I observe that I left Calais in the _banquette_ of the diligence at 6
P.M. on the Friday night, May 8th, 1835, and reached Paris at 3 A.M. on
Sunday morning--thirty-three hours. I remember my great surprise at
finding the entire way paved after the fashion that I had been
accustomed to consider proper only for the streets of towns. We used for
by far the greatest part of the way the unpaved spaces left on either
side of the paved causeway. But the conductor told me that in winter
they were generally obliged to keep on the latter the whole way. The
horses, two wheelers and three leaders abreast, were almost--indeed I
think quite--without exception grey. They were also all, or almost all,
stallions. The style of driving struck me as very rough, awkward,
violent, and inelegant, but masterful and efficacious. The driver was
changed with every relay; and it seemed to me very probable that it was
expedient that each man should know such cattle, not only on the road
but in the stable.
We breakfasted at Abbeville, and dined at Beauvais. And I find it
recorded that I contrived at both places to find time for a flying
visit to the cathedral, and was highly delighted with the noble fragment
of a church at the latter city.
I went to bed on arriving at the Hôtel de Lille et d’Albion, which was
in those days a very different place from its noisy, pretentious, and
vulgar successor of the same name in the Rue St. Honoré. The old house
in the Rue des Filles de St. Thomas has long since disappeared, together
with the quiet little street in which it was situated. Like its
successor it was almost exclusively used by English, but they were the
English of the days when personally conducted herds were not. The
service was performed by handmaidens in neat caps and white bodices over
their coloured skirts. There were no swallow-tail-coated waiters, and
the coffee was exquisite! _Tempi passati, perchè non tornate più?_
At ten the next morning I went to No. 6, Rue de Provence, where I found
my parents and my sisters at breakfast.
The object of this Paris journey was twofold--the writing a book in
accordance with an agreement which my mother had entered into with Mr.
Richard Bentley, the father of the publisher of these volumes, and the
consultation of a physician to whom she had been especially recommended
respecting my father’s health, which was rapidly and too evidently
declining. They had been in Paris some time already, and had formed a
large circle of acquaintance, both English and French. I was told by my
mother that the physician, who had seen my father several times, had
made no pleasant report of his condition. He did not apprehend any
immediately alarming phase of illness, but said that had he been left to
guess my father’s age after visiting him, he should have supposed him to
be more than four score, the truth being that he was very little more
than sixty.
This, my first visit to Paris, lasted one month only, from the 9th of
May to the 9th of June, and many of the recollections which seem to me
now to be connected with it very probably belong to subsequent visits,
for my diary, re-opened now for the first time after the interval of
more than half a century, was kept, I find, in a very intermittent and
slovenly manner. No doubt I found very few minutes for journalising in
the four-and-twenty hours of each day.
I well remember that my first impression of _Lutetia
Parisiorum_--“Mudtown of the Parisians,” as Carlyle translates it--was
that of having stepped back a couple of centuries or so in the history
of European civilisation and progress. We are much impressed at home,
and talk much of the vastness of the changes which the last fifty years
have made in our own city, but I think that which the same time has
operated in Paris is much greater. Putting aside the mere extension of
streets and dwellings, which, great as it has been in Paris, has been
much greater in London, the changes in the former city have been far
more radical. Certainly there are many quarters of London where the eye
now rests on that which is magnificent, and which at the time when I
knew the town well, presented nothing but what was, if not sordid, at
least ugly. But to those who remember the streets of Louis Philippe’s
city, the change in the whole conception of city life, and the _manière
d’être_ of the population, is far greater. With the exception of the
principal boulevards in the neighbourhood of the recently completed
“Madeleine,” and its then recently established flower market, the
streets were still traversed by filthy and malodorous open ditches,
which did more or less imperfectly the duty of sewers, and Paris still
deserved its name of “Mudtown”. Wretched little oil lamps, suspended on
ropes stretched across the streets, barely served to make darkness
visible. Water was still carried at so much the bucket up the
interminable staircases of the Parisian houses by stalwart Auvergnats,
who came from their mountains to do a work more severe than the
Parisians could do for themselves.
But another specialty, which very forcibly struck me, and which cannot
be said to have been any survival of ways and habits obsolete on the
other side of the Channel, was the remarkable manner in which the
political life of the hour, with its emotions, opinions, and passions,
was enacted, so to speak, on the stage of the streets, as a drama is
presented on the boards of a theatre. Truly he who ran through the
streets of Paris in those days might read, and indeed could not help
reading, the reflection and the manifestation of the political
divisions and passions which animated the reign of the _bourgeois_ king,
and ended by destroying it.
And in this respect the time of my first visit to Paris was a very
interesting one. The Parisian world was, of course, divided into
Monarchists and Republicans, the latter of whom laboured under the
imputation, in some cases probably unjust, but in more entirely merited
(as in certain other more modern instances), of being willing and ready
to bring their theories into practice by perpetrating or conniving at
any odious monstrosity of crime, violence and bloodshed. The Fieschi
incident had recently enlightened the world on the justice of such
accusations.
But the Monarchists were more amusingly divided into “_Parceque_
Bourbon,” supporters of the existing _régime_, and “_Quoique_ Bourbon,”
tolerators of it. The former, of course, would have preferred the white
flag and Charles Dix; but failing the possibility of such a return to
the old ways, were content to live under the rule of a sovereign, who,
though not the legitimate monarch by right divine, was at least a scion
of the old legitimate race. The “_Quoique_ Bourbon” partisans were the
men who, denying all right to the throne save that which emanated from
the will of the people, were yet Monarchists from their well-rooted
dread of the intolerable evils which Republicanism had brought, and, as
they were convinced, would bring again upon France, and were therefore
contented to support the _bourgeois_ monarchy “although” the man on the
throne was an undeniable Bourbon.
But what made the streets, the boulevards, the Champs Elysées, and
especially the Tuileries garden peculiarly amusing to a stranger, was
the circumstance that the Parisians all got themselves up with strict
attention to the recognised costume proper to their political party. The
Legitimist, the “_Quoique Bourbon” bourgeois_, (very probably in the
uniform of the then immensely popular National Guard) and the Republican
in his appropriate bandit-shaped hat and coat with exaggeratedly large
lappels, or draped picturesquely in the folds of a cloak, after a
fashion borrowed from the other side of the Alps, were all
distinguishable at a glance. It was then that deliciously graphic line
(I forget who wrote it) “_Feignons à feindre à fin de mieux dissimuler_”
was applied to characterise the conspirator-like attitudes it pleased
these gentlemen to assume.
The truth was that Paris was still very much afraid of them. I remember
the infinite glee, and the outpouring of ridicule, which hailed the
dispersion of a Republican “demonstration” (the reader will forgive the
anachronism of the phrase), at the Porte St. Martin, by the judicious
use of a powerful fire-engine. The heroes of the _drapeau rouge_ had
boasted they would stand their ground against any charge of soldiery.
Perhaps they would have done so. But the helter-skelter that ensued on
the first well-directed jet of cold water from the pipe of a fire-engine
furnished Paris with laughter for days afterwards.
But, as I have said, Paris, not unreasonably, feared them. Secret
conspiracy is always an ugly enemy to deal with. And no violence of mere
speculative opinion would have sufficed, had fear been absent, to cause
the very marked repulsion with which all the Parisians, who had anything
to lose, in that day regarded their Republican fellow citizens.
Assuredly the Conservatives of the Parisian world of 1835 were not “the
stupid party.” Both in their newspapers, and other ephemeral literature,
and in the never-ending succession of current _mots_ and jokes which
circulated in the Parisian salons, they had the pull very decidedly. I
remember some words of a parody on one of the Republican songs of the
day, which had an immense vogue at that time. “_On devrait planter le
chêne_,” it ran, “_pour l’arbre de la liberté_” (it will be remembered
that planting “trees of liberty” was one of the common and more harmless
“demonstrations” of the Republican party). “_Ses glands nouriraient sans
peine les cochons qui l’ont planté._” And the burthen of the original
which ran, “_Mourir pour la patrie, C’est le sort le plus beau le plus
digne d’envie_,” was sufficiently and very appositely caricatured by the
slight change of “_Mourir pour la patrie_” into “_Nourris_ par _la
patrie_,” &c.
To a stranger seeing Paris as I saw it, and frequenting the houses which
I frequented, it seemed strange that such a community should have
considered itself in serious danger from men who seemed to me, looking
from such a stand-point, a mere handful of skulking melodramatic
enthusiasts, playing at conspiracy and rebellion rather than really
meditating it. But I was not at that time fully aware how entirely the
real danger was to be found in regions of Paris, and strata of its
population which were as entirely hidden from my observation, as if they
had been a thousand miles away. But though I could not see the danger, I
saw unmistakably enough the fear it inspired in all classes of those
who, as I said before, had anything to lose.
It was this fear that made the National Guard the heroes of the hour. It
was impossible but that such a body of men--Parisian shopkeepers put
into uniform (those of them who would condescend to wear it; for many
used to be seen, who contented themselves with girding on a sabre and
assuming a firelock, while others would go to the extent of surmounting
the ordinary black coat with the regulation military shako)--should
afford a target for many shafts of ridicule. The capon-lined paunches of
a considerable contingent of these well-to-do warriors were an
inexhaustible source of not very pungent jokes. But Paris would have
been frightened out of its wits at the bare suggestion of suppressing
these citizen saviours of society. Of course they were petted at the
Tuileries. No reception or _fête_ of any kind was complete without a
large sprinkling of these shopkeeping guardsmen, and their presence on
such occasions was the subject of an unfailing series of _historiettes_.
I remember an anecdote excellently illustrative of the time, which was
current in the salons of the “_Parceque_ Bourbon” society of the day. A
certain elderly duchess of the _vieille roche_, a dainty little woman,
very _mignonne_, whose exquisite _parure_ and still more exquisite
manners scented the air at a league’s distance, to use the common French
phrase, with the odour of the most aristocratic salons of the Quartier
St. Germain, was, at one of Louis Philippe’s Tuileries receptions, about
to take from the tray handed round by a servant the last of the ices
which it had contained, when a huge outstretched hand, with its five
wide-spread fingers, was protruded from behind over her shoulder, and
the refreshment of which she was about to avail herself was seized by a
big National Guard with the exclamation, “_Enfoncèe la petite mère!_”
Nevertheless, it may be safely asserted that the little duchess, and all
the world she moved in, would have been infinitely more dismayed had
they gone to the Tuileries and seen no National Guards there.
Among the many persons of note with whom I became more or less well
acquainted during that month, no one perhaps stands out more vividly in
my recollection than Chateaubriand. He also, though standing much aloof
from the noise and movement of the political passions of the time, was
an aristocrat _jusqu’au bout des ongles_, in appearance, in manners, in
opinions, and general tone of mind. The impression to this effect
immediately produced on one’s first presentation was in no degree due
to any personal advantages. He was not, when I knew him, nor do I think
he ever could have been, a good looking man. He stooped a good deal, and
his head and shoulders gave me the impression of being somewhat too
large for the rest of his person. The lower part of his face too, was, I
thought, rather heavy.
But his every word and movement were characterised by that exquisite
courtesy which was the inalienable, and it would seem incommunicable,
specialty of the _seigneurs_ of the _ancien régime_. And in his case the
dignified bearing of the grand seigneur was tempered by a _bonhomie_
which produced a manner truly charming.
And having said all this, it may seem to argue want of taste or want of
sense in myself, to own, as truthfulness compels me to do, that I did
not altogether like him. I had a good deal of talk with him, and that to
a youngster of my years and standing was in itself very flattering, and
I felt as if I were ungrateful for not liking him. But the truth in one
word is, that he appeared to me to be a “tinkling cymbal.” I don’t mean
that he was specially insincere as regarded the person he was talking to
at the moment. What I do mean is, that the man did not seem to me to
have a mind capable of genuine sincerity in the conduct of its
operations. He seemed to me a theatrically-minded man. Immediately after
making his acquaintance I read the _Génie du Chrétienisme_, and the book
confirmed my impression of the man. He honestly intends to play a very
good and virtuous part, but he _is_ playing a part.
He was much petted in those days by the men, and more especially by the
women of the _ancien régime_ and the Quartier St. Germain. But I suspect
that he was a good deal quizzed, and considered an object of more or
less good-natured ridicule by the rest of the Parisian world. I fancy
that he was in straitened circumstances. And the story went that he and
his wife put all they possessed into a box, of which each of them had a
key, and took from day to day what they needed, till one fine day they
met over the empty box with no little surprise and dismay.
Chateaubriand thought he understood English well, and rather piqued
himself upon the accomplishment. But I well remember his one day asking
me to explain to him the construction of the sentence, “Let but the
cheat endure, I ask not aught beside.” My efforts to do so during the
best part of half an hour ended in entire failure.
He was in those days reading in Madame Récamier’s salon at the
Abbaye-aux-Bois (in which building my mother’s friend, Miss Clarke, also
had her residence), those celebrated _Mémoires d’Outretombe_, of which
all Paris, or at least all literary and political Paris, was talking.
Immense efforts were made by all kinds of notabilities to obtain an
admission to these readings. But the favoured ones had been very few.
And my mother was proportionably delighted at the arrangement that a
reading should be given expressly for her benefit. M. de Chateaubriand
had ceased these _séances_ for the nonce, and the gentleman who had been
in the habit of reading for him had left Paris. But by the kindness of
Miss Clarke and Madame Récamier, he was induced to give a sitting at the
Abbaye expressly for my mother. This arrangement had been made before I
reached Paris, and I consequently to my great regret was not one of the
very select party. My mother was accompanied by my sisters only. I
benefited however in my turn by the acquaintance thus formed, and
subsequently passed more than one evening in Madame Récamier’s salon at
the Abbaye-aux-Bois in the Rue du Bac.
My mother, in her book on _Paris and the Parisians_, writes of that
reading as follows:--“The party assembled at Madame Récamier’s on this
occasion did not, I think, exceed seventeen, including Madame Récamier
and M. de Chateaubriand. Most of these had been present at former
readings. The Duchesses de Larochefoucauld and de Noailles, and one or
two other noble ladies, were among them. And I felt it was a proof that
genius is of no party, when I saw a grand-daughter of General Lafayette
enter among us. She is married to a gentleman who is said to be of the
extreme _coté gauche_.” The passage of the _Mémoires_ selected for the
evening’s reading was the account of the author’s memorable visit to
Prague to visit the royal exiles. “Many passages,” writes my mother,
“made a profound impression on my fancy and on my memory, and I think I
could give a better account of some of the scenes described than I
should feel justified in doing, as long as the noble author chooses to
keep them from the public eye. There were touches that made us weep
abundantly; and then he changed the key, and gave us the prettiest, the
most gracious, the most smiling picture of the young princess and her
brother that it was possible for pen to trace. And I could have said, as
one does in seeing a clever portrait, ‘That is a likeness, I’ll be sworn
for it.’”
It may be seen from the above passage, and from some others in my
mother’s book on _Paris and the Parisians_, that her estimate of the man
Chateaubriand was a somewhat higher one, than that which I have
expressed in the preceding pages. She was under the influence of the
exceeding charm of his exquisite manner. But in the following passage,
which I am tempted to transcribe by the curious light it throws on the
genesis of the present literary history of France, I can more entirely
subscribe to the opinions expressed:--
“The active, busy, bustling politicians of the hour have succeeded in
thrusting everything else out of place, and themselves into it. One
dynasty has been overthrown, and another established; old laws have been
abrogated, and hundreds of new ones formed; hereditary nobles have been
disinherited, and little men made great. But amidst this plenitude of
destructiveness, they have not yet contrived to make any one of the puny
literary reputations of the day weigh down the renown of those who have
never lent their voices to the cause of treason, regicide, rebellion, or
obscenity. The literary reputations both of Chateaubriand and Lamartine
stand higher beyond all comparison than those of any other living French
authors. Yet the first, with all his genius, has often suffered his
imagination to run riot; and the last has only given to the public the
leisure of his literary life. But both of them are men of honour and
principle, as well as men of genius; and it comforts one’s human nature
to see that these qualities will keep themselves aloft, despite whatever
squally winds may blow, or blustering floods assail them. That both
Chateaubriand and Lamartine belong rather to the imaginative than to the
_positif_ class cannot be denied; but they are renowned throughout the
world, and France is proud of them. The most curious literary
speculations, however, suggested by the present state of letters in this
country, are not respecting authors such as these. They speak for
themselves, and all the world knows them and their position. The
circumstance decidedly the most worthy of remark in the literature of
France at the present time is the effect which the last revolution
appears to have produced. With the exception of history, to which both
Thiers (?)[B] and Mignet have added something that may live,
notwithstanding their very defective philosophy, no single work has
appeared since the revolution of 1830 which has obtained a substantial,
elevated, and generally acknowledged reputation for any author unknown
before that period--not even among all the unbridled ebullitions of
imagination, though restrained neither by decorum, principle, nor taste.
Not even here, except from one female pen, which might become, were it
the pleasure of the hand that wields it, the first now extant in the
world of fiction,” (of course, Georges Sand is alluded to,) “has
anything appeared likely to survive its author. Nor is there any writer,
who during the same period has raised himself to that station in society
by means of his literary productions, which is so universally accorded
to all who have acquired high literary celebrity in any country.
“The name of Guizot was too well known before the revolution for these
observations to have any reference to him.” (Cousin should not have been
forgotten.) “And however much he may have distinguished himself since
July, 1830, his reputation was made before. There are, however, little
writers in prodigious abundance.... Never, I believe, was there any
period in which the printing presses of France worked so hard as at
present. The revolution of 1830 seems to have set all the minor spirits
in motion. There is scarcely a boy so insignificant, or a workman so
unlearned, as to doubt his having the power and the right to instruct
the world.... To me, I confess, it is perfectly astonishing that any one
can be found to class the writers of this restless clique as ‘the
literary men of France.’... Do not, however, believe me guilty of such
presumption as to give you my own unsupported judgment as to the
position which this ‘new school,’ as the _décousu_ folks always call
themselves, hold in the public esteem. My opinion on this subject is the
result of careful inquiry among those who are most competent to give
information respecting it. When the names of such as are best known
among this class of authors are mentioned in society, let the politics
of the circle be what they may, they are constantly spoken of as a
pariah caste that must be kept apart.
“‘Do you know ----?’ has been a question I have repeatedly asked
respecting a person whose name is cited in England as the most esteemed
French writer of the age--and so cited, moreover, to prove the low
standard of French taste and principle.
“‘No, madame,’ has been invariably the cold answer.
“‘Or----?’
“‘No; he is not in society.’
“‘Or----?’
“‘Oh, no! His works live an hour--too long--and are forgotten.’”
Now, are the writers of French literature of the present day, whose
names will at once present themselves to every reader’s mind, to be
deemed superior to those of Louis Philippe, who “lent their voices to
the cause of treason, regicide, rebellion, or obscenity,” and were
unrestrained by either “decorum, principle, or taste”? For it is most
assuredly no longer true that the writers in question are held to be a
“pariah caste,” or that they are not known and sought by “society.” The
_facilis decensus_ progress of the half century that has elapsed since
the cited passages were written, is certainly remarkable.
There is one name, however, which cannot be simply classed as one of the
_décousus_. Victor Hugo had already at that day made an European
reputation. But the following passage about him from my mother’s book on
_Paris and the Parisians_ is so curious, and to the present generation
must appear so, one may almost say, monstrous, that it is well worth
while to reproduce it.
“I have before stated,” she writes, “that I have uniformly heard the
whole of the _décousu_ school of authors spoken of with unmitigated
contempt, and that not only by the venerable advocates for the _bon
vieux temps_, but also, and equally, by the distinguished men of the
present day--distinguished both by position and ability. Respecting
Victor Hugo, the only one of the tribe to which I allude who has been
sufficiently read in England to justify his being classed by us as a
person of general celebrity, the feeling is more remarkable still. I
have never mentioned him or his works to any person of good moral
feeling or cultivated mind who did not appear to shrink from according
him even the degree of reputation that those who are received as
authority among our own cities have been disposed to allow him. _I might
say that of him France seems to be ashamed._” (My italics.) “‘Permit me
to assure you,’ said one gentleman gravely and earnestly, ‘that no idea
was ever more entirely and altogether erroneous than that of supposing
that Victor Hugo and his productions can be looked on as a sort of type
or specimen of the literature of France at the present hour. He is the
head of a sect, the high priest of a congregation who have abolished
every law, moral and intellectual, by which the efforts of the human
mind have hitherto been regulated. He has attained this pre-eminence,
and I trust that no other will arise to dispute it with him. But Victor
Hugo is NOT a popular French author.’”
My recollections of all that I heard in Paris, and my knowledge of the
circles (more than one) in which my mother used to live, enable me to
testify to the absolute truth of the above representation of the
prevalent Parisian feeling at that day respecting Victor Hugo. Yet he
had then published his _Lyrics_, _Notre Dame de Paris_, and the most
notable of his dramas; and I think no such wonderful change of national
opinion and sentiment as the change from the above estimate to that now
universally recognised in France, can be met with in the records of
European literary history. Is it not passing strange that whole regions
of Paris should have been but the other day turned, so to speak, into a
vast mausoleum to this same “pariah,” and that I myself should have
seen, as I did, the Pantheon not yet cleared from the wreck of garlands
and inscriptions and scaffoldings for spectators, all of which had been
prepared to do honour to his obsequies?
But it must be observed that the violent repulsion and reprobation with
which he was in those days regarded by all his countrymen, save the
extreme and restless spirits of the Republican party, cannot fairly be
taken as the result and outcome of genuine literary criticism. All
literary judgments in France were then subordinated to political party
feeling, and that was intensified by the most fatal of all
disqualifications for the formation of sound and equable estimates--by
fear. All those well-to-do detesters of Victor Hugo and all his works,
the “_Quoique_ Bourbons” as well as the “_Parceque_ Bourbons,” the
prosperous supporters of the new _régime_ as well as the regretful
adherents of the old, lived in perpetual fear of the men whose corypheus
and hierophant was Victor Hugo, and felt, not without reason, that the
admittedly ricketty throne of the citizen king and those sleek and
paunchy National Guardsmen alone stood between them and the loss of all
they held dearest in the world. Nevertheless, the contrast between the
judgments and the feeling of 1835 and those of fifty years later is
sufficiently remarkable.
Much has been said, especially in England, of the great writer’s
historical inaccuracy in treating of English matters. But an anecdote
which my mother gives in her book is worth reproducing for the sake of
the evidence it gives that in truth Victor Hugo was equally ignorantly
and carelessly inaccurate when speaking of home matters, on which, at
least, it might have been thought that he would have been better
informed.
“An able lawyer, and most accomplished gentleman and scholar, who holds
a distinguished station in the _cour royale_” (in all probability
Berryer), “took us to see the Palais de Justice. Having shown us the
chamber where criminal trials are carried on, he observed that this was
the room described by Victor Hugo in his romance, adding, ‘He was,
however, mistaken here, as in most places where he affects a knowledge
of the times of which he writes. In the reign of Louis XI. no criminal
trials ever took place within the walls of this building, and all the
ceremonies as described by him resemble much more a trial of yesterday
than of the age at which he dates his tale.’”
Georges Sand, certainly upon the whole the most remarkable literary
figure in the French world at the time of my visit to Paris, _vidi
tantum_. That I had an opportunity of doing on various occasions. She
was a person on whom, quite apart from her literary celebrity, the eye
of any observer would have dwelt with some speculative curiosity. She
was hardly to be called handsome, or even pretty, but was still
decidedly attractive. The large eyes _à fleur de tête_, and the mobile
and remarkably expressive mouth rendered the face both attractive and
stimulative of interest. The features were unmistakably refined in
character and expression, and the mouth--the most trustworthy
evidence-giving feature upon that point--was decidedly that of a
high-bred woman.
She was at that period of her varied career acting as well as writing in
a manner which attracted the attention of Louis Philippe’s very vigilant
and abnormally suspicious police. She had recently left Paris for an
excursion in the _tête-à-tête_ company of the well known Abbé de
Lamenais, who was at that time giving much trouble and disquietude to
the official guardians of the altar and the throne. His comings and
goings were the object of vigilant supervision on the part of the police
authorities; and it so happened by a strange chance that the report of
the official observers of this little excursion, which reached the
official head-quarters, reached me also. And all the watchers had to
tell was that the abbé and the lady his companion shared the same
bedchamber at the end of their first day’s journey. Now the Abbé de
Lamenais was an old, little, wizened, dried-up, dirty--very
dirty--priest. It is possible, but I have reason to think highly
improbable, that economy was the motive of this strange chamber
comradeship. But I was then, and am still, very strongly convinced that
the sole purpose of it was to outrage the lady’s (and the priest’s)
censors, to act differently from everybody else, and to give evidence
of superiority to conventionality and “prejudice.”
I wrote very carefully and conscientiously some few years subsequently a
long article on Georges Sand in the _Foreign Quarterly_ which attracted
some attention at the time. I should write in many respects differently
now. The lady in subsequent years put a considerable quantity of “water
into her wine”--and though not altogether in the same sense,--I have
done so too.
To both Guizot and Thiers I had the honour of being introduced. If I
were to say that neither of them seemed to me to have entirely the
manners and bearing of a gentleman, I should probably be thought to be
talking affected and offensive nonsense. And I do not mean to say so in
the ordinary English every-day use of the term. What I mean is that they
were both of them very far from possessing that grand seigneur manner,
which as I have said so markedly distinguished Chateaubriand, and many
another Frenchman whom I knew in those days; by no means all of them
belonging to the aristocratic caste, party, or class. Guizot looked for
all the world like a village schoolmaster, and seemed to me to have much
the manner of one. He stooped a good deal, and poked his head forwards.
I remember thinking that he was, in manner, more like an Englishman than
a Frenchman; and that it was a matter of curious speculation to me at
the time, whether this effect might have been produced by the fact that
he was a Protestant, and an earnest one, instead of being a Roman
Catholic. Possibly my impression of his schoolmaster-like deportment may
have been the result of his manner to me. I was but a boy, with no claim
at all to the honour of being noticed by him in any way. But I remember
being struck by the difference of the manner of Thiers in this respect.
All my prejudices and all that I knew of the two men disposed me to feel
far the higher respect for Guizot. And my opinion still is that I judged
rightly, whether in respect to character or intellectual capacity. Not
but that I thought and think that Thiers was the brighter and in the
ordinary sense of the term the cleverer man of the two. There was no
brightness about the _premier abord_ of Guizot, though doubtless a
longer and more intimate acquaintance than was granted to me would have
corrected this impression. But Thiers was, from the bow with which he
first received you to the latest word you heard from him, all
brightness. Of dignity he had nothing at all. If Guizot might have been
taken for a schoolmaster, Thiers might have been mistaken for a
stockbroker, say, a prosperous, busy, bustling, cheery stockbroker, or
any such man of business. And if Guizot gave one the impression of being
more English than French, his great rival was unmistakeably and
intensely French. I have no recollection of having much enjoyed my
interview with M. Guizot. But I was happy during more than one evening
spent in Thiers’s house in Paris.
Of Madame Récamier I should have said the few words I have to say about
the impression so celebrated a woman produced upon me, when I was
speaking of her salon in a previous page. But they may be just as well
said here. Of the beauty for which she was famed throughout Europe, of
course little remained, when I saw her in 1835. But the grace, which was
in a far greater degree unique, remained in its entirety. I think she
was the most gracefully moving woman I ever saw. The expression of her
face had become perhaps a little sad, but it was sweet, attractive, full
of the promise of all good things of heart and mind. If I were to say
that her management of her salon might be compared in the perfection of
its tactical success with that of a successful general on the field, it
might give the idea that management and discipline were visible, which
would be a very erroneous one. That the perfection of art lies in the
concealment of it, was never more admirably evidenced than in her
“administration” as a _reine de salon_. A close observer might perceive,
or perhaps rather divine only, that all was marshalled, ordered, and
designed. Yet all was, on the part at least of the guests, unconstrained
ease and enjoyment. That much native talent, much knowledge of men and
women, and exquisite tact must have been needed for this perfection in
the art of _tenir salon_ cannot be denied. Finally it may be said that a
great variety of _historiettes_, old and new, left me with the
unhesitating conviction that despite the unfailing tribute to an
_éclat_ such as hers, of malicious insinuations (all already ancient
history at the time of which I am writing), Madame Récamier was and had
always been a truly good and virtuous Christian woman.
Miss Clarke, also, as has been said an inmate of the Abbaye-aux-Bois,
and a close friend of her celebrated neighbour, I became intimate with.
She was an eccentric little lady, very plain, brimfull of talent, who
had achieved the wonderful triumph of living, in the midst of the
choicest society of Paris, her own life after her own fashion, which was
often in many respects a very different fashion from that of those
around her, without incurring any of the ridicule or anathemas with
which such society is wont to visit eccentricity. I remember a
good-naturedly recounted legend to the effect, that she used to have her
chemises, which were constructed after the manner of those worn by the
grandmothers of the present generation, marked with her name in full on
the front flap of them; and that this flap was often exhibited over the
bosom of her dress in front! She too was a _reine de salon_ after her
fashion--a somewhat different one from that of her elegant neighbour.
There was, at all events, a greater and more _piquant_ variety to be
found in it. All those to be found there were, however, worth seeing or
hearing for one reason or another. _Her_ method of ruling the
frequenters of her receptions might be described as simply shaking the
heterogeneous elements well together. But it answered so far as to make
an evening at her house unfailingly amusing and enjoyable. She was
very, and I think I may say, universally popular. She subsequently
married M. Mohl, the well-known Orientalist, whom I remember to have
always found, when calling upon him on various occasions, sitting in a
tiny cabinet so absolutely surrounded by books, built up into walls all
round him, as to suggest almost inevitably the idea of a mouse in a
cheese, eating out the hollow it lived in.
Referring to my mother’s book on _Paris and the Parisians_ for those
extracts from it which I have given in the preceding pages, I find the
following passage, the singular forecast of which, and its bearing on
the present state of things in France, tempts me to transcribe it.
Speaking in 1835, and quoting the words of a high political authority,
whom she had met “at the house of the beautiful Princess B----”
(Belgiojoso), she writes: “‘You know,’ he said, ‘how devoted all France
was to the Emperor, though the police was somewhat tight, and the
conscriptions heavy. But he had saved us from a Republic, and we adored
him. For a few days, or rather hours, we were threatened again five
years ago by the same terrible apparition. The result is that four
millions of armed men stand ready to protect the prince who chased it.
Were it to appear a third time, which Heaven forbid! you may depend upon
it, _that the monarch who should next ascend the throne of France might
play at “le jeu de quilles” with his subjects and no one be found to
complain_.’” (My italics.) On the margin of the page on which this is
printed, my mother has written in the copy of the book before me, “_Vu
et approuvé._ Dec. 10th, 1853. F. T.”
The mention of the Princess Belgiojoso in the above passage reminds me
of a memorable evening which I spent at her house, and of my witnessing
there a singular scene, which at the present day may be worth
recounting.
The amusement of the evening consisted in hearing Liszt and the princess
play on two pianos the whole of the score of Mozart’s _Don Giovanni_!
The treat was a delightful one; but I dare say that I should have
forgotten it but for the finale of the performance. No sooner was the
last note ended than the nervous musician swooned and slid from his
seat, while the charming princess, in whom apparently matter was less
under the dominion of mind, or at least of nerve, was as fresh as at the
beginning!
My month at Paris, with its poor thirty times twenty-four hours, was all
too short for half of what I strove to cram into it. And of course I
could please myself with an infinitude of recollections of things and
places, and occasions, and above all, persons, who doubtless contributed
more to the making of that month one of the pleasantest I have to look
back on, than any of the celebrities whom I had the good fortune to
meet. But it may be doubted whether any such rambling reminiscences
would be equally pleasing to my readers.
There is one anecdote, however, of a well remembered day, which I must
tell, before bringing the record of my first visit to Paris to a
conclusion.
A picnic party--rather a large one, and consisting of men and women of
various nationalities--had been organised for a visit to the famous and
historic woods of Montmorenci. We had a delightful day, and my memory is
still, after half a century, crowded with very vivid remembrances of the
places and persons, and things done and things said, which rendered it
such. But as for the places, have they not been described and
re-described in all the guide books that were ever written? And as for
the persons, alas! the tongues that chattered so fast and so pleasantly
are still for evermore, and the eyes that shone so brightly are dim, if
not, as in most instances, closed in their last sleep! But it is only
with an incident that formed the finale of our day there that I mean to
trouble the reader.
Thackeray, then an unknown young man, with whom I that day became
acquainted for the first time, was one of our party. Some half-dozen of
us--the boys of the party--thinking that a day at Montmorenci could not
be passed _selon les prescriptions_ without a cavalcade on the famous
donkeys, selected a number of them, and proceeded to urge the strongly
conservative animals probably into places, and certainly into paces, for
which their life-long training had in no wise prepared them. A variety
of struggles between man and beast ensued with divers vicissitudes of
victory, till at last Thackeray’s donkey, which certainly must have
been a plucky and vigorous beast, succeeded in tossing his rider clean
over his long ears, and as ill luck would have it, depositing him on a
heap of newly broken stones. The fall was really a severe one, and at
first it was feared that our picnic would have a truly tragic
conclusion. But it was soon ascertained that no serious mischief had
been done, beyond that, the mark of which the victim of the accident
bore on his face to his dying day.
I think that when I climbed to the _banquette_ of the Lille diligence to
leave Paris, on the morning of the 7th of June, 1835, it was the first
time that the prospect of a journey failed in any way to compensate me
for quitting what I was leaving behind.