Great was the general surprise of the dancing class when this large,
tall, handsome English girl, of about eighteen, entered the room in a
rose-colored silk dress, with very low neck and very short sleeves,
white satin shoes, and white kid gloves; her long auburn ringlets and
ivory shoulders glancing in the ten o'clock morning sunlight with a sort
of incongruous splendor, and her whole demeanor that of the most
innocent and modest tranquillity.
Mademoiselle Descuillès shut her book to with a snap, and sat bolt
upright and immovable, with eyes and mouth wide open. Young Mr. Guillet
blushed purple, and old Mr. Guillet scraped a few interjections on his
fiddle, and then, putting it down, took a resonant pinch of snuff, by
way of restoring his scattered senses.
No observation was made, however, and the lesson proceeded, young Mr.
Guillet turning scarlet each time either of his divergent orbs of vision
encountered his serenely unconscious, full-dressed pupil; which
certainly, considering that he was a member of the Grand Opera _corps de
ballet_, was a curious instance of the purely conventional ideas of
decency which custom makes one accept.
Whatever want of assiduity I may have betrayed in my other studies,
there was no lack of zeal for my dancing lessons. I had a perfect
passion for dancing, which long survived my school-days, and I am
persuaded that my natural vocation was that of an opera dancer. Far into
middle life I never saw beautiful dancing without a rapture of
enthusiasm, and used to repeat from memory whole dances after seeing
Duvernay or Ellsler, as persons with a good musical ear can repeat the
airs of the opera first heard the night before. And I remember, during
Ellsler's visit to America, when I had long left off dancing in society,
being so transported with her execution of a Spanish dance called "El
Jaleo de Xerxes," that I was detected by my cook, who came suddenly upon
me in my store-room, in the midst of sugar, rice, tea, coffee, flour,
etc., standing on the tips of my toes, with my arms above my head, in
one of the attitudes I had most admired in that striking and picturesque
performance. The woman withdrew in speechless amazement, and I alighted
on my heels, feeling wonderfully foolish. How I thought I never should
be able to leave off dancing! And so I thought of riding! and so I
thought of singing! and could not imagine what life would be like when I
could no more do these things. I was not wrong, perhaps, in thinking it
would be difficult to leave them off: I had no conception how easily
they would leave me off.
Varying our processions in the Champs Élysées were less formal
excursions in the Jardin de Luxembourg; and as the picture-gallery in
the palace was opened gratuitously on certain days of the week, we were
allowed to wander through it, and form our taste for art among the
samples of the modern French school of painting there collected: the
pictures of David, Gérard, Girodet, etc., the Dido and Æneas, the
Romulus and Tatius with the Sabine women interposing between them,
Hippolytus before Theseus and Phædra, Atala being laid in her grave by
her lover--compositions with which innumerable engravings have made
England familiar--the theatrical conception and hard coloring and
execution of which (compensated by masterly grouping and incomparable
drawing) did not prevent their striking our uncritical eyes with
delighted admiration, and making this expedition to the Luxembourg one
of my favorite afternoon recreations. These pictures are now all in the
gallery of the Louvre, illustrating the school of art of the consulate
and early empire of Bonaparte.
Another favorite promenade of ours, and the one that I preferred even to
the hero-worship of the Luxembourg, was the Parc Monceaux. This estate,
the private property of the Orleans family, confiscated by Louis
Napoleon, and converted into a whole new _quartier_ of his new Paris,
with splendid streets and houses, and an exquisite public flower-garden
in the midst of them, was then a solitary and rather neglected Jardin
Anglais (so called) or park, surrounded by high walls and entered by a
small wicket, the porter of which required a permit of admission before
allowing ingress to the domain. I never remember seeing a single
creature but ourselves in the complete seclusion of this deserted
pleasaunce. It had grass and fine trees and winding walks, and little
brooks fed by springs that glimmered in cradles of moss-grown,
antiquated rock-work; no flowers or semblance of cultivation, but a
general air of solitude and wildness that recommended it especially to
me, and recalled as little as possible the great, gay city which
surrounded it.
My real holidays, however (for I did not go home during the three years
I spent in Paris), were the rare and short visits my father paid me
while I was at school. At all other seasons Paris might have been
Patagonia for any thing I saw or heard or knew of its brilliant gayety
and splendid variety. But during those holidays of his and mine, my
enjoyment and his were equal, I verily believe, though probably not (as
I then imagined) perfect. Pleasant days of joyous _camaraderie_ and
_flanerie_!--in which every thing, from being new to me, was almost as
good as new to my indulgent companion: the Rue de Rivoli, the Tuileries,
the Boulevard, the Palais Royal, the _déjeuner à la fourchette_ at the
Café Riche, the dinner in the small _cabinet_ at the Trois Frères, or
the Cadran Bleu, and the evening climax of the theater on the Boulevard,
where Philippe, or Léontine Fay, or Poitier and Brunet, made a school of
dramatic art of the small stages of the Porte St. Martin, the Variétés,
and the Vaudeville.
My father's days in Paris, in which he escaped from the hard labor and
heavy anxiety of his theatrical life of actor, manager, and proprietor,
and I from the dull routine of school-room studies and school-ground
recreations, were pleasant days to him, and golden ones in my girlish
calendar. I remember seeing, with him, a piece called "Les deux
Sergens," a sort of modern Damon and Pythias, in which the heroic
friends are two French soldiers, and in which a celebrated actor of the
name of Philippe performed the principal part. He was the predecessor
and model of Frédéric Lemaître, who (himself infinitely superior to his
pupil and copyist, Mr. Fechter, who, by a very feeble imitation of
Lemaître's most remarkable parts, has achieved so much reputation) was
not to be compared with Philippe in the sort of sentimental melodrama of
which "Les deux Sergens" was a specimen.
This M. Philippe was a remarkable man, not only immensely popular for
his great professional merit, but so much respected for an order of
merit not apt to be enthusiastically admired by Parisians--that of a
moral character and decent life--that at his funeral a very serious riot
occurred, in consequence of the Archbishop of Paris, according to the
received opinion and custom of the day, refusing to allow him to be
buried in consecrated ground; the profane player's calling, in the year
of grace 1823, or thereabouts, being still one which disqualified its
followers for receiving the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, and
therefore, of course, for claiming Christian burial. The general feeling
of the Parisian public, however, was in this case too strong for the
ancient anathema of the Church. The Archbishop of Paris was obliged to
give way, and the dead body of the worthy actor was laid in the sacred
soil of Père la Chaise. I believe that since that time the question has
never again been debated, nor am I aware that there is any one more
peculiarly theatrical cemetery than another in Paris.
In a letter of Talma's to Charles Young upon my uncle John's death, he
begs to be numbered among the subscribers to the monument about to be
erected to Mr. Kemble in Westminster Abbey; adding the touching remark:
"Pour moi, je serai heureux si les prêtres me laissent enterrer dans un
coin de mon jardin."
The excellent moral effect of this species of class prejudice is
admirably illustrated by an anecdote I have heard my mother tell. One
evening, when she had gone to the Grand Opera with M. Jouy, the wise and
witty Hermite de la Chaussée d'Antin, talking with him of the career and
circumstances of the young ballet women (she had herself, when very
young, been a dancer on the English stage), she wound up her various
questions with this: "Et y en a-t-il qui sont filles de bonne conduite?
qui sont sages?" "Ma foi!" replied the Hermite, shrugging his shoulders,
"elles auraient grand tort; personne n'y croirait."
A charming vaudeville called "Michel et Christine," with that charming
actress, Madame Alan Dorval, for its heroine, was another extremely
popular piece at that time, which I went to see with my father. The time
of year at which he was able to come to Paris was unluckily the season
at which all the large theaters were closed. Nevertheless, by some happy
chance, I saw one performance at the Grand Opera of that great dancer
and actress, Bigottini, in the ballet of the "Folle par Amour;" and I
shall never forget the wonderful pathos of her acting and the grace and
dignity of her dancing. Several years after, I saw Madame Pasta in
Paesiello's pretty opera of the "Nina Pazza," on the same subject, and
hardly know to which of the two great artists to assign the palm in
their different expression of the love-crazed girl's despair.
I also saw several times, at this period of his celebrity, the
inimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaïdes" that
was making a furor--a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet,
produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the Académie
Royale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds;
and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked old
King Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it is impossible to imagine.
The piece was the broadest and most grotesque quiz of the "grand genre
classique et héroïque," and was almost the first of an order of
entertainments which have gone on increasing in favor up to the present
day of universally triumphant parody and burlesque, by no means as
laughable and by no means as unobjectionable. Indeed, farcical to the
broadest point as was that mythological travesty of "The Danaïdes," it
was the essence of decency and propriety compared with "La grande
Duchesse," "La belle Hélène," "Orphée aux Enfers," "La Biche au Bois,"
"Le petit Faust," and all the vile succession of indecencies and
immoralities that the female good society of England in these latter
years has delighted in witnessing, without the help of the mask which
enabled their great-grandmothers to sit out the plays of Wycherley,
Congreve, and Farquhar, chaste and decorous in their crude coarseness
compared with the French operatic burlesques of the present day.
But by far the most amusing piece in which I recollect seeing Poitier,
was one in which he acted with the equally celebrated Brunet, and in
which they both represented English _women_--"Les Anglaises pour Rire."
The Continent was then just beginning to make acquaintance with the
traveling English, to whom the downfall of Bonaparte had opened the
gates of Europe, and who then began, as they have since continued, in
ever-increasing numbers, to carry amazement and amusement from the
shores of the Channel to those of the Mediterranean, by their wealth,
insolence, ignorance, and cleanliness.
"Les Anglaises pour Rire" was a caricature (if such a thing were
possible) of the English female traveler of that period. Coal-scuttle
poke bonnets, short and scanty skirts, huge splay feet arrayed in
indescribable shoes and boots, short-waisted tight-fitting spencers,
colors which not only swore at each other, but caused all beholders to
swear at them--these were the outward and visible signs of the British
fair of that day. To these were added, in this representation of them by
these French appreciators of their attractions, a mode of speech in
which the most ludicrous French, in the most barbarous accent, was
uttered in alternate bursts of loud abruptness and languishing drawl.
Sudden, grotesque playfulness was succeeded by equally sudden and
grotesque bashfulness; now an eager intrepidity of wild enthusiasm,
defying all decorum, and then a sour, severe reserve, full of angry and
terrified suspicion of imaginary improprieties. Tittering shyness, all
giggle-goggle and blush; stony and stolid stupidity, impenetrable to a
ray of perception; awkward, angular postures and gestures, and jerking
saltatory motions; Brobdingnag strides and straddles, and kittenish
frolics and friskings; sharp, shrill little whinnying squeals and
squeaks, followed by lengthened, sepulchral "O-h's"--all formed together
such an irresistibly ludicrous picture as made "Les Anglaises pour Rire"
of Poitier and Brunet one of the most comical pieces of acting I have
seen in all my life.
Mrs. Rowden's establishment in Hans Place had been famous for occasional
dramatic representations by the pupils; and though she had become in her
Paris days what in the religious jargon of that day was called serious,
or even methodistical, she winked at, if she did not absolutely
encourage, sundry attempts of a similar sort which her Paris pupils got
up.
Once it was a vaudeville composed expressly in honor of her birthday by
the French master, in which I had to sing, with reference to her, the
following touching tribute, to a well-known vaudeville tune:
"C'est une mère!
Qui a les premiers droits sur nos coeurs?
Qui partage, d'une ardeur sincère,
Et nos plaisirs et nos douleurs?
C'est une mère!"
I suppose this trumpery was stamped upon my brain by the infinite
difficulty I had in delivering it gracefully, with all the point and all
the pathos the author assured me it contained, at Mrs. Rowden,
surrounded by her friends and guests, and not suggesting to me the
remotest idea of _my_ mother or any body else's mother.
After this we got up Madame de Genlis' little piece of "L' Isle
Heureuse," in which I acted the accomplished and conceited princess who
is so judiciously rejected by the wise and ancient men of the island, in
spite of the several foreign tongues she speaks fluently, in favor of
the tender-hearted young lady who, in defiance of all sound systems of
political and social economy, always walks about attended by the poor of
the island in a body, to whom she distributes food and clothes in a
perpetual stream of charity, and whose prayers and blessings lift her
very properly to the throne, while the other young woman is left talking
to all the ambassadors in all their different languages at once.
Our next dramatic attempt came to a disastrous and premature end. I do
not know who suggested to us the witty and clever little play of
"Roxelane;" the versification of the piece is extremely easy and
graceful, and the preponderance of female characters and convenient
Turkish costume, of turbans and caftans, and loose voluminous trousers,
had appeared to us to combine various advantages for our purpose.
Mademoiselle Descuillès had consented to fill the part of Solyman, the
magnificent and charming Sultan, and I was to be the saucy French
heroine, "dont le nez en l'air semble narguer l'amour," the _sémillante_
Roxelane. We had already made good progress in the only difficulty our
simple appreciation of matters dramatic presented to our imagination,
the committing the words of our parts to memory, when Mrs. Rowden, from
whom all our preparations on such occasions were kept sacredly secret,
lighted upon the copy of the play, with all the MS. marks and directions
for our better guidance in the performance; and great were our
consternation, dismay, and disappointment when, with the offending
pamphlet in her hand, she appeared in our midst and indignantly forbade
the representation of any such piece, after the following ejaculatory
fashion, and with an accent difficult to express by written signs: "May,
commang! may_de_mosels, je suis atonnay! May! commang! May_de_mosel
Descuillès, je suis surprise! Kesse ke say! vous per_ma_ttay
may_de_mosels être lay filles d'ung seraglio! je ne vou pau! je vous
defang! je suis biang atonnay!" And so she departed, with our prompter's
copy, leaving us rather surprised, ourselves, at the unsuspected horror
we had been about to perpetrate, and Mademoiselle Descuillès shrugging
her shoulders and smiling, and not probably quite convinced of the
criminality of a piece of which the heroine, a pretty Frenchwoman,
revolutionizes the Ottoman Empire by inducing her Mohammedan lover to
dismiss his harem and confine his affections to her, whom he is supposed
to marry after the most orthodox fashion possible in those parts.
Our dramatic ardor was considerably damped by this event, and when next
it revived our choice could not be accused of levity. Our aim was
infinitely more ambitious, and our task more arduous. Racine's
"Andromaque" was selected for our next essay in acting, and was, I
suppose, pronounced unobjectionable by the higher authorities. Here,
however, our mainstay and support, Mademoiselle Descuillès, interposed a
very peculiar difficulty. She had very good-naturedly learned the part
of Solyman, in the other piece, for us, and whether she resented the
useless trouble she had had on that occasion, or disliked that of
committing several hundred of Racine's majestic verses to memory, I know
not; but she declared that she would only act the part of Pyrrhus, which
we wished her to fill, if we would read it aloud to her till she knew
it, while she worked at her needle. Of course we had to accept any
condition she chose to impose upon us, and so we all took it by turns,
whenever we saw her industrious fingers flying through their
never-ending task, to seize up Racine and begin pouring her part into
her ears. She actually learned it so, and our principal difficulty after
so teaching her was to avoid mixing up the part of Pyrrhus, which we had
acquired by the same process, with every other part in the play.
The dressing of this classical play was even more convenient than our
contemplated Turkish costume could have been. A long white skirt drawn
round the waist, a shorter one, with slits in it for armholes, drawn
round the neck by way of tunic, with dark blue or scarlet Greek pattern
border, and ribbon of the same color for girdle, and sandals, formed a
costume that might have made Rachel or Ristori smile, but which
satisfied all our conceptions of antique simplicity and grace; and so we
played our play.
Mademoiselle Descuillès was Pyrrhus; a tall blonde, with an insipid face
and good figure, Andromaque; Elizabeth P----, my admired and emulated
superior in all things, Oreste (not superior, however, in acting; she
had not the questionable advantage of dramatic blood in her veins); and
myself, Hermione (in the performance of which I very presently gave
token of mine). We had an imposing audience, and were all duly
terrified, became hoarse with nervousness, swallowed raw eggs to clear
our throats, and only made ourselves sick with them as well as with
fright. But at length it was all over; the tragedy was ended, and I had
electrified the audience, my companions, and, still more, myself; and
so, to avert any ill effects from this general electrification, Mrs.
Rowden thought it wise and well to say to me, as she bade me good-night,
"Ah, my dear, I don't think your parents need ever anticipate your going
on the stage; you would make but a poor actress." And she was right
enough. I did make but a poor actress, certainly, though that was not
for want of natural talent for the purpose, but for want of cultivating
it with due care and industry. At the time she made that comment upon my
acting I felt very well convinced, and have since had good reason to
know, that my school-mistress thought my performance a threat, or
promise (I know not which to call it) of decided dramatic power, as I
believe it was.
With this performance of "Andromaque," however, all such taste, if it
ever existed, evaporated, and though a few years afterward the stage
became my profession, it was the very reverse of my inclination. I
adopted the career of an actress with as strong a dislike to it as was
compatible with my exercising it at all.
I now became acquainted with all Racine's and Corneille's plays, from
which we were made to commit to memory the most remarkable passages; and
I have always congratulated myself upon having become familiar with all
these fine compositions before I had any knowledge whatever of
Shakespeare. Acquaintance with his works might, and I suppose certainly
would, have impaired my relish for the great French dramatists, whose
tragedies, noble and pathetic in spite of the stiff formality of their
construction, the bald rigidity of their adherence to the classic
unities, and the artificial monotony of the French heroic rhymed verse,
would have failed to receive their due appreciation from a taste and
imagination already familiar with the glorious freedom of Shakespeare's
genius. As it was, I learned to delight extremely in the dignified
pathos and stately tragic power of Racine and Corneille, in the
tenderness, refinement, and majestic vigorous simplicity of their fine
creations, and possessed a treasure of intellectual enjoyment in their
plays before opening the first page of that wonderful volume which
contains at once the history of human nature and human existence.
After I had been about a year and a half at school, Mrs. Rowden left her
house in the Rue d'Angoulême, and moved to a much finer one, at the very
top of the Champs Élysées, a large, substantial stone mansion, within
lofty iron gates and high walls of inclosure. It was the last house on
the left-hand side within the Barrière de l'Étoile, and stood on a
slight eminence and back from the Avenue des Champs Élysées by some
hundred yards. For many years after I had left school, on my repeated
visits to Paris, the old stone house bore on its gray front the large
"Institution de jeunes Demoiselles," which betokened the unchanged tenor
of its existence. But the rising tide of improvement has at length swept
it away, and modern Paris has rolled over it, and its place remembers it
no more. It was a fine old house, roomy, airy, bright, sunny, cheerful,
with large apartments and a capital play-ground, formed by that
old-fashioned device, a quincunx of linden trees, under whose shade we
carried on very Amazonian exercises, fighting having become one of our
favorite recreations.
This house was said to have belonged to Robespierre at one time, and a
very large and deep well in one corner of the play-ground was invested
with a horrid interest in our imaginations by tales of _noyades_ on a
small scale supposed to have been perpetrated in its depths by his
orders. This charm of terror was, I think, rather a gratuitous addition
to the attractions of this uncommonly fine well; but undoubtedly it
added much to the fascination of one of our favorite amusements, which
was throwing into it the heaviest stones we could lift, and rushing to
the farthest end of the play-ground, which we sometimes reached before
the resounding _bumps_ from side to side ended in a sullen splash into
the water at the bottom. With our removal to the Barrière de l'Étoile,
the direction of our walks altered, and our visits to the Luxembourg
Gardens and the Parc Monceaux were exchanged for expeditions to the Bois
de Boulogne, then how different from the charming pleasure-ground of
Paris which it became under the reforming taste and judgment of Louis
Napoleon!
Between the back of our play-ground and the village suburb of Chaillot
scarcely a decent street or even house then existed; there was no
splendid Avenue de l'Impératrice, with bright villas standing on vivid
carpets of flowers and turf. Our way to the "wood" was along the
dreariest of dusty high-roads, bordered with mean houses and
disreputable-looking _estaminets_; and the Bois de Boulogne itself, then
undivided from Paris by the fortifications which subsequently encircled
the city, was a dismal network of sandy avenues and _carrefours_,
traversed in every direction by straight, narrow, gloomy paths, a dreary
wilderness of low thickets and tangled copsewood.
I have said that I never returned home during my three years' school
life in Paris; but portions of my holidays were spent with a French
family, kind friends of my parents, who received me as an _enfant de la
maison_ among them. They belonged to the _petite bourgeoisie_ of Paris.
Mr. A---- had been in some business, I believe, but when I visited him
he was living as a small _rentier_, in a pretty little house on the main
road from Paris to Versailles.
It was just such a residence as Balzac describes with such minute finish
in his scenes of Parisian and provincial life: a sunny little
_maisonnette_, with green _jalousies_, a row of fine linden trees
clipped into arches in front of it, and behind, the trim garden with its
wonderfully productive dwarf _espaliers_, full of delicious pears and
Reine Claudes (that queen of amber-tinted, crimson-freckled greengages),
its apricots, as fragrant as flowers, and its glorious, spice-breathing
carnations.
The mode of life and manners of these worthy people were not refined or
elegant, but essentially hospitable and kind; and I enjoyed the sunny
freedom of my holiday visits to them extremely. The marriage of their
daughter opened to me a second Parisian home of the same class, but with
greater pretensions to social advantages, derived from the great city in
the center of which it stood.
I was present at the celebration of Caroline A----'s marriage to one of
the head-masters of a first-class boarding-school for boys, of which he
subsequently became the principal director. It was in the Rue de Clichy,
and thither the bride departed, after a jolly, rollicking, noisy
wedding, beginning with the religious solemnization at church and
procession to the _mairie_ for due sanction of the civil authorities,
and ending with a bountiful, merry, early afternoon dinner, and the not
over-refined ancient custom of the distribution of the _jarretière de la
mariée_. The jarretière was a white satin ribbon, tied at a discreet
height above the bride's ankle, and removed thence by the best man and
cut into pieces, for which an animated scramble took place among the
male guests, each one who obtained a piece of the white favor
immediately fastening it in his button-hole. Doubtless, in earlier and
coarser times, it was the bride's real garter that was thus distributed,
and our elegant white and silver rosettes are the modern representatives
of this primitive wedding "favor," which is a relic of ages when both in
England and in France usages obtained at the noblest marriages which
would be tolerated by no class in either country now;
"When bluff King Hal the stocking threw,
And Katharine's hand the curtain drew."
I have a distinct recollection of the merry uproar caused by this
ceremony, and of the sad silence that fell upon the little sunny
dwelling when the new-married pair and all the guests had returned to
Paris, and I helped poor Madame A---- and her old _cuisinière_ and
_femme de charge_, both with tearful eyes, to replace the yellow
_velours d'Utrecht_ furniture in its accustomed position on the shiny
_parquet_ of the best _salon_, with the slippery little bits of
foot-rugs before the empty _bergères_ and _canapés_.
My holidays after this time were spent with M. and Madame R----, in
whose society I remember frequently seeing a literary man of the name of
Pélissier, a clever writer, a most amusing talker, and an admirable
singer of Béranger's songs.
Another visitor of their house was M. Rio, the eminent member of the
French ultramontane party, the friend of Lammenais, Lacordaire,
Montalembert, the La Ferronays, the hero of the Jeune Vendée, the
learned and devout historian of Christian art. I think my friend M.
R---- was a Breton by birth, and that was probably the tie between
himself and his remarkable Vendéan friend, whose tall, commanding
figure, dark complexion, and powerful black eyes gave him more the
appearance of a Neapolitan or Spaniard than of a native of the coast of
ancient Armorica. M. Rio was then a young man, and probably in Paris for
the first time, at the beginning of the literary career of which he has
furnished so interesting a sketch in the autobiographical volumes which
form the conclusion of his "Histoire de l'Art Chrétien." Five and twenty
years later, while passing my second winter in Rome, I heard of M. Rio's
arrival there, and of the unbounded satisfaction he expressed at finding
himself in the one place where no restless wheels beat time to, and no
panting chimneys breathed forth the smoke of the vast, multiform
industry of the nineteenth century; where the sacred stillness of
unprogressive conservatism yet prevailed undisturbed. Gas had, indeed,
been introduced in the English quarter; but M. Rio could shut his eyes
when he drove through that, and there still remained darkness enough
elsewhere for those who loved it better than light.
During one of my holiday visits to M. R----, a ball was given at his
young gentlemen's school, to which I was taken by him and his wife. It
was my very first ball, and I have a vivid recollection of my white
muslin frock and magnificent _ponceau_ sash. At this festival I was
introduced to a lad, with whom I was destined to be much more intimately
acquainted in after years as one of the best amateur actors I ever saw,
and who married one of the most charming and distinguished women of
European society, Pauline de la Ferronays, whose married name has
obtained wide celebrity as that of the authoress of "Le Récit d'une
Soeur."
I remained in Paris till I was between fifteen and sixteen years old,
and then it was determined that I should return home. The departure of
Elizabeth P---- had left me without competitor in my studies among my
companions, and I was at an age to be better at home than at any school.
My father came to fetch me, and the only adventure I met with on the way
back was losing my bonnet, blown from my head into the sea, on board the
packet, which obliged me to purchase one as soon as I reached London;
and having no discreeter guide of my proceedings, I so far imposed upon
my father's masculine ignorance in such matters as to make him buy for
me a full-sized Leghorn flat, under the circumference of which enormous
_sombrero_ I seated myself by him on the outside of the Weybridge coach,
and amazed the gaping population of each successive village we passed
through with the vast dimensions of the thatch I had put on my head.
Weybridge was not then reached by train in half an hour from London; it
was two or three hours' coach distance: a rural, rather
deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain
of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on
the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former
residence of the Duke of York.
The straggling little village lay on the edge of a wild heath and common
country that stretches to Guildford and Godalming and all through that
part of Surrey to Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, and the Sussex coast--a
region of light, sandy soil, hiding its agricultural poverty under a
royal mantle of golden gorse and purple heather, and with large tracts
of blue aromatic pine wood and one or two points of really fine scenery,
where the wild moorland rolls itself up into ridges and rises to crests
of considerable height, which command extensive and beautiful views:
such as the one from the summit of Saint George's Hill, near Weybridge,
and the top of Blackdown, the noble site of Tennyson's fine house,
whence, over miles of wild wood and common, the eye sweeps to the downs
above the Sussex cliffs and the glint of the narrow seas.
We had left London in the afternoon, and did not reach Weybridge until
after dark. I had been tormented the whole way down by a nervous fear
that I should not know my mother's face again; an absence of three
years, of course, could not justify such an apprehension, but it had
completely taken possession of my imagination and was causing me much
distress, when, as the coach stopped in the dark at the village inn, I
heard the words, "Is there any one here for Mrs. Kemble?" uttered in a
voice which I knew so well, that I sprang, hat and all, into my mother's
arms, and effectually got rid of my fear that I should not know her.
Her rural yearnings had now carried her beyond her suburban refuge at
Craven Hill, and she was infinitely happy, in her small cottage
habitation, on the outskirts of Weybridge and the edge of its
picturesque common. Tiny, indeed, it was, and but for her admirable
power of contrivance could hardly have held us with any comfort; but she
delighted in it, and so did we all except my father, who, like most men,
had no real taste for the country; the men who appear to themselves and
others to like it confounding their love for hunting and shooting with
that of the necessary field of their sports. Anglers seem to me to be
the only sportsmen who really have a taste for and love of nature as
well as for fishy water. At any rate, the silent, solitary, and
comparatively still character of their pursuit enables them to study and
appreciate beauty of scenery more than the violent exercise and
excitement of fox-hunting, whatever may be said in favor of the
picturesque influences of beating preserves and wading through
turnip-fields with keepers and companions more or less congenial.
Of deer-stalking and grouse-shooting I do not speak; a man who does not
become enthusiastic in his admiration of wild scenery while following
these sports must have but half the use of his eyes.
Perhaps it was hardly fair to expect my father to relish extremely a
residence where he was as nearly as possible too high and too wide, too
long and too large, for every room in the house. He used to come down on
Saturday and stay till Monday morning, but the rest of the week he spent
at what was then our home in London, No. 5 Soho Square; it was a
handsome, comfortable, roomy house, and has now, I think, been converted
into a hospital.
The little cottage at Weybridge was covered at the back with a vine,
which bore with the utmost luxuriance a small, black, sweet-water grape,
from which, I remember, one year my mother determined to make wine; a
direful experiment, which absorbed our whole harvest of good little
fruit, filled every room in the house with unutterable messes, produced
much fermentation of temper as well as wine, and ended in a liquid
product of such superlative nastiness, that to drink it defied our
utmost efforts of obedience and my mother's own resolute courage; so it
was with acclamations of execration made libations of--to the infernal
gods, I should think--and no future vintage was ever tried, to our great
joy.
The little plot of lawn on which our cottage stood was backed by the
wild purple swell of the common, and that was crested by a fine fir
wood, a beautiful rambling and scrambling ground, full of picturesque
and romantic associations with all the wild and fanciful mental
existences which I was then beginning to enjoy. And even as I glide
through it now, on the railroad that has laid its still depths open to
the sun's glare and scared its silence with the eldritch snort and
shriek of the iron team, I have visions of Undine and Sintram, the
Elves, the little dog Stromian, the Wood-Witch, and all the world of
supernatural beauty and terror which then peopled its recesses for me,
under the influence of the German literature that I was becoming
acquainted with through the medium of French and English translations,
and that was carrying me on its tide of powerful enchantment far away
from the stately French classics of my school studies.
Besides our unusual privilege of grape-growing in the open air, our
little estate boasted a magnificent beurré pear tree, a small arbor of
intertwined and peculiarly fine filbert and cobnut trees, and some
capital greengage and apple trees; among the latter, a remarkably large
and productive Ribstone pippin. So that in the spring the little plot of
land was flowerful, and in the autumn fruitful, and we cordially
indorsed my mother's preference for it to the London house in Soho
Square.
The sort of orchard which contained all these objects of our regard was
at the back of the house; in front of it, however, the chief peculiarity
(which was by no means a beauty) of the place was displayed.
This was an extraordinary mound or hillock of sand, about half an acre
in circumference, which stood at a distance of some hundred yards
immediately in front of the cottage, and in the middle of what ought to
have been a flower garden, if this uncouth protuberance had not
effectually prevented the formation of any such ornamental setting to
our house. My mother's repeated applications to our landlord (the
village baker) to remove or allow her to remove this unsightly
encumbrance were unavailing. He thought he might have future use for the
sand, and he knew he had no other present place of deposit for it; and
there it remained, defying all my mother's ingenuity and love of beauty
to convert it into any thing useful or ornamental, or other than a cruel
eye-sore and disfigurement to our small domain.
At length she hit upon a device for abating her nuisance, and set about
executing it as follows. She had the sand dug out of the interior of the
mound and added to its exterior, which she had graded and smoothed and
leveled and turfed so as to resemble the glacis of a square bastion or
casemate, or other steep, smooth-sided earth-work in a fortification. It
was, I suppose, about twenty feet high, and sloped at too steep an angle
for us to scale or descend it; a good footpath ran round the top,
accessible from the entrance of the sand-heap, the interior walls of
which she turfed (to speak Irish) with heather, and the ground or floor
of this curious inclosure she planted with small clumps of evergreen
shrubs, leaving a broad walk through the middle of it to the house door.
A more curious piece of domestic fortification never adorned a cottage
garden. It looked like a bit of Robinson Crusoe's castle--perhaps even
more like a portion of some deserted fortress. It challenged the
astonishment of all our visitors, whose invariable demand was, "What is
that curious place in the garden?" "The mound," was the reply; and the
mound was a delightful play-ground for us, and did infinite credit to my
mother's powers of contrivance. Forty years and more elapsed between my
first acquaintance with Weybridge and my last visit there. The Duke of
York's house at Oatlands, afterwards inhabited by my friends Lord and
Lady Ellesmere, had become a country hotel, pleasant to all its visitors
but those who, like myself, saw ghosts in its rooms and on its gravel
walks; its lovely park, a nest of "villas," made into a suburb of London
by the railroads that intersect in all directions the wild moorland
twenty miles from the city, which looked, when I first knew it, as if it
might be a hundred.
I read and spent a night at the Oatlands Hotel, and walked, before I did
so, to my mother's old cottage. The tiny house had had some small
additions, and looked new and neat and well cared for. The mound,
however, still stood its ground, and had relapsed into something of its
old savage condition; it would have warranted a theory of Mr. Oldbuck's
as to its possible former purposes and origin. I looked at its crumbled
and irregular wall, from which the turf had peeled or been washed away;
at the tangled growth of grasses and weeds round the top, crenellated
with many a breach and gap; and the hollow, now choked up with luxuriant
evergreens that overtopped the inclosure and forbade entrance to it, and
thought of my mother's work and my girlish play there, and was glad to
see her old sand-heap was still standing, though her planting had, with
the blessing of time, made it impenetrable to me.
Our cottage was the last decent dwelling on that side of the village;
between ourselves and the heath and pine wood there was one miserable
shanty, worthy of the poorest potato patch in Ireland. It was inhabited
by a ragged ruffian of the name of E----, whose small domain we
sometimes saw undergoing arable processes by the joint labor of his son
and heir, a ragged ruffian some sizes smaller than himself, and of a
half-starved jackass, harnessed together to the plow he was holding;
occasionally the team was composed of the quadruped and a tattered and
fierce-looking female biped, a more terrible object than even the man
and boy and beast whose labors she shared.
On the other side our nearest neighbors, separated from us by the common
and its boundary road, were a family of the name of ----, between whose
charming garden and pretty residence and our house a path was worn by a
constant interchange of friendly intercourse.
I followed no regular studies whatever during our summer at Weybridge.
We lived chiefly in the open air, on the heath, in the beautiful wood
above the meadows of Brooklands, and in the neglected, picturesque
inclosure of Portmore Park, whose tenantless, half-ruined mansion, and
noble cedars, with the lovely windings of the river Wey in front, made
it a place an artist would have delighted to spend his hours in.
We haunted it constantly for another purpose. My mother had a perfect
passion for fishing, and would spend whole days by the river, pursuing
her favorite sport. We generally all accompanied her, carrying baskets
and tackle and bait, kettles and camp stools, and looking very much like
a family of gypsies on the tramp. We were each of us armed with a rod,
and were more or less interested in the sport. We often started after an
early breakfast, and, taking our luncheon with us, remained the whole
day long absorbed in our quiet occupation.
My mother was perfectly unobservant of all rules of angling, in her
indiscriminate enthusiasm, and "took to the water" whether the wind
blew, the sun shone, or the rain fell; fishing--under the most
propitious or unpropitious circumstances--was not, indeed, necessarily,
catching fish, but still, fishing; and she was almost equally happy
whether she did or did not catch any thing. I have known her remain all
day in patient expectation of the "glorious nibble," stand through
successive showers, with her clothes between whiles drying on her back,
and only reluctantly leave the water's edge when it was literally too
dark to see her float.
Although we all fished, I was the only member of the family who
inherited my mother's passion for it, and it only developed much later
in me, for at this time I often preferred taking a book under the trees
by the river-side, to throwing a line; but towards the middle of my life
I became a fanatical fisherwoman, and was obliged to limit my waste of
time to one day in the week, spent on the Lenox lakes, or I should
infallibly have wandered thither and dreamed away my hours on their
charming shores or smooth expanse daily.
I have often wondered that both my mother and myself (persons of
exceptional impatience of disposition and irritable excitability of
temperament) should have taken such delight in so still and monotonous
an occupation, especially to the point of spending whole days in an
unsuccessful pursuit of it. The fact is that the excitement of hope,
keeping the attention constantly alive, is the secret of the charm of
this strong fascination, infinitely more than even the exercise of
successful skill. And this element of prolonged and at the same time
intense expectation, combined with the peculiarly soothing nature of the
external objects which surround the angler, forms at once a powerful
stimulus and a sedative especially grateful in their double action upon
excitable organizations.