There comes to me, in spite of these memories of an extended connection,
a sense as of some shrinkage or decline in the _beaux jours_ of the
Institution; which seems to have found its current run a bit thick and
troubled, rather than with the pleasant plash in which we at first
appeared all equally to bathe. I gather, as I try to reconstitute, that
the general enterprise simply proved a fantasy not workable, and that at
any rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumber
the candid _jeunesse_; so that I wonder by the same token on what theory
of the Castalian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, M.
Houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have been
moved to dip him into our well. Shall I blush to relate that my own
impression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turn
taken--and quite in spite of the high Fezandie ideals--by the
_invraisemblable_ house of entertainment where the assimilation of no
form of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experience
that insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience too
directly deprecated by reason of the originally plotted tender growths
of innocence. And some of these shapes were precisely those from which
our good principal may well have first drawn his liveliest reassurance:
I seem to remember such ancient American virgins in especial and such
odd and either distinctively long-necked or more particularly
long-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock-coats of no type or
"cut," no suggested application at all as garments--application, that
is, to anything in the nature of character or circumstance, function or
position--gathered about in the groups that M. Bonnefons almost
terrorised by his refusal to recognise, among the barbarous races, any
approach to his view of the great principle of Diction. I remember
deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn and seeing
how, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded; I remember
above all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature
_wholly_ animated and containing no waste expressional spaces, no
imaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeed
of the amount of trouble of it too, when _none_ of the letters of the
alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a Frenchman.
The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makes
in any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kind
of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed
especially to aim: I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which
might easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendant
impressions and quickened sensibilities--yielding, as these last did,
harvests of apparitions. I positively cherish at the present hour the
fond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as might
still have hung about there--I mean on the very spot--from the vital
presence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which had
involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other
presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was
still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and
supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. The Pension
Vauquer, then but lately existent, according to Le Pere Goriot, on the
other side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me; but the figures
peopling it are not to-day essentially more intense (that is as a matter
of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared
with the paleness of the conned page in general,) than I persuade
myself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous and
more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents of
the Pension Fezandie. Fantastic and all "subjective" that I should
attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round
them, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that the
general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity,
of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breath
of the Second Empire and making them twinkle back with a light of
resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great
grimacing example. The grimace might have been legibly there in the air,
to the young apprehension, and could I but simplify this record enough I
should represent everything as part of it. I seemed at any rate
meanwhile to think of the Fezandie young men, young Englishmen mostly,
who were getting up their French, in that many-coloured air, for what I
supposed, in my candour, to be appointments and "posts," diplomatic,
commercial, vaguely official, and who, as I now infer, though I didn't
altogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of the
establishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. It was as a
side-wind of their free criticism, I take it, that I felt the first
chill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang of
prevision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the general
fine fallacy on which it rested. Their criticism was for that matter
free enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. They
expressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn--such as might
naturally proceed, I think I felt, from a mightier race; they spoke of
poor old Bonnefons, they spoke of our good Fezandie himself, they spoke
more or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and I
remember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish served
to us at dejeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which my
brothers and I didn't partake) but as rotten. These were expressions,
absent from our domestic, our American air either of fonder
discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the
range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the
general tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow with
light the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectually
unregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inward
stirrings and the growth of a _comparative_ sense of things have now
begun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general
outward concussion of the English "abroad" with the fact of being abroad
took place. The Fezandie young men were as much abroad as might be, and
yet figured to me--largely by the upsetting force of that confidence,
all but physically exercised--as the finest, handsomest, knowingest
creatures; so that when I met them of an afternoon descending the
Champs-Elysees with fine long strides and in the costume of the period,
for which we can always refer to contemporary numbers of "Punch," the
fact that I was for the most part walking sedately either with my mother
or my aunt, or even with my sister and her governess, caused the spark
of my vision that they were armed for conquest, or at the least for
adventure, more expansively to glow. I am not sure whether as a general
thing they honoured me at such instants with a sign of recognition; but
I recover in especial the sense of an evening hour during which I had
accompanied my mother to the Hotel Meurice, where one of the New York
cousins aforementioned, daughter of one of the Albany uncles--that is of
the Rhinebeck member of the group--had perched for a time, so
incongruously, one already seemed to feel, after the sorriest stroke of
fate. I see again the gaslit glare of the Rue de Rivoli in the spring or
the autumn evening (I forget which, for our year of the Rue d'Angouleme
had been followed by a migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, or
rather with two periods, of Boulogne-sur-mer interwoven, and we might
have made our beguiled way from either domicile); and the whole
impression seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glittering
_vitrines_ about the poor Pendletons' bereavement, their loss of their
only, their so sturdily handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their state
with the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery with which I
find my recall of Paris from those years so disproportionately and so
quite other than stomachically charged. The point of all of which is
simply that just as we had issued from the hotel, my mother anxiously
urging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, of
the great bazaar (of which the Rue de Rivoli was then a much more
bristling avenue than now) rather than depending on me for support and
protection, there swung into view the most splendid, as I at least
esteemed him, of my elders and betters in the Rue Balzac, who had left
the questions there supposedly engaging us far behind, and, with his
high hat a trifle askew and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me at
a glance what it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was speed
in his step, assurance in his air, he was visibly, impatiently on the
way; and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactly
to _be_ on the way. He gave it the more, doubtless, through the fact
that, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat (from which the
Englishman of that age was so singularly inseparable) he testified to
the act of recognition, and to deference to my companion, but with a
grand big-boy good-humour that--as I remember from childhood the so
frequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top-most
overlooking, on the part of an admired senior--only gave an accent to
the difference. As if he cared, or could have, that I but went forth
through the Paris night in the hand of my mamma; while he had greeted us
with a grace that was as a beat of the very wings of freedom! Of such
shreds, at any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of young
sensibility--when memory (if sensibility has at all existed for it)
rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds and, drawing forth ever
so tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the pattern
to the light. I find myself in this connection so restlessly and
tenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in handsful
and every shred seems tangled with another.
Gertrude Pendleton's mere name, for instance, becomes, and very
preferably, the frame of another and a better picture, drawing to it
cognate associations, those of that element of the New York cousinship
which had originally operated to place there in a shining and even, as
it were, an economic light a "preference for Paris"--which preference,
during the period of the Rue d'Angouleme and the Rue Montaigne, we
wistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest, on the part of the
inimitable Masons. Their earlier days of Tours and Trouville were over;
a period of relative rigour at the Florence of the still encircling
walls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, I seem to
gather, a thing of the past; great accessions, consciously awaited
during the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and my
own whole consciousness of the general air--so insistently I
discriminate for that alone--was coloured by a familiar view of their
enjoyment of these on a tremendously draped and festooned _premier_ of
the Rue-St.-Honore, bristling with ormolu and Pradier statuettes and
looking almost straight across to the British Embassy; rather a low
premier, after the manner of an entresol, as I remember it, and where
the closed windows, which but scantly distinguished between our own
sounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible, street of
records and memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light thick with a
mixture of every sort of queer old Parisian amenity and reference: as if
to look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe,
to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste and even to smell--to
one's greater assault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect of
some sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption,
say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate
and other bonbons. I must have felt the whole thing as something for
one's developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have been
rather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering under
it. This goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousins' inbred
ease, from far back, in all such assumable relations; and of how, four
of the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were (with the
eldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the general ground, after
marriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there), they were
possessed of the scene and its great reaches and resources and
possibilities in a degree that reduced us to small provincialism and a
hanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest of
mammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" did, of presentations at
the Tuileries to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable Empress: reports
touchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, yet after all so
scantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions so
great didn't perhaps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which they
were usually appointed. There was something of an implication in the air
of those days, when young Americans were more numerously lovely than
now, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that some
account of the only tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe
(that of the Lord's day) might have been taken even at the Tuileries.
But what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the New
York cousinship in this general connection is a time that I remember to
have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particular
cousins I now speak of had conceived, under the influence of I know not
what unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliest
possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow
me, when I was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving walks,
of an extraordinarily _matinal_ character, at the hour of the meticulous
rag-pickers and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns
of the Second Empire as at no time since; which made us all feel
together, under the conduct of Honorine, bright child of the pavement
herself, as if _we_, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had also
something to say to the great show presently to be opened, and were
free, throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know its
aspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I call our
shepherdess Honorine even though perhaps not infallibly naming the
sociable soubrette who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have
been an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care or, more
particularly, expert sensibility and candour of sympathy and curiosity,
our flock was freely confided. If she wasn't Honorine she was Clementine
or Augustine--which is a trifle; since what I thus recover, in any case,
of these brushings of the strange Parisian dew, is those communities of
contemplation that made us most hang about the jewellers' windows in the
Palais Royal and the public playbills of the theatres on the Boulevard.
The Palais Royal, now so dishonoured and disavowed, was then the very
Paris of Paris; the shutters of the shops seemed taken down, at that
hour, for our especial benefit, and I remember well how, the "dressing"
of so large a number of the compact and richly condensed fronts being
more often than not a matter of diamonds and pearls, rubies and
sapphires, that represented, in their ingenuities of combination and
contortion, the highest taste of the time, I found open to me any amount
of superior study of the fact that the spell of gems seemed for the
feminine nature almost alarmingly boundless. I stared too, it comes back
to me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even thought it became a young
man of the world to express as to this or that object a refined and
intelligent preference; but what I really most had before me was the
chorus of abjection, as I might well have called it, led, at the highest
pitch, by Honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so to
say, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion--goodness knew
in fact (for my small intelligence really didn't) what depths of
corruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them again, these queer dim plays
of consciousness: my sense that my innocent companions, Honorine _en
tete_, would have done anything or everything for the richest ruby, and
that though one couldn't one's self be decently dead to that richness
one didn't at all know what "anything" might be or in the least what
"everything" was. The gushing cousins, at the same time, assuredly knew
still less of that, and Honorine's brave gloss of a whole range alike of
possibilities and actualities was in itself a true social grace.
They all enjoyed, in fine, while I somehow but wastefully mused--which
was after all my form of enjoyment; I was shy for it, though it was a
truth and perhaps odd enough withal, that I didn't really at all care
for gems, that rubies and pearls, in no matter what collocations, left
me comparatively cold; that I actually cared for them about as little
as, monstrously, secretly, painfully, I cared for flowers. Later on I
was to become aware that I "adored" trees and architectural
marbles--that for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficiently
bestreaked or empurpled marble in particular I would have given a bag of
rubies; but by then the time had passed for my being troubled to make
out what in that case would represent on a small boy's part the
corruptibility, so to call it, proclaimed, before the _vitrines_, by the
cousins. That hadn't, as a question, later on, its actuality; but it had
so much at the time that if it had been frankly put to me I must have
quite confessed my inability to say--and must, I gather, by the same
stroke, have been ashamed of such inward penury; feeling that as a boy I
showed more poorly than girls. There was a difference meanwhile for such
puzzlements before the porticos of the theatres; all questions melted
for me there into the single depth of envy--envy of the equal, the
beatific command of the evening hour, in the _regime_ of Honorine's
young train, who were fresh for the early sparrow and the chiffonier
even after shedding buckets of tears the night before, and not so much
as for the first or the second time, over the beautiful story of La Dame
aux Camelias. There indeed was another humiliation, but by my weakness
of position much more than of nature: whatever doing of "everything"
might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainly
have done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas's
triumphant idyll--now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous
classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters,
Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely,
at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a wondrous
mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence is
all that aspect of the cousins and the rambles and the overlapping
nights melting along the odorously bedamped and retouched streets and
arcades; bright in the ineffable morning light, above all, of our
peculiar young culture and candour!
All of which again has too easily led me to drop for a moment my more
leading clue of that radiation of goodnature from Gertrude Pendleton and
her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked.
The becraped passage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of a
later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been, that first
winter, mainly from a _petit hotel_ somewhere "on the other side," as
we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elysees; a region
at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy as
a chaos of accidents and contrasts where _petits hotels_ of archaic type
were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so
characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frank
industries and vulgarities--all brightened these indeed by the sociable
note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other _bavardise_.
The great consistencies of arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony,
were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there; in
spite of which the attraction of the hazard of it on the part of our
then so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously, or
even expressively, as just gesticulatively and helplessly gay--since
that earlier pitch of New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for that
matter pretended to, enunciation--was quite in what I at least took to
be the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves;
exemplified for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party in
honour of the small son of all hopes whom she was so precipitately to
lose: an occasion which, as we had, in our way, known the act of baptism
but as so abbreviated and in fact so tacit a business, had the effect
for us of one of the great "forms" of a society taking itself with
typical seriousness. We were much more serious than the Pendletons,
but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our
being able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have been
but of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with small
guests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but I must
have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of
those round which as many kinds of circumstance as possible
clustered--so that the more of these there were the more one might
imagine a great social order observed. How shall I now pretend to say
how many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recognised?--with the
remarkable one, to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield, that
the "religious ceremony" was at the same time a "party," of twinkling
lustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders (that
platitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moral
line, drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil); with little English
girls, daughters of a famous physician of that nationality then pursuing
a Parisian career (he must have helped the little victim into the
world), and whose emphasised type much impressed itself; with round
glazed and beribboned boxes of multi-coloured sugared almonds, dragees
de bapteme above all, which we harvested, in their heaps, as we might
have gathered apples from a shaken tree, and which symbolised as nothing
else the ritual dignity. Perhaps this grand impression really came back
but to the dragees de bapteme, not strictly more immemorial to our young
appreciation than the New Year's cake and the "Election" cake known to
us in New York, yet immensely more official and of the nature of
scattered largesse; partly through the days and days, as it seemed to
me, that our life was to be furnished, reinforced and almost encumbered
with them. It wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that they
were somehow so important and so historic.
It was with no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasional
presence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case of
the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at
all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my free
approach. Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of this record
alluded, at that time doing his baccalaureat on the other side of the
Seine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall my
awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil), as to
quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes
for the "Europe" in which he had been from the first so technically
plunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to,
had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be
"finished," educationally, to the point that for our strenuous cousin
Charlotte was the only proper one--and I feel sure he can have acquitted
himself in this particular in a manner that would have passed for
brilliant if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff little standards,
always tend to burn low in her presence. These ladies were to develop
more and more the practice of living in odd places for abstract inhuman
reasons--at Marseilles, at Duesseldorf (if I rightly recall their
principal German sojourn), at Naples, above all, for a long stage;
where, in particular, their grounds of residence were somehow not as
those of others, even though I recollect, from a much later time,
attending them there at the opera, an experience which, in their
fashion, they succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of the
concrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. Later impressions, few
but firm, were so to enhance one's tenderness for Vernon's own image,
the most interesting surely in all the troop of our young kinsmen early
baffled and gathered, that he glances at me out of the Paris period,
fresh-coloured, just blond-bearded, always smiling and catching his
breath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such an
appeal to the right idealisation, or to belated justice, as makes of
mere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty. It seemed quite richly
laid upon me at the time--I get it all back--that he, two or three years
older than my elder brother and dipped more early, as well as held more
firmly, in the deep, the refining waters the virtue of which we all
together, though with our differences of consistency, recognised, was
the positive and living proof of what the process, comparatively poor
for ourselves, could do at its best and with clay originally and
domestically kneaded to the right plasticity; besides which he shone, to
my fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly in
his very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, but the intensely
accent-giving stamp of the Latin quarter, which we so thinly imagined
and so superficially brushed on our pious walks to the Luxembourg and
through the parts where the glamour might have hung thickest. We were to
see him a little--but two or three times--three or four years later,
when, just before our own return, he had come back to America for the
purpose, if my memory serves, of entering the Harvard Law School; and to
see him still always with the smile that was essentially as facial, as
livingly and loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion itself;
always too with the air of caring so little for what he had been put
through that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully,
some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted as
from a laughing mental embarrassment: he had been put through too much;
it was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known where to begin. He
did give out, a little, on occasion--speaking, that is, on my different
plane, as it were, and by the roundabout report of my brother; he gave
out, it appeared, as they walked together across shining Newport sands,
some fragment, some beginning of a very youthful poem that "Europe" had,
with other results, moved him to, and a faint thin shred of which was to
stick in my remembrance for reasons independent of its quality:
"Harold, rememberest thou the day,
We rode along the Appian Way?
Neglected tomb and altar cast
Their lengthening shadow o'er the plain,
And while we talked the mighty past
Around us lived and breathed again!"
That was European enough, and yet he had returned to America really to
find himself, even with every effort made immediately near him to defeat
the discovery. He found himself, with the outbreak of the War, simply as
the American soldier, and not under any bribe, however dim, of the
epaulette or the girt sword; but just as the common enlisting native,
which he smiled and gasped--to the increase of his happy shortness of
breath, as from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no lack of
personal soundness--at feeling himself so _like_ to be. As strange, yet
as still more touching than strange, I recall the sight, even at a
distance, of the drop straight off him of all his layers of educational
varnish, the possession of the "advantages," the tongues, the degrees,
the diplomas, the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all sunk
in--a sacrifice of precious attributes that might almost have been
viewed as a wild bonfire. So his prodigious mother, whom I have perhaps
sufficiently presented for my reader to understand, didn't fail to view
it--judging it also, sharply hostile to the action of the North as the
whole dreadful situation found her, with deep and resentful displeasure.
I remember how I thought of Vernon himself, during the business, as at
once so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, as
vaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep-down reaction,
some extremity of indifference and defiance, some exhibition of a young
character too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to and
with too much expected of it, and all under too firmer a will; so that
the public pretext had given him a lift, or lent him wings, which
without its greatness might have failed him. As the case was to turn
nothing--that is nothing he most wanted and, remarkably, most
enjoyed--did fail him at all. I forget with which of the possible
States, New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island (though I think the
first) he had taken service; only seeming to remember that this all went
on for him at the start in McClellan's and later on in Grant's army,
and that, badly wounded in a Virginia battle, he came home to be nursed
by his mother, recently restored to America for a brief stay. She held,
I believe, in the event, that he had, under her care, given her his vow
that, his term being up, he would not, should he get sufficiently well,
re-engage. The question here was between them, but it was definite that,
materially speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. The old, the
irrepressible adage, however, was to live again between them: when the
devil was sick the devil a saint would be; when the devil was well the
devil a saint was he!
The devil a saint, at all events, was Vernon, who denied that he had
passed his word, and who, as soon as he had surmounted his first
disablement, passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. At once
restored to the front and to what now gave life for him its
indispensable relish, he was in the thick, again, of the great carnage
roundabout Richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he (as I figure still
incorrigibly smiling) succumbed. His mother had by this time indignantly
returned to Europe, accompanied by her daughter and her younger son--the
former of whom accepted, for our great pity, a little later on, the
office of closing the story. Anne King, young and frail, but not less
firm, under stress, than the others of her blood, came back, on her
brother's death, and, quietest, most colourless Electra of a lucidest
Orestes, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenched
fields, got possession of his buried body and bore it for reinterment to
Newport, the old habitation, as I have mentioned, of their father's
people, both Vernons and Kings. It must have been to see my mother, as
well as to sail again for Europe, that she afterwards came to Boston,
where I remember going down with her, at the last, to the dock of the
English steamer, some black and tub-like Cunarder, an archaic "Africa"
or "Asia" sufficing to the Boston service of those days. I saw her off
drearily and helplessly enough, I well remember, and even at that moment
found for her another image: what was she most like, though in a still
sparer and dryer form, but some low-toned, some employed little Bronte
heroine?--though more indeed a Lucy Snowe than a Jane Eyre, and with no
shade of a Bronte hero within sight. To this all the fine privilege and
fine culture of all the fine countries (collective matter, from far
back, of our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it had amounted for
Vernon to the bare headstone on the Newport hillside where, by his
mother's decree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint of the
manner of his death. So grand, so finely personal a manner it appeared
to me at the time, and has indeed appeared ever since, that this brief
record irrepressibly springs from that. His mother, as I have equally
noted, was however, with her views, to find no grace in it so long as
she lived; and his sister went back to her, and to Marseille, as they
always called it, but prematurely to die.