FRANKFORT—PARIS—TROUVILLE
I was born on the 24th of February, 1837, in South Audley Street, in
a house long since pulled down, which stood at the southern corner of
Hill Street. My father had left the Diplomatic Service on his marriage
and for some years my parents lived at Exbury, the old family place
overlooking the Solent through vistas in the trees, where, sitting in the
drawing-room, you could see the great battleships with their bellying
sails—men-of-war of the pattern of Nelson’s days—the stately wooden
walls of old England, the huge West Indiamen travelling to and from
Southampton, “sailing between worlds and worlds with steady wing”—and the
dainty little Cowes yachts pertly flitting among them like graceful white
gulls.
Ships were indeed a thing of beauty in those days, and Exbury was an
earthly paradise; but like diamond tiaras and ropes of pearls, it was
a costly luxury, unremunerative. My people had to retrench, the lovely
home was let, and they went abroad to economize. In this way it happened
that I first awoke to life at Frankfort in 1840—that at any rate is my
earliest dim recollection. Two years later my father left Germany and
took us to live in France.
* * * * *
1842-1846.—I can hardly believe that it is only seventy-three years since
we first went to live in France. When I think of the immense changes
that have taken place in that beloved country since then, it seems more
like seven hundred. The upheavals of wars and revolutions, two Dynasties
gone, toppled over like houses of cards, sovereigns lauded up to the
skies one year, hounded out of existence the next, followed by the howls
and execration of infuriated mobs; 1848 and the barricades—the _coup
d’état_ of 1851—the Second Empire—the Crimean War—Mexico and the murder
of Maximilian—the war of 1870 followed by the Commune—France shorn of
two great provinces—Paris improved out of all its picturesqueness by
the commonplace uniformity of Hausmannism—only here a nook and there a
corner left—all these seem to be transformation scenes which would need
centuries to carry out, and yet they have all taken place in my lifetime.
But not in France alone; in Europe, Asia, America, Africa and Australia,
the seventy-eight years of my life have witnessed more changes than any
similar period in the world’s history.
For four years we passed the winter and spring—the season in those
days—in Paris—never twice in the same apartments, though we always
remained in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine—a convenient quarter for
our elders and for ourselves, for it was no great distance from the
gardens of the Tuileries, where we used to play with a number of little
French friends—I have forgotten the names of all of them save only one
called Jules—I suppose he had a surname, but if he did I never knew it—he
was always “le petit Jules.” He was of about my own age, very small, but
of a quite demonic cleverness, and at marbles he was a hero. He broke us
all, and many a time we went home with empty bags—not a bulge in ours—his
bursting with wealth, and yet we loved him.
I remember one tragic episode of a beautiful white alley with rosy pink
veins, the pride of my soul. The little villain challenged me to play
him, offering to stake a superb agate against it. In less time than it
takes to write the tale the alley was his. My beautiful white alley! I
was but seven years old and I wept bitterly. I wonder whether “le petit
Jules,” if he is yet alive, remembers how he avenged Waterloo that day
in his victory over the English boy. I don’t suppose that he often plays
marbles now, but if he is yet alive, I feel sure that his many talents
have led him to great successes in all his endeavours, whatever they may
have been.
Many merry days we spent among the trees and statues of those gardens,
and often on a sunny morning we could see the old King, Louis Philippe,
pacing the terrace fronting the river. He used generally to wear
a long grey great-coat with a huge steeple hat covering the famous
_Poire_[16]—an astute, none-too-reliable old man. He never had but one
companion on his walks—probably General Baudrand, his most familiar
friend—perhaps Guizot or some minister—talking earnestly, stopping
every now and then to enforce a point with appropriate gesticulations.
Hatching plots, Spanish marriage for Montpensier, or some other villainy?
Probably. But that old grey coat covered a King, and we looked at it with
awe.
As might be expected in the case of a King whose own people admitted that
the one thing he lacked was dignity, his Court seems to have been the
shoddiest affair that could be imagined; we used to hear many stories
of its vulgarities. Old Lady Sandwich, grandmother of the present earl,
spent much Irish wit upon it. Her descriptions of the bourgeois courtiers
were inimitable. She happened to go to an audience just about the time
that there was so much fuss about poor Queen Pomaré—the ex-Queen of
Tahiti. The equerry who was to announce her asked the English lady’s name.
“La Comtesse de Sandwich.”
“Pardon, Madame, je n’ai pas bien compris.”
“La Comtesse de Sandwich.”
“Mille pardons, Madame—mais ces noms anglais sont si difficiles.”
The man was evidently determined to be insolent, but Lady Sandwich turned
the tables on him by saying with a laugh:
“Mon Dieu! Monsieur, dites donc la Reine Pomaré!”
That smothered him—everybody laughed, and she stalked into the presence
majestic and triumphant.
Another time at a court ball, she had struggled through the shabby crowd
to the buffet and got herself an ice, when a big hand snatched it from
her and from the mouth that belonged to the hand there issued, “Enfoncée
la petite mère!” She turned round, furious—it was her bootmaker in the
garb of the Garde Nationale. He had only seen her back, so had not
recognized her. When he did see——!
Of the Royal Family in the Tuileries there were two members at whom
nobody sneered, of whom nobody spoke an evil word—Queen Amélie and
the Duc d’Aumale. Her goodness and dignity won universal respect and
admiration. Of the Duc d’Aumale I shall have a word to say elsewhere. As
for the rest, there was no great halo of majesty about them. The wily
old fox himself was distrusted where he was not hated. The Legitimists
spoke of him as the very incarnation of the Revolution, like his father
Égalité, a traitor to his King and to his caste. How dared he call
himself “King of the French” when his cousin was the lawful “King of
France?” The sons, Nemours, Joinville, Montpensier, I used to hear spoken
of with scant respect—no great harm about them; but poor creatures,
commanding neither regard nor affection; nobody seemed to associate with
them or to wish their friendship. When I came to know them later in life
in this country I understood the talk to which I had listened as a child.
The death of the Duc d’Orléans excited sympathy from its tragic
character, besides which he like the Duc d’Aumale, but in a lesser
degree, had earned some credit in the Algerian campaign. I can just
remember the horror with which the news of the fatal accident when he was
thrown from his carriage, between Paris and Neuilly, was received. It was
in 1842, just seventy-three years ago!
My father’s many accomplishments—music, painting, languages—made him
welcome beyond the usual run of foreigners in French society. He was,
moreover, wonderfully well-read in the old memoirs of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and quite an authority on historic French
portraits. So much so that when I once said to him that I felt sure that
if he were to find himself transported back to one of the famous salons
of those times he would know almost all the people by sight, his answer
was, “Upon my word, I believe I should.”
The society of the Faubourg in the early forties must have been very
interesting; there were so many people still living who could talk as
eye-witnesses of the horrors of the great Revolution: at the time of
our sojourning in France there was less interval separating us from the
Terreur than there is between to-day and the Crimean War.
A man of seventy years in 1842 was twenty years of age when the King was
murdered; yet it seems difficult to believe now that, as a child, I often
listened, my hair almost on end, to men and women telling how they had
seen their nearest and dearest led off in the tumbrils to the shambles of
Monsieur de Paris, and recounting the miracles by which they themselves
had escaped. There were many such. Indeed, the Duchesse d’Angoulème
herself—the woman of so many tears that to her dying day in 1851 her poor
eyes suffered from the chronic weeping known as _gutta lachrymans_—who as
a child had, with her unhappy mother, gone through the miseries of the
Conciergerie, and seen the King and Queen, both her parents led away to
the scaffold, was living, though not in France, and my father knew her
well—in all respects a wonderful woman, of whom Napoleon said that she
was “the only man in the family.”
It is now the fashion to laugh at the story that Robespierre, minded
to marry her, sought an interview with her in prison. She, warned
beforehand, maintained a dead silence, refusing to utter a word, and he
left the room, banging the door and exclaiming, “Bégueule comme toute sa
famille.” My father, who had exceptional relations with the old French
Legitimists, firmly believed that this really happened, and he had good
reason for his faith. Of people whom I actually knew and who had survived
the Revolution, several were in various ways notable.
At Trouville we became very intimate with the family of the Marquis de
Chaumont Quitry. The two sons, Félix and Odon, were splendid young men
who, among others, made the place gay, and on a fine evening they would
carry out their _trompes de chasse_ and make the rocks ring with the
“Hallali,” the “Rendezvous des Chasseurs,” and other fanfares, to the
great joy of us children.
The old Marquis had been a great figure among the _émigrés_. When still
little more than a boy he had contrived to make his escape from the
Terreur with his young wife, and landed in England with a few pounds in
his pocket. Many friends were eager to help him, but he was as proud as
his ancestor, Robert de Chaumont, the knight of the First Crusade, and
he would accept nothing. With the little money that he had he bought
cloth, thread, scissors, needles, and whalebone, and set up with the
Marquise as a stay-maker somewhere in Soho—a hero, if ever there was
one—and it became the fashion for fine ladies to have their stays made by
the noble descendant of Crusaders whose pedigree could be traced back to
Charlemagne.
There was another wizened little old gentleman, whose name I have
forgotten, who used to tell us anecdotes of the straits to which he was
put during his life in London; but after all, it might have been worse,
and he was able to feed himself for very little money. In the cheap slum
in which he lived there used to appear every morning a man with little
pieces of meat on skewers; for two or three pence you could obtain “des
petites portions,” quite enough for a meal, “et ma foi! ça n’était pas
trop mauvais; ça s’appelle Kami.” He was dealing with the cat’s-meat man!
I used often to be taken to see the venerable Marquise du Mesnil, who
had been lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. The old lady lived in a
wonderful apartment full of glorious old furniture, Gobelins tapestry,
Sèvres china, vernis Martin, fans and pictures, memorials of the old
Court which would fetch a king’s ransom to-day. I sometimes wondered
whether the windows of those rooms had ever been opened since the house
was built, for the air was thick with a peculiar musty, stuffy, mousey
smell, over which neither musk nor verveine could prevail. Here she sat
bolt upright with a priceless snuffbox in her wizened hand, telling tales
which made me gasp with terror, until I could almost see Judith carrying
the bleeding head out of the tapestry in the boudoir to the music of the
_carmagnole_ in the street below.
At the Musée Carnavalet, or looking at the Princess de Lamballe’s
little pink slipper at the Cluny, I am reminded of that house of fear
from which I used to escape trembling, but to which, such was its weird
fascination, I always used to beg to be taken every time my people went
to visit there. The old lady was always very kind to the little boy who
never quite knew whether he feared or loved her, but who had a lurking
suspicion that she must be some relation of that fairy who was not asked
to the christening.
A great pleasure on our homeward walk from the Rive Gauche was to
be allowed, after recrossing the river, to go through the Place
du Carrousel, between the Louvre and the Tuileries, not then the
magnificent, dull and highly respectable space that it now is, but a
regular fair, with all sorts of cheap booths, where dogs and cats and
monkeys, many strange beasts, birds from over-sea islands, parrots
and fowls with gaudy plumage, snakes, tortoises, cheap and entrancing
sham jewellery and rubbish were for sale. It was very picturesque,
very smelly and very dirty, the screams of the macaws, the barking
of the dogs, and the cries of the vendors made the day noisome and
hideous, but we youngsters loved it with all its filth, and the present
spick-and-spanness is no compensation for the magnets of attraction that
have been swept away.
I wonder where these sweepings agglomerate into life again. There must
be some place where the humble _piou-piou_ buys a cheap ring for his
lady-love, some place where the _marchand de coco_ tinkles his bell among
the crowd, where the distressful person who earns his living by picking
up cigar-ends, now partially ruined by the cigarette craze and the end
of snuff-taking, can ply his trade, and the cries of the old-clothes man
and the dealer in stale fruit may be heard, some place from which modern
ideas will drive them once more into the wilderness; for after all, it
must be admitted that the picturesque charms of Petticoat Lane are hardly
in harmony with the sedateness of an improving neighbourhood, let alone
a great architectural quadrangle separating two palaces, one, alas! now
gone for ever.
There were other walks—the Jardins des Plantes, the Bois de Boulogne,
and so many pleasant expeditions. But what I grew to love most, as the
years rolled on, were the quaint old nooks and corners that we used to
come upon in remote and unexpected places, remnants of the old Paris of
the Trois Mousquetaires—delightful people!—curiously gabled streets where
the oil lanterns still swung from wires fastened to the houses on either
side, places just fit for rufflers like d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos,
Aramis, swaggering hand on hilt; dark, mysterious, labyrinthine quarters,
very primitive and no doubt very unhygienic; but then you cannot have
everything.
One not very judicious outing I remember when I was seven years old, and
a sentimental tutor from Demler’s school, to which we were sent, took
several of his pupils, myself among them, to the Morgue to see the corpse
of a girl who had been murdered—stabbed to death—by her sweetheart. It
was a horrid place, that old Morgue, where the dead bodies were laid out
naked on marble slabs with a tiny trickle of water playing upon them,
like salmon in a fishmonger’s shop, and their poor rags of clothing hung
damp, empty and melancholy from the ceiling. The sight almost made me
sick and fed me with nightmares for weeks.
One of my father’s best friends in Paris was the old Duchesse de Rauzan.
She had recently built herself a house at Trouville, on the sands near
the mouth of the river. Trouville was then a tiny fishing village. The
only other house besides that of the Duchesse was one built close to hers
by Doctor, afterwards Sir Joseph, Olliffe, the physician to the English
Embassy. The Duchesse was anxious to get a few of her friends to camp for
the summer in the fishermen’s cottages and make up a pleasant _coterie_.
Amongst others, she persuaded my father to join the party. One day my
father had taken me with him to call on the Duchesse, to inquire further
before deciding, and as we were sitting there, a footman announced
“Monsieur le Docteur Billard.”
“What a piece of luck!” said the Duchesse. “Monsieur Billard is the
Trouville doctor, so you will be able to ask him all about it.”
Questioned, Billard answered, “Monsieur, Trouville est un trou!” and went
into fits of laughter at the fullness of his own wit.
The answer, however, did not suit the Duchesse’s book, so the poor doctor
was promptly snubbed and told not to talk nonsense. I was destined to
see a good deal of that learned man of pills and noxious draughts in
the next four years, and he became one of my most intimate enemies. He
was a primitive, and so far as I was concerned he had but one remedy,
a horrible decoction of gum arabic and sugar, called _sirop de gomme_,
which presumably was intended to glue together any little portions of the
human organization which might have got out of joint, and was his panacea
for all ailments except the toothache; for that he had a dreadful
instrument of torture called a German key—upon me he experimented with
both.
He was a humorist: “N’ayez pas peur, mon petit ami; nous allons guérir ça
avec un peu de baume d’acier.” In went the “baume d’acier” into my mouth,
and with a great wrench out came the tooth. Howling with pain, rage and
indignation at having been tricked, I wreaked an inadequate revenge upon
M. Billard’s shins. But this is forestalling events. In spite of the
doctor’s wit, the Duchesse easily talked over my father, and the result
was five most happy summers in the brightest of surroundings.
And so it came to pass that one fine day in 1842 we all embarked on the
railway, then a very new institution, which went no further than Rouen,
where we slept, and on the following morning two huge yellow diligences,
which my father had chartered to carry us and our fortunes to the
Norman coast, were standing outside the old-fashioned inn. My father,
my grandmother, two aunts, my two brothers and myself, besides a German
tutor and a white poodle, made up the crew.
Greatly hindered was the packing of the crazy old coaches by that
nondescript, motley crowd that used to fill an inn-yard on those
occasions, a crowd quite unknown to the traveller of to-day, long since
as extinct as the great auk, all shouting, swearing and spitting, all
giving different opinions, with much gesticulation, as to what trunk
should be placed where, in unison only when the question of _pourboires_
turned up, in unison then—not in harmony.
Off at last! The great lumbering diligences rattling over the cobble
stones of the glorious old cathedral city, stopping now and then for
pack-thread repairs to the harness, the coachman cracking a long
whip, the stick made of twisted willow and garnished with red cotton
tassels to match those on his horn, which he from time to time tootled
distractingly, shouting at his horses, the near leader, a favourite,
being addressed lovingly as “Coco,” the off leader held up to contempt as
a “sacred canary-bird,” and the wheelers being left to jog on in peace as
the spirit moved them, nibbling with fond kisses at one another’s ears,
and all four merrily jingling their bells.
It was a weary journey, and we were all very tired, hungry, cross and
scratchy (for the straw in the bottom of the diligence harboured a colony
of greedy fleas), when we rolled along the quay in state and finally drew
up at the chemist’s shop, kept by one Madame Gamard, the upper floors of
which we were to occupy.
It was a mean old house, at the entrance to a curly street, the back
windows of which overlooked a butcher’s shambles, where every morning
at daybreak bovine sacrifices took place, a gruesome sight, which the
German tutor used to wake us up to witness. He would not have missed a
death-blow or a groan for anything. He revelled in blood like Ivan the
Terrible. If only, as in the case of the cruel Tsar, it had been human
blood, one felt that his treat would have been complete. At the back
of the house slaughter; in the front drugs and potions in wonderfully
inscribed gallipots, interspersed with fly-blown caramels and sugared
almonds almost as nauseous as the salts and senna.
Only a maid and a cook, with my nurse and my father’s manservant, came
with us from Paris, so as we were a largish party, my grandmother had
to engage two additional women selected from the local talent. Her star
was in the ascendant when for one of them her choice fell upon Marie
Letac—and here I am at once met by a difficulty. How to spell the name?
As no member of the Letac family had ever been taught to read or write,
such superfluous accomplishments not being the fashion at Trouville,
the spelling was a matter of debate. Should the name end with a _c_,
or _que_, or _cque_, or _ques_, or _cques_? I take the line of least
resistance and adopt the final _c_.
Marie was a dear, rosy-faced, good-humoured, very plump person of some
forty years—snuff her one dissipation, her one extravagance. How she
managed to stow away so much was a mystery; a large, flat nose and the
stains on her apron would account for some of it, but surely not for
all. Her union with a thin, red-haired, weasel-faced carpenter had been
blessed by a numerous family, obviously hardy annuals. She was a great
character, but when she came back the following year from Paris, whither
she had insisted on accompanying us, she became a notable authority
touching the glories of the capital, upon which she would descant to
Weasel-face and a select circle of _commères_, listening open-mouthed,
with their hands folded under their aprons upon their ample stomachs.
What struck her most in Paris was the beauty of the potatoes. “Parlez-moi
des pommes de terre de Paris! C’est si-z-aimable à cuir.” Of the
servants’ quarters in a Paris house she did not approve so highly,
and no wonder, for they were wretched dens under the roof, often not
weathertight. She sometimes acted as my nurse, and I can hear her now,
after bidding me good night, saying, “Où’s’qu’il est le parapluie?—allons
nous coucher!”
One fine day there came to Trouville a travelling dentist and quack, a
sort of Dr. Dulcamara, who established his cart on the quai near the fish
market. He announced himself as “La Gloire de la Science,” the favourite
medicine-man and confidant of the Emperor of Russia and the other Crowned
Heads of Europe. He was dressed in an old ragged blue military coatee
with scarlet worsted epaulettes, dirty white breeches and top-boots. On
his head rested the dignity of a huge cocked hat with a tall tricolor
plume. He carried a gigantic sword, and his warlike appearance was
enhanced by a pair of phenomenal black moustachios. In attendance upon
him were a performer on the key-bugle and a _pitre_, or jack-pudding,
whose business it was at the psychological moment to bang a big drum and
crash a pair of cymbals in order to drown the howls of the victims of
dentistry.
Marie Letac, who had been suffering from toothache, was wild to go and
consult the “Glory of Science.” My aunt promised to pay the fee, so off
she went and mounted the learned doctor’s cart. A little while later we
went out and met Marie Letac with a duster before her mouth, bleeding
profusely, crying with pain, yet half laughing at her own plight—one
might almost say weeping merrily.
“Well,” said my aunt, “so you have had it out?”
“Seven of them,” blurted out Marie.
“Seven! Impossible!”
“Oh! du moment que c’est mademoiselle qui régale!” and with that she went
off bleeding but content.
The man of pills, potions, and forceps did a roaring trade that day; the
drum and cymbals were never idle, and there was a great crowd of sailors
and fishwives, standing unwearied for many hours, happy in the enjoyment
of an exhibition which was free, and in the contemplation of the pain of
their friends and neighbours.
I think, though it is anticipating by a good many years, that I must
finish the story of our relations with Marie Letac. She remained with us
all the time we were in France, and was heart-broken when we left—that
was in 1846. We spent the summer holidays of that year at Tunbridge
Wells, and one day, as we were all sitting at luncheon, there came a ring
at the bell, and we were told that there was a French beggar-woman who
wanted to see my aunt. She ran out of the room and presently came back
with Marie, travel-stained, tired, footsore, and almost worn out, but
crying for very happiness. She said that she could bear the separation no
longer, so she had gone to Havre, taken boat for Southampton, and walked
all the way to Tunbridge Wells. How she managed to find the road, not
knowing a word of English and almost penniless, was a puzzle. She had an
addressed envelope and that was all, but here and there she met with a
kind person who knew a little French and helped her, and so at last the
faithful creature reached us. She did not stay very long, for she had her
husband and the hardy annuals to look after, and she was sent back to
Normandy, this time travelling decently and in comfort.
The following summer we went back to Trouville, and of course she came
to be with us. After that we never saw her again. But every Yuletide
there came a letter to my aunt, written by the village scribe in
pompous language, beginning, “Je croirais manquer à mon devoir si je ne
m’empressais pas,” etc., etc., with many good wishes and felicitations.
At last, after many years, there was a sad Christmas which brought no
letter. Poor Marie “avait manqué à son devoir.” She was dead.
* * * * *
Of Trouville Alexandre Dumas père was the Columbus, la Mère Oseraie
the George Washington. What the one discovered, the other made. The
“Bras d’Or,” the solitary little inn over which Madame Oseraie shed
the very sunshine of kindness, became famous as a summer resort for
the long-haired denizens of the Quartier Latin of Paris. It was quite
humble and very cheap, but it was specklessly clean, and the cooking was
undeniable, for the hostess was a born _cordon bleu_. The elder Dumas
was no mean judge, and when he gave her his blessing, her omelettes were
said to be a dream, her _soupe aux choux_ a revelation. The great man
had spoken, and the “Bras d’Or” became a sort of suffragan headquarters
for some of the painters of the Barbizon school, and a small gang of
imitative _rapins_ who followed in their wake. It suited their meagre
purses; for three or four francs a day they were lodged and fed upon the
fat of the land, with bread and cider _à discrétion_.
As for Madame Oseraie herself, round, fat, and fubsy, with a most genial
smile and welcome, she looked as if she had been made to suckle the
world on the milk of human kindness. The good inn was never empty, and
the guests went back to Paris all the better for the rest, with a dip
in the sea, fresh, strong air and good food, carrying a satchel full of
sketches to work upon in their cock-loft _ateliers_ till the time should
come round for another happy summer holiday. But after 1842 no more “Bras
d’Or” for the poor _rapins_! The grandees from Paris had taken possession
of Trouville; Madame Oseraie not unreasonably raised her prices, and the
poor, long-haired, imperfectly-washed, but very merry ne’er-do-weels must
move on to some other and, let us hope, equally happy hunting ground.
When the great people came they had perforce to accept the simple
life. The fisher folk furbished up their cottages according to their
humble ideas of æsthetic extravagance, and their lodgers, who had left
behind them rooms rich with Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry, furnished
with masterpieces by Riesener, Caffieri and Gouthières, had to content
themselves with hideous cheap wall-papers the colour of which came
off in dust upon their coats and gowns, and with such poor sticks and
stocks as the modest homes could afford. What became of the owners, in
what troglodytes’ dwellings they lay hidden, counting over their little
harvest, is more than any man can say.
One or two artists, a little less hairy and a little better off than
the old patrons of the inn, came with the mighty. There were the two
brothers Mozin, Charles and Théodore, the one a clever painter, the other
a musician, and Vogel, beloved of the none-too-critical Paris ladies
for his sugary ballads all about love and cottages and despair—songs as
sweet and smooth as the almond-paste in a wedding-cake. They brought a
sort of mild æsthetic leaven into the general hotch-potch; the dandies
copied their scarlet flannel blouses and their _bérets_; the smart ladies
accepted their sketches and the dedications of their songs, feeling that
in so doing they were laying a claim to a reputation for culture.
A vision of the _plage_ at Trouville was Madame de Contades, who came
down from Paris one year to breathe a little health after some serious
illness. She used to be carried on to the sands on a canvas litter by two
sturdy fishermen in their blue jerseys and knitted caps, and when she
was comfortably established with her book, her fan, her parasol, and her
bottle of smelling-salts or some cunning essence, she would be surrounded
by a bevy of children, pages and tiny maids of honour, all eager to
render her homage and do her some small service—a lilliputian court quite
as much in love with her as the dandy moths that singed their wings in
her flame.
How beauty appeals to children! That sweet, pale face, framed in soft
brown curls like the Cenci of Guido Reni, is a fascination to me to-day
as it was seventy years ago and more. She should have remained a tender
invalid; but the rough Norman breezes brought back the roses to her
cheeks and strength to her shapely limbs, and the next I heard of our
beautiful queen was swimming a race against another lady in the Seine at
Paris. To her lilliputian court this seemed an outrage of _lèse-poésie_.
Indeed, it was deemed a little unusual at that rather stiff period.
The Lubersacs, Barbantanes, Blacas, followed the lead of the Duchesse de
Rauzan, as should beseem daughters and sons-in-law. Notable also was the
Duchesse de Gramont Caderousse, with her two boys, daily playfellows of
ours, the second of whom became the famous _viveur_, dandy, duellist, and
eccentric of the Second Empire—I shall, perhaps, speak of him later. The
elder brother died as a boy.
Sunday was a great day, when the little street and the _plage_ were quite
alive with holiday folk who flocked in from the neighbouring farms and
villages to see the fine people from Paris. It was a very picturesque
crowd. Of course the sailor-men were all dressed in their best blue
cloth, with their red knitted woollen caps throwing a tassel jauntily on
one side. The well-to-do farmers’ wives and daughters were very smart.
Striped petticoats coming down a little above the ankle, showing a neat
little pair of wooden sabots, or even leather shoes; black-silk aprons;
white fichus folded over their breasts; upon their heads the old, high
twelfth-century caps, trimmed with lace, which our ladies said was
beautiful, handed down from mother to daughter for generations.
A few years ago I was at Trouville once more upon a Sunday. Alas! the old
costumes were no longer there. The present generation of farmers’ wives
were all garbed and hatted in imitation of Paris fashions. It was too
sad! They were a fine, strapping, healthy race of women, with beautiful
skins and cheeks as rosy as the apples of their own orchards. Some of the
girls were very handsome, sweet and modest-looking; rather shy of the
foreigners. It may be said that I was not of an age to judge, but I was a
long-eared little pitcher, and I heard what my elders said. The men were
not so picturesquely attired, but there was a touch of local character
about their get-up also.
A great ally of ours was a certain old Monsieur Pommier (I don’t suppose
he was more than forty, but to us he seemed a Methuselah), who always
came to see us dressed in his Sunday best. A brown coat as stiff as iron,
and as uncomfortable as a strait waistcoat, with a ridiculous little pair
of tails about six inches long sticking out behind almost at right angles
to his waist; a phenomenally high collar reaching to his ears, a tall
stock above a flowered white waistcoat; on his reddish, close-cropped
head a black beaver hat, brushed the wrong way; in his hand a stick with
the thick end downwards, held by a leathern thong at the small end; tiny
side-whiskers, and a face and nose shining from recent soapsuds. He was
the type of the prosperous Normandy farmers and cider-makers of his
day. If they were proverbially a close-fisted race, they knew how to be
hospitable, and there was an old-world courtesy which pierced through
their roughness and was most attractive. To us they were very kindly, and
the memory of them is still pleasant.
It was a motley crowd that came to mix with the grand ladies, the
dandies, the _nounous_, the little bare-legged children making
sand-castles, watching an itinerant Polichinelle or scrambling about
the mussel-clad Roches Noires under the careful eyes of governesses and
tutors.
But gay and bright and happy as the Sunday was out of doors, inside our
house it was dreary and penitential. My grandmother, a Leslie-Anstruther
by birth, had inherited all the bigotry of the old Covenanters, and under
her rule, kind and loving as it was on week-days, the Sabbath was a day
on which no expression of joy was permitted. Many hours were consumed by
her in various forms of deadly dull worship. Even we, mere children, had
to sit through a service which was made as forbidding as it could be. She
began with the morning service read from beginning to end, including the
priestly absolution, which she delivered with peculiar unction; then came
the Litany, which the professional cleric omits when the morning prayer
has been given in its entirety; then the Communion service. By that
time most performers would have been exhausted—not so my grandmother;
she proceeded to deliver one of Blair’s sermons, and woe be to us if we
yawned, or fidgeted, or were guilty of inattention!
I remember one special Sunday. I must have been about six years old when
I was promoted to a pair of trousers; they were made by the village
tailor out of a hideous black-and-white check horse-cloth, very coarse
and prickly, like the hair-shirt of a medieval saint. Every time I
moved the sharp points entered into my tender flesh; to kneel was a
penance, to get up again and sit down a torture. My fidgets and groans
could not be restrained; they were a criminal interruption, and I was
punished accordingly, but at any rate, in order that the punishment
should be effective, the cruel trousers had to be taken down, and
that was a consolation, though only temporary, and not unmixed with a
counter-irritation of pain. In these circumstances religion was what the
great Lord Halifax called “a _vertu_ stuck with bristles, too rough for
this Age.”
* * * * *
In 1845 we stayed on at Trouville long after all the other summer
visitors had fled, like the swallows. No one left but the fisherfolk and
ourselves.
In the late autumn the sea became leaden, ugly, cruel-looking. One
stormy day when I fought my way as usual against the wind down to the
deserted sands, close to where the bathing-machines were drawn up in
idleness, I came upon a group of fishermen carrying something blue and
limp, a belated bather whom they had risked their own lives to rescue
from the waves growling savagely upon the beach, lashing themselves,
as it seemed to me, into a fury at being robbed of their prey. It was
difficult to believe that it was the same sea that a few short weeks
before had rippled so gently, kissing the pretty feet of the paddling
children! On such days as those I felt very much alone and longed to get
back to the Gardens of the Tuileries and the merry games with our little
_camarades_.
But there were bright days in the waning year, when we made expeditions
to neighbouring farm-houses, or tramped along the frosty riverside road
to the little town of Touques, with its black-and-white timbered houses
and the picturesque ruins of the old Norman castle.
What a joy it was when I was about eight years old to let my imagination
run riot, peopling the old keep with visions of knights and dames and
beautiful Jewesses! I was in the middle of reading “Ivanhoe” and here
was indeed a setting for the book. I could fancy myself at Torquilstone
and conjure up living pictures of the Black Knight, Front de Bœuf, the
Templar, Athelstane, and Cedric the Saxon. There was a beautiful peasant
girl in her high Norman cap, wandering down below among the now leafless
apple orchards; could she be the Lady Rowena? And that sturdy, rather
ruffianly vagabond standing in the ancient archway. Surely no other than
Gurth the swineherd! Phantoms conjured up by the Wizard of the North.
* * * * *
In August, 1847, we were once more at Trouville, and it was for the last
time. In former years we had been wont to see more of that romantic
Norman coast than most people did; for we were not fashionable: we used
to arrive in early spring, long before the orchards were brilliant with
the bravery of the apple blossoms, and more than once we stayed on long
after the last glorious red fruits had been gathered for the cider-vats,
when the first frosts had coloured the falling leaves, and the hedges
yielded no more blackberries with which to smear our small faces. This
year our stay was bounded by the Eton holidays.
It was a fateful month—fateful for France—for it was the month in which
the Praslin tragedy took place, a tragedy which might perhaps by now have
been mercifully forgotten had it not played so important a part in the
political history of that time.
One beautiful summer day, when all the little world of Trouville was
gathered together upon the velvety sands, the terrible news arrived. Two
young Irish ladies came running up to my aunts weeping bitterly—almost
in hysterics. They were great friends of the Praslin family and had just
heard that the poor Duchess had been murdered and the Duke arrested. I
remember the thrill of horror with which the news was received on the
_plage_, and that thrill throbbed through all France. The Duc de Praslin
had driven the first nail in the coffin of the Orleans monarchy.
For some five or six years the Duke and Duchess, who had a large family,
had had in their service as governess a certain Mademoiselle de Luzy. Of
this lady the Duchess, with or without reason, but most probably with
very good reason, at any rate so far as the transfer of her husband’s
affections was concerned, had become furiously jealous: so much so that
her father, Marshal Sebastiani, insisted upon Mademoiselle de Luzy’s
dismissal. This, however, did not put an end to the intimacy, of whatever
nature it may have been, between her and the Duke, for it was shown that
on the arrival of the family in Paris from the country, he drove at once
to her house. That night the murder was committed. When the servants
entered the bedroom, they had to face a sight so appalling that M.
Delessert, the Prefect of Police, whose business made him familiar with
the horrors of crime, told Mr. Henry Greville that in all his experience
he had not come across so ghastly a spectacle. There were signs of a
desperate struggle, for the unhappy Duchess, a short but stout woman, had
evidently fought fiercely for her life.
Suffice it to say here that the evidence against the Duke was damning.
A pistol known to belong to him had been used as a bludgeon, and was
clotted with blood and hair—some of the hair was his own, pulled out in
the cruel fight! He had opened the window in order to excite the belief
that the crime was the work of burglars; but it was pointed out to him
that nothing had been stolen, and that a figure resembling his had been
seen from the outside opening the casement—upon which he observed that
the matter assumed a grave aspect. He was arrested and carried to prison,
but managed to take a dose of poison which proved insufficient; a second
dose was smuggled, as it was averred, into his cell, and of this he died;
but there were many people who believed that the poison was a farce, and
that he was spirited away to England, where he is supposed to have lived
for many years in hiding somewhere in the Lake district. The possibility
of this escape was strenuously denied both by M. Delessert and the
Procureur-Général; but it is significant that the former did not himself
see the Duke’s body, although it was his duty to do so. He was prevented
by other business.
Mademoiselle de Luzy was arrested and kept in solitary confinement. But
when she was examined she gave her evidence clearly and simply. Nothing
was elicited to show that she was _particeps criminis_, or even that her
relations with the Duke had gone beyond the bounds of propriety. She was
of course released, and afterwards married very respectably.
All France was moved to the core by the horror of the crime; but what
aroused even more indignation than the murder itself was, as I well
recollect, the widespread idea that for political reasons there had been
a miscarriage of justice and that the murderer, owing to his exalted
position, had been allowed to disappear scot-free.
There were whisperings and mutterings, and grave doubts expressed even in
high places; but in the lower strata of society, among the _bourgeoisie_
and the proletariat, there were sullen, ominous thunder-growls boding ill
for a government which had long since forfeited all claim to popularity;
the whole affair was shrouded in a mystery which was more than enough
to excite the minds of a highly inflammable people. Republicans and
Socialists had for some years been on the war-path: now they were goaded
by laws gagging the press and proscribing public meetings. These laws,
initiated by Guizot and furiously opposed by Thiers, brought about the
final crash; the revolution broke out, and on the 22nd of February,
1848, the King and his Queen were hounded out by the mob of Paris. A few
days later a slippery old gentleman with a curious pear-shaped head and
profuse expressions of geniality—a commodity which he always kept in
stock—landed at Newhaven. He said he was Mr. Smith.
Whether the Duc de Praslin died in prison, a suicide as well as a
murderer, or whether his flight was connived at by the mighty, is one of
those secrets which will remain hidden till the Day of Judgment. It used
to be said that members of his family were in the habit of paying annual
visits to him in England. The French authorities always scouted this
idea; but many years later facts came to my knowledge which proved that
one of his very near relations did make a practice of coming to England
periodically, and that during those expeditions he was for the most part
lost to the sight of his friends. Whither he went no one knew.
It is a strange coincidence that the fall of the last two monarchies
in France—that of Louis Philippe and that of Louis Napoléon—should in
each case have been heralded by a single murder. These were crimes
which stirred the wildest passions, the fiercest and most unthinking
resentments of the mob, and however unjustly, the penalty for them was
paid by those who had no hand in them.