"Sir, you may make your friend quite at his ease on the subject, for I
have not known her existence till within these twenty-four hours."
"You danced with her half the evening--you sat beside her at supper. She
listened to you with evident attention--of this last I myself was
witness; and the report in the neighbourhood is, that you have come to
this place by an express arrangement with her father," gravely retorted
the guardsman.
All this exactness of requisition appeared to me to be going rather too
far; and I exhibited my feeling on the subject, in the tone in which I
replied, that I had stated every thing that was necessary for the
satisfaction of a "man of sense, but that I had neither the faculty nor
the inclination to indulge the captiousness of any man."
His colour mounted, and I seemed as if I was likely to have a couple of
heroes on my hands. But he compressed his lip, evidently strangled a
chivalric speech, and, after a pause to recover his calmness, said--
"Sir, I have not come here to decide punctilios on either side. I
heartily wish that this affair had not occurred, or could be reconciled;
my countrymen here, I know, stand on a delicate footing, and I am
perfectly aware of the character that will be fastened on them by the
occurrence of such rencontres. Can you suggest any means by which this
difference may be settled at once?"
"None in the world, sir," was my answer. "I have told you the fact, that
I have no pretension whatever to the lady--that I am wholly unacquainted
even with the person of your friend--that the idea of intentional injury
on my part, therefore, is ridiculous; and let me add, for the benefit of
your friend, that to expect an apology for imaginary injuries, would be
the most ridiculous part of the entire transaction."
"What, then, am I to do?" asked the gallant captain, evidently
perplexed. "I really wish that the affair could be got over without
_fracas_. In fact, though the Jewess is pretty, Lafontaine's choice does
not much gratify any of us."
"What you ought to do, sir, is sufficiently plain," said I. "Go to your
friend; if he has brains enough remaining to comprehend the nature of
the case, he will send you back with his apology. If he has not, I shall
remain half an hour on the sands until he has made up his mind."
The captain made me a low bow, and slowly paced back to the lodging of
his fiery compatriot.
When I was left alone, I, for the first time, felt the whole ill-luck of
my situation. So long as I was heated by our little dialogue, I thought
only of retorting the impertinent interference of a stranger with my
motives or actions. But, now, the whole truth flashed on me with the
force of a new faculty. I saw myself involved in a contest with a fool
or a lunatic, in which either of our lives, or both, might be
sacrificed--and for nothing. Hope, fortune, reputation, perhaps renown,
all the prospects of life were opening before me, and I was about to
shut the gate with my own hand. In these thoughts I was still too young
for what is called personal peril to intervene. The graver precaution of
more advanced years was entirely out of the question. I was a soldier,
or about to be one; and I would have rejoiced, if the opportunity had
been given to me, in heading a forlorn hope, or doing any other of those
showy things which make a name. The war, too, was beginning--my future
regiment was ordered for foreign service--every heart in England was
beating with hope or fear--every eye of Europe was fixed upon England
and Englishmen; and, in the midst of all this high excitement, to fall
in a pitiful private quarrel, struck me with a sudden sense of
self-contempt and wilful absurdity, that made me almost loathe my being.
I acknowledge that the higher thoughts, which place those rencontres in
their most criminal point of view, had then but little influence with
me. But to think that, within the next hour, or the next five minutes, I
might be but like the sleepers in the rude resting-place of the
fishermen; with my name unknown, and all the associations of life
extinguished--
"This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod"--
was an absolute pang. I could have died a martyr, and despised the
flame, or rather rejoiced in it, as a security that I should not perish
forgotten. But a fancied wrong, an obscure dispute, the whole future of
an existence flung away for the jealous dreams of a mad Frenchman, or
the Sport of a coquette, of whom I knew as little as of her fantastic
lover, threw me into a fever of scorn for the solemn follies of mankind.
The captain returned. I had not stirred from the spot.
"I regret," said he, "that my friend is wholly intractable. He has
convinced himself, if he can convince no one else, that he has wholly
lost the good opinion of his fair one, and that you are the cause. Some
communication which he had from London, informed him of your frequent
intercourse with her father. This rendered him suspicious, and the
peculiar attention with which you were treated last night, produced a
demand for an explanation; which, of course, heightened the quarrel. The
inamorata, probably not displeased to have more suitors than one,
whether in amusement or triumph, appears to have assisted his error, if
such it be; and he returned home, stung to madness by what he terms her
infidelity. He now demands your formal abandonment of the pursuit."
All my former feelings of offence recurred at the words, and I hotly
asked--"Well, sir, to whom must I kneel--to the lady or the gentleman?
Take my answer back--that I shall do neither. Where is your friend to be
found?"
He pointed to a clump of frees within a few hundred yards, and I
followed him. I there saw my antagonist; a tall, handsome young man, but
with a countenance of such dejection that he might have sat for the
picture of despair. It was clear that his case was one for which there
was no tonic, but what the wits of the day called a course of steel.
Beside him stood a greyhaired old figure, of a remarkably intelligent
countenance, though stooped slightly with age. He was introduced to me
as General Deschamps; and in a few well-expressed words, he mentioned
that he attended, from respect to the British, to offer his services to
me on an occasion "which he deeply regretted, but which circumstances
unfortunately rendered necessary, and which all parties were doubtless
anxious to conclude before it should produce any irritation in the
neighbourhood."
To the offer of choice of weapons, I returned an answer of perfect
indifference. It had happened, that as my father had destined me for
diplomacy, and had conceived the science to have but two essentials,
French and fencing, I was tolerably expert in both. Swords were chosen.
We were placed on the ground, and the conflict began. My antagonist was
evidently a master of his art; but there is no weapon whose use depends
so much upon the mind of the moment as the sword. He was evidently
resolved to kill or be killed; and the desperation with which he rushed
on me exposed him to my very inferior skill. At the third pass I ran him
through the sword arm. He staggered back with the twinge; but at the
instant when he was about to bound on me, and perhaps take his revenge,
a scream stopped us all; a female, wrapped in cloak and veil, rushed
forward, and threw herself into Lafontaine's arms in a passion of sobs.
An attendant, who soon came up, explained the circumstance; and it
finally turned out, that the fair Mariamne, whatever her coquetry might
have intended at night, repented at morn; recollected some of the
ominous expressions of her lover; and on hearing that he had been seen
with a group entering the grove, and that I, too, was absent, had
conjectured the truth at once, and flown, with her _femme de chambre,_
to the rendezvous. She had come just in time.
The reconciliation was complete. I was now not only forgiven by the
lover, but was the "very best friend he had in the world;--a man of
honour, a paragon, a _chevalier sans peur et sans reproche_." The wound
of the gallant chasseur was bound up, like an ancient knight's, with his
mistress's scarf. She upbraided me, with her glistening eyes, for having
had the audacity to quarrel with her hero; and then, with the same eyes,
thanked me for the opportunity of proving her faith to _cher et
malheureux Charles_. Her little heart poured out its full abundance in
her voluble tongue; and for a quarter of an hour, and it is a long life
for happiness, we were the happiest half dozen in Christendom.
How Mordecai would admire all this, was yet to be told; but my casual
mention of his name broke up the rapture at once. Mariamne suddenly
became sensible of the irregularity of alternately fainting and smiling
in the arms of a handsome young soldier; and in the presence, too, of so
many spectators, all admirers of her black eyes and blooming
sensibilities. She certainly looked to me much prettier than in her
full-dress charms of the evening before, and I almost began to think
that the prize was worth contending for; but the guardsman and the old
general had felt the effects of the morning air, and were
unsentimentally hungry. Mariamne and her attendant were escorted to the
edge of the plantation by her restored knight; and I accepted the
general's invitation to breakfast, instead of drowning myself in the
next pond.
The general was lodged in the first floor of a fisherman's dwelling,
which, in more polished parts of the land, would have been pronounced a
hovel; but in Brighton, as it then was, bore the name of a house. We
entered it through an apartment filled with matters of the fisherman's
trade,--nets, barrels, and grapnels; and in a corner a musket or two,
which had evidently seen service, though probably _not_ in his Majesty's
pay. The walls were covered with engravings of British sea-fights and
favourite admirals, from the days of Elizabeth; patriotic in the highest
degree, and most intolerable specimens of the arts; the floor, too, had
its covering, but it was of nearly a dozen children of all sizes, from
the bluff companion of his father down to the crier in the cradle; yet
all fine bold specimens of the brood of sea and fresh air, British
bull-dogs, that were yet to pin down the game all round the world; or
rather cubs of the British lion, whose roar was to be the future terror
of the foreigner.
The general welcomed us to his little domicile with as much grace as if
he had been ushering us into the throne-room of the Tuileries. I
afterwards understood that he had been governor of the "Invalides;" and
the change from the stately halls of that military palace must have
severely taxed the philosophy of any man; yet it had no appearance of
having even ruffled the temperament of the gallant veteran. He smiled,
talked, and did the honours of his apartment with as much urbanity as if
he had been surrounded by all the glittering furniture, and all the
liveried attendance, of his governorship. I have always delighted in an
old Frenchman, especially if he has served. Experience has made me a
cosmopolite, and yet to this hour a young Frenchman is my instinctive
aversion. He is born in coxcombry, cradled in coxcombry, and educated in
coxcombry. It is only after his coxcombry is rubbed off by the changes
and chances of the world, that the really valuable material of the
national character is to be seen. He always reminds me of the
mother-of-pearl shell, rude and unpromising on the outside, but by
friction exhibiting a fine interior. However it may be thought a paradox
to pronounce the Frenchman unpolished, I hold to my assertion. If the
whole of "jeune France" sprang on their feet and clapped their hands to
the hilts of their swords, or more probably to their daggers, to avenge
the desecration of the only shrine at which nine-tenths of them worship,
I should still pronounce the Frenchman the most unpolished of Europeans.
What is his look of conscious superiority to all that exist besides in
this round world? The toss of his nostril, the glare of his eye, the
contempt of his gathered lip? Give me the homeliest manners of the
homeliest corner of Europe--nay, give me the honest rudeness of the
American savage, in preference to this arrogant assumption of an empty
superiority. Why, the very tone in which every Frenchman, from fifteen
to five-and-forty, utters the words "la France," is enough to raise the
laugh, or make the blood boil, of all mankind.
Nearly twenty years after this, I happened to be sitting one day with
Gentz, the most memorable practical philosopher of his age and country.
Germany was then in the most deplorable depression, overrun with French
armies; and with Napoleon at Erfurth, in the pride of that "bad
eminence" on which he stood in such Titanic grandeur, and from which he
was so soon to be flung with such Titanic ruin. Our conversation
naturally turned on the melancholy state of things.
"I think," said the great politician, "that this supremacy must fall. I
might not think so if any other nation were the masters of Europe; but
France, though often a conqueror, has never been a possessor. The
insolence of the individual Frenchman has been the grand obstacle to the
solidity of her empire."
To my remark, that her central position, her vast population, the
undaunted bravery of her troops, and the military propensities of her
people, fitted her to be the disturber of Europe.
"Yes," was the sage's answer; "but to be no more than the disturber. Her
power is the whirlwind; for purposes which man may never be able fully
to define, suffered, or sent forth, to sweep the Continent; perhaps,
like the tempest, to punish, nay, perhaps in the end to purify; but the
tempest is scarcely more transitory, or more different from the dew that
invisibly descends and silently refreshes the land."
"But Napoleon," said I, "with an army of a million recruited from thirty
millions, opposed to the worn-down force and exhausted treasures of the
Continent! What an iron wedge driven in among their dilapidated
combinations! What a mountain of granite, with the cloud and the thunder
for its crown, domineering over the plain!"
"True--perfectly true," he replied, throwing back the long locks from a
broad forehead which reminded me of a bust of Plato. "True. Man may be
as little able to decide on the means by which the power of France will
fall, as on the purposes for which that tremendous fabric of splendid
iniquity first rose. But, look into that street."
It happened that a French regiment of cuirassiers, with the fine
clangour of its drums and trumpets, was passing under the window at the
moment.
"You see there," said he, "the kind of feeling which that really
striking show produces; not a window is open but our own. The blinds of
every window have been let down, not an eye looks at these troops. Yet
the public of Vienna are extravagantly fond of display in all its
shapes; and punchinello, or a dance of dogs, would bring a head to every
pane of glass, from the roof to the ground. The French are individually
shrunk from, hated, abhorred.
"Naturally enough, as conquerors," I observed; chiefly from a desire to
hear more of the sentiments of the celebrated German.
"No--no!" said he, almost in a tone of vexation. "The Germans are as
much alive to the merits of their enemies in the field, as any other
nation in the world. They acknowledge the soldiership of the French. I
even believe that the talents of their extraordinary emperor are more
sincerely acknowledged in Vienna than in Paris. But it is the
intolerable insolence of the national character, that makes its bravery,
its gaiety, and even its genius detested. Trust me; this feeling will
not be unfruitful. Out of the hut of the peasant will come the avengers,
whom the cabinet has never been able to find in the camp. Out of the
swamp and the thicket will rise the tree that will at once overshadow
the fallen fortunes of Germany, and bring down the lightning on her
aggressors. In this hope alone I live."