Adam’s
Geography_, bound in calf, and ornamented with elegant patterns in
gilding. On the upper side of the binding are the words:—
Prix de Bonne Conduite qu’a obtenu Mlle. Midford
while on the reverse side we read:—
Mrs. St. Quintin’s School Hans Place June 17th 1801.
The Mitfords’ name used to be spelt with a “d” at one time, but Dr.
Mitford changed it to a “t” a few years later than the period of which
we are writing.
There were three vacations in the year, the breaking up for which was
always preceded by a festival. Before Easter and Christmas there was
usually a ballet “when the sides of the schoolroom were fitted up
with bowers, in which the little girls who had to dance were seated,
and whence they issued at a signal from M. Duval the dancing master,
attired as sylphs or shepherdesses, to skip or glide through the mazy
movements of a fancy dance to the music of his kit. Or sometimes there
would be a dramatic performance, as when the same room was converted
into a theatre for the representation of Hannah More’s _Search after
Happiness_.