A GLIMPSE OF OLD FRENCH SOCIETY
During her school life Mary Mitford had an opportunity of seeing many
of the French refugees of noble birth who had escaped from their
country in the commencement of the Reign of Terror.
“M. St. Quintin,” she tells us, “being a lively, kind-hearted man, with
a liberal hand and a social temper, it was his delight to assemble as
many as he could of his poor countrymen and countrywomen around his
hospitable supper-table.”
“Something wonderful and admirable it was,” she writes, “to see how
these dukes and duchesses, marshals and marquises, chevaliers and
bishops bore up under their unparalleled reverses! How they laughed,
and talked, and squabbled, and flirted, constant to their high heels,
their rouge and their furbelows, to their old _liésons_, their polished
sarcasms and their cherished rivalries! They clung even to their
_mariages de convenance_; and the very habits which would most have
offended our English notions, if we had seen them in their splendid
hotels of the Faubourg St. Germain, won tolerance and pardon when mixed
up with such unaffected constancy and such cheerful resignation.”
There were supper parties also given to other members of the French
society by a cousin of Mary Mitford’s who had married an _émigré_ of
high birth and who resided in Brunswick Square. Mary often spent the
interval between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning with these
relatives. “Saturday was their regular French day,” she writes, “when
in the evening the conversation, music, games, manners and cookery
were studiously and decidedly French. Trictrac superseded chess or
backgammon, reversi took the place of whist, Gretry of Mozart, Racine
of Shakespeare; omelettes and salads, champagne moussu, and _eau sucré_
excluded sandwiches, oysters and porter.
“At these suppers their little school-girl visitor,” she says,
“assisted, though at first rather in the French than the English sense
of the word. I was present indeed, but had as little to do as possible
either with speaking or eating.... However, in less than three months I
became an efficient consumer of good things, and said ‘oui, monsieur,’
and ‘merci, madame,’ as often as a little girl of twelve years old
ought to say anything.
“I confess, however, that it took more time to reconcile me to the
party round the table than to the viands with which it was covered. In
truth they formed a motley group, reminding me now of a masquerade and
then of a puppet show. I shall attempt to sketch a few of them as they
then appeared to me, beginning, as etiquette demands, with the duchess.
“She was a tall, meagre woman of a certain age (that is to say on
the wrong side of sixty). Her face bore the remains of beauty, [but
injured by] a quantity of glaring rouge. Her dress was always simple
in its materials and delicately clean. She meant the fashion to be
English, I believe,—at least she used often to say, ‘me voilà mise à
l’Anglaise’; but as neither herself nor her faithful _femme de chambre_
could or would condescend to seek for patterns from _les grosses
bourgeoises de ce Londres là bas_ they constantly relapsed into the
old French shapes.... She used to relate the story of her escape from
France, and accounted herself the most fortunate of women for having,
in company with her faithful _femme de chambre_, at last contrived
to reach England with jewels enough concealed about their persons to
secure them a modest competence. No small part of her good fortune
was the vicinity of her old friend the Marquis de L., a little thin,
withered old man, with a face puckered with wrinkles, and a prodigious
volubility of tongue. This gentleman had been madame’s devoted beau for
the last forty years.... They could not exist without an interchange of
looks and sentiments, a mental intelligence, a gentle gallantry on the
one side and a languishing listening on the other, which long habit had
rendered as necessary to both as their snuff-box or their coffee.
“The next person in importance to the duchess was Madame de V., sister
to the marquis. Her husband, who had acted in a diplomatic capacity in
the stormy days preceding the Revolution, still maintained his station
at the exiled court, and was at the moment of which I write employed on
a secret embassy to an unnamed potentate.... In the dearth of Bourbon
news this mysterious mission excited a lively and animated curiosity
amongst these sprightly people.
“In person Madame de V. was quite a contrast to the duchess; short,
very crooked, with the sharp, odd-looking face and keen eye that so
often accompany deformity. She [used] a quantity of rouge and finery,
mingling [together] ribands, feathers and beads of all the colours of
the rainbow. She was on excellent terms with all who knew her, and was
also on the best terms with herself, in spite of the looking-glass,
whose testimony indeed was so positively contradicted by certain
couplets and acrostics addressed to her by M. le Comte de C., and the
chevalier des I., the poets of the party, that to believe one uncivil
dumb thing against two witnesses of such undoubted honour would have
been a breach of politeness of which madame was incapable.
“The Chevalier des I. was a handsome man, tall, dark-visaged, and
whiskered, with a look rather of the new than of the old French school,
fierce and soldierly; he was accomplished too, played the flute, and
wrote songs and enigmas. His wife, the prettiest of women, was the
silliest Frenchwoman I ever encountered. She never opened her lips
without uttering some _bêtise_. Her poor husband, himself not the
wisest of men, quite dreaded her speaking.
“It happened that the Abbé de Lille, the celebrated French poet, and
M. de Colonne, the ex-minister, had promised one Saturday to join
the party in Brunswick Square. They came: and our chevalier [as a
poet] could not miss so fair an opportunity of display. Accordingly,
about half an hour before supper he put on a look of _distraction_,
strode hastily two or three times up and down the room, slapped his
fore-head, and muttered a line or two to himself, then, calling
hastily for pen and paper, began writing with the illegible rapidity of
one who fears to lose a happy thought;—in short, he acted incomparably
the whole agony of composition, and finally, with becoming diffidence,
presented the impromptu to our worthy host, who immediately imparted
it to the company. It was heard with lively approbation. At last the
commerce of flattery ceased; the author’s excuses, the ex-minister’s
and the great poet’s thanks, and the applause of the audience died away.
“A pause [now] ensued which was broken by Madame des I., who had
witnessed the whole scene with intense pleasure, and who exclaimed,
with tears standing in her beautiful eyes, ‘How glad I am they like the
impromptu! My poor dear chevalier! No tongue can tell what pains it has
cost him! There he was all yesterday evening writing, writing,—all the
night long—never went to bed—all to-day—only finished just before we
came. My poor dear chevalier! Now he’ll be satisfied.’
“Be it recorded to the honour of French politeness that finding it
impossible to stop or to out-talk her, the whole party pretended not to
hear, and never once alluded to this impromptu _fait à loisir_ till the
discomforted chevalier sneaked off with his pretty simpleton. Then to
be sure they did laugh....
“The Comtess de C. would have been very handsome but for one terrible
drawback—she squinted. I cannot abide those ‘cross eyes,’ as the
country people call them; but the French gentlemen did not seem to
participate in my antipathy, for the countess was regarded as the
beauty of the party. Agreeable she certainly was, lively and witty....
She had an agreeable little dog called Amour—a pug, the smallest and
ugliest of the species, who regularly after supper used to jump out of
a muff, where he had lain _perdu_ all the evening, and make the round
of the supper-table, begging cake and biscuits. He and I established
a great friendship, and he would even venture, on hearing my voice,
to pop his poor little black nose out of his hiding-place before the
appointed time. It required several repetitions of _fi donc_ from his
mistress to drive him back behind the scenes till she gave him his cue.
“No uncommon object of her wit was the mania of a young smooth-faced
little abbé, the politician _par eminence_, where all were
politicians. M. l’Abbé must have been an exceeding bore to our English
ministers, whom by his own showing he pestered weekly with laboured
memorials,—plans for a rising in La Vendée, schemes for an invasion,
proposals to destroy the French fleet, offers to take Antwerp, and
plots for carrying off Buonaparte from the opera-house and lodging him
in the Tower of London. Imagine the abduction, and fancy him carried
off by the unassisted prowess and dexterity of M. l’Abbé!”
[Illustration]