other day, “I suppose we shall have the opera and the theatres open in
England on Sundays, _comme ailleurs_, if the Catholic Bill passes?”
“I have not heard _that_,” replied his lordship, smiling; “and I should
rather think the contrary.”
“_Diantre_,” replied the French emancipator, grinding his teeth, “_Eh à
quoi bon donc leur émancipation? qu’est ce que ça fait?_”[35]
“Let me send you some turbot, L——,” said Mr. ——, the other day at dinner,
to a well known and respectable Irish catholic barrister.
“Turbot,” replied the papist counsellor, coldly, “O! I am emancipated—I
have done with fish!”
The Irish catholics hate fish; but are rigorous observers of fasts, and
of all forms and ordinances imposed by a church, to which, as much from
a point of honour as of faith, they rigidly submit. How many of the idle
forms of church discipline will fall into desuetude, with that feeling
of sympathy for the persecuted faith that imposed them! a feeling which
catholic emancipation will cool down, and obliterate.
VIRAGOS.
Women of strong tempers always govern their husbands; women of strong
minds influence them. A man’s sole refuge against an ill-tempered wife is
to run away from her, which he generally does when he can. The influence
of a clever woman lies in the power she has of hiding it. Still the
virago, I believe, has the best of it: for if the man, in affecting to
submit, very frequently only conceals, still he endures. The key to the
government of all men is their passions; and after these—but this is
shewing up the mystery of the craft;
“Plague on it, that rogues can’t be true to themselves.”
FEMALE PERSEVERANCE.
“Nous n’avons point de diable, assez diable, pour tenir tête à
une méchante femme.”[36]
_La Descente de Mezzeten en Enfers._
Why are women so much more pertinacious than men? _Voyons un peu!_ A
woman is like a mastiff; once she seizes on an idea, she never lets go,
till she has fairly worried out her end. She has no physical strength; no
force of reason comparable with man’s; but she has a stronger volition.
The toughness of her will is a set-off against the fragility of her
means; and she substitutes perseverance for power. Man yields, after
a struggle, to her concentrated weakness, because he hates whatever
interferes with his enjoyment. Like Falstaff, he loves above all things,
“To take mine ease in mine inn;” and to avoid a domestic bore, will
assent to much, even when he does not approve. Man is essentially an
epicurean; and woman, from necessity, a stoic. In public affairs the
mere force of volition often supplies the place of talent and resources;
while its absence neutralizes and renders inefficient intellects of the
finest and highest quality. To this may be referred much of the success
of female intrigue, under the governments which have permitted its
operation. It was doubtless to the reiterated attacks of Madame du Barri,
that Louis the Fifteenth yielded, when he abandoned the most estimable
and enlightened of his ministers, _De Choiseul_; and a similar obstinacy
in the unfortunate _Marie Antoinette_ goaded her reluctant husband into
that course of duplicity and vacillation, which brought them both to a
scaffold.
OPINION.
Intolerance is the offspring of conceit: we push an opinion, because
it is our own, and resent contradiction as a personal insult. Very few
persons, however, have any lawful right of property in their own ideas.
The greatest number of our opinions are corporate, and belong to the age
and country in which we happen to be born. No inconsiderable quantity
belong to that venerable and respectable personage, our old nurse. Even
the few notions which strong thinkers develope for themselves, depend
very closely on habits of thought, impressed by tutors and parents,
modified by external circumstances, equally uncontrollable. If some
of our worthy anti-catholic, anti-reforming, corn-trade-fettering
aristocrats, could be made sensible of the very vulgar origin of
many of their favourite ideas, they would as soon shake hands with a
chimney-sweeper as entertain them.
WIVES OF FOOLS.
Oh! ye women, who have the good, or ill luck (_selon_) to be married
to fools, attempt not to reason with your dears—expect not to seduce,
and despair of persuading. Wit, grace, and understanding, are only
influential with men of feeling and intellect: to such arms the sensible
and the clever never fail to yield. But the fool “bears a charmed life.”
Remember the maxim of your great law-giver: “_On ne séduit pas un sot;
on le dompte._”[37] A fool is incapable of giving quarter, and unworthy
of receiving it. The worst of a fool is not that he _is_ a fool, but
that he is so self-sufficient and self-conceited; just as obscure people
become burthensome, when they imagine themselves important; and as those
who live out of the world are unmanageable, from a fancy that all the
world is occupied about them. Foolish husbands are always jealous of
their authority, and fearful of being supposed to be ruled; they oppose,
for the sake of asserting themselves, even when their inclinations are
neutral: and once launched into an opposition, they persevere, in spite
of conviction, because it does not become their dignity to be less wise
than a woman.
LES ROCHERS DE MAD. DE SÉVIGNÉ.
“Travellers ne’er did lie, though fools at home condemn them.”
SHAKSPEARE.
It is no longer possible to exclaim with Madame de Sévigné, “c’est une
chose étrange, que les grands voyages!” _Les grands voyages_, on the
contrary, have become the most common and every-day events of life! A
“good traveller” has ceased to be “something at the latter end of a
dinner,” as La Feu has it: and to talk of the “Pyrenean and the river
Po,” would now incur for the prosing delinquent the character of a bore,
and the penalty of being once heard and ever after avoided. Travelling,
even to “Judah’s barren sands,” is no longer a distinction; and the
Traveller’s Club has so completely become every body’s club, that it has
been proposed, by way of something really exclusive, to start a _crocchio
ristretto_ of those who have never travelled at all. To talk of a visit
to Paris is as cockney as to prate of the lakes of Cumberland or to cite
their poets; to boast of having seen the Pope _pontificate_, is as pure
a John-Gilpinism, as to chatter of Fonthill; and to have “swum in a
gondola” is no more thought of, God save the mark! than a voyage in the
Richmond steamer. The Pacific Ocean and the British Channel have become
subjects equally common-place; and if another Peyrouse should disappear
from the world, it is odds but he would be picked up in a month by some
wandering dandy from Bond-street, or discovered on an _uninhabited
island_ by a roving detachment from the Yacht Club.
“How came you to alter your route last year? I thought to have met you at
Thebes!”
“Oh! I changed my mind, on hearing that half Bloomsbury were there before
me; and so cut off for the North Pole with Parry.”
“Did you meet any one there one knows?”
“No, that’s the charm of it. White bears excepted, one has the place to
one’s self. Whom did you have, by the by, at Athens last year?”
“Scarcely a soul; at least, scarcely a soul ‘above buttons.’ There were
a few third-rate English and first-rate Irish to be seen, sauntering
about the Acropolis, and making _goûtés_ in the Parthenon; but _pas âme
qui vive_—that one ever heard of before. The A.’s pushed on for the
Pyramids, the B.’s have been some time settled on the brow of Mount
Caucasus, C. left us in the spring for the Crimea, and D. joined his
eternal Pylades at Ispahan.”
“At Ispahan! what a fellow that D. is, with his eternal pretensions to
taste! Go to Ispahan! when one is sick of it, and its Hajji Babas of
Bond-street, and all that sort of thing. No one turns his horse’s head to
the South now, unless indeed it were in search of the _terra incognita_.
It is the merest _pont aux ânes_. One’s very tailor passes his _vacances_
at Smyrna (where mine, by the by, picked up some charming cachemirs, to
make cool coats for next winter); and you know the old story of Lady
Lydia’s maid and Monsieur Forbin, and the silk parasol, in the ruins of
Thebes. The North, Sir, the North is the only thing now, the Frozen sea,
or Kamtschatka, _via_ Moscow, that’s my _carte de voyage_ for the next
travelling season. Have you seen my Droshka?”
“No; but I have a Britska waiting for me at Petersburgh. I am going to
join Lord Frederick J——, who has the prettiest thing on the Sea of Azoff,
built by Potemkin. Will you be _des nôtres_?”
“With all my heart. Let us rendezvous at Novogorod, embark at Smolensko
on the Dnieper, and so proceed by Kerson and the steppes.”
“Exactly; and that will bring us within two verstes of Lord F.’s villa.”
It is thus that the home-bred youths “prate of their whereabouts.” Not
only _il n’y a plus de Pyrénées_, but the total annihilation of time and
place seems to have realized the poet’s rant, and to have turned the
nursery-dream of Peter Wilkins and his flying men to a “flat reality.”
While British travellers are thus illustrating the “march of mind,” by
marching off to all parts of the globe, and
“When pleasure begins to grow dull in the East,
Just order their wings and fly off to the West,”
there is a nation which keeps its ground with all that tenacity of a
toad on a tile[38]—a nation which, compared by some to tigers, by others
to monkeys, and by Voltaire to both, appears to have been the least
understood of any nation on earth. For while the North in hordes come
swarming, as of old, over the sunny regions of the South, and while the
south seems to change sides, hands across, down the middle and up again,
in a cosmopolitical country-dance with the natives of the frozen North,
the French, who stand between both, are sure to be always found at home.
For one French traveller, of either sex, to be met on the high roads
of Europe, one thousand, at least, of any, or every other nation, may
be seen scampering from the Tagus to the Neva, and from Thebes to the
Giant’s Causeway. The French are, in fact, the most grave, sedentary,
and immovable people of Europe. Even their women, so falsely accused
of vivacity and activity, expend their energies in perpetual movement
of mind and muscle. Under the old régime (when the women in France led
the lives of the sultanas in the harem, one particular only excepted),
all the institutions, both political and social, tended to encourage
habits of indolence, in which, in free states, and under happier moral
combinations, the sex can never indulge. The very forms and language
of high society were borrowed from the inveterate habits of a slavish,
idle, and sedentary existence. Did any affliction befal a lady of rank,
she forthwith went to bed, to receive the condolence of friends _dans la
ruelle_. If she went to drive, it was but to _promener en voiture_; and
even in modern Paris, a promenade extends but to a seat in the gardens of
the Tuileries, or a chair on the Boulevards.
I had a friend in Paris, some few years ago, who was the most charming
and most indolent creature in the world. She was one of the best remains
of the old régime of rank and fashion, who had survived the plebeian
bustle and democratic activity of the Revolution. Though she had nearly
reached her grand climacteric, she was, as she often assured me, still
“as active, vivacious, and locomotive as she had been in the flower
and bloom of her youth;” and, witty and indolent as Madame du Deffand
herself, she was a finely preserved specimen of a genus, now rapidly
disappearing, which philosophy might have contemplated with rapturous
curiosity. Madame de —— was a perfect impersonation of a lady of fashion
of the days of Marie Antoinette. Her _ruelle_ was her empire; her _chaise
longue_ her throne. She took her chocolate, and received visits in bed,
during the day; rose late, dined at the hour of the old French _souper_,
between eight and nine, and sat up half the night, surrounded by her
_habitués_, among whom were to be numbered all the _bel esprit_ of Paris.
I was as much with her as my health and our very opposed habits would
permit, for she was a perfect study; and I generally left her in the
midst of her _media noche_, in all the vigour of spirits which are
vulgarly supposed to belong to the early part of the day. As I made many
sacrifices to these habits of indolence, I occasionally required them in
turn; and I sometimes succeeded in digging her out of her hotel, where
she had for years been niched, motionless as the priestesses of the
temples of Pompeii, which modern _virtù_ excavates from their domicile
of centuries. I once routed her from her bed at mid-day; and had her
dressed and driving at Longchamp, just as the _beau monde_ were turning
their horses’ heads homeward. I also once produced her, to the amazement
of her friends, at the opera, before the ballet was half over; and I
actually had her at a _séance_ of the _Institut_ before the expected
_discours_ of the long-winded Mons. Quatremère de Quincy had quite
concluded.
My indolent and agreeable friend, notwithstanding this decided _vis
inertiæ_, talked in raptures of the country (like all French women), and
had a _campagne_ three leagues from Paris, about which she raved, and
from which her _jardinière_ was duly replenished with March violets,
April hyacinths, and _immortels_ all the year. Daily projects were made,
and as daily broken, for taking me to this “Délices;” and it was not till
after a thousand “Nous remettrons cela à un autre jour,” that the day at
last arrived, when, having myself made all the necessary preparations for
a formidable journey of three leagues, assisted at the _levée_, hurried
forward the toilette, and bribed over Félicie, her unfelicitous _femme
de chambre_, to unusual expedition, I at last got Madame de —— under
weigh, and absolutely transported her from her _dormeuse au coin du feu_,
to her _calèche_. With horses and a coachman as lazy as herself, it was
late in the evening when we arrived within view of the iron gates of the
_campagne_; and before we had reached the end of the straight avenue of
limes, it was so dark that we could scarcely discern the grim, grotesque
stone statues of Arlequin and Colombine, which guarded the flight of
marble steps, leading to the broad paved terrace on which the _maison de
campagne_ was perched.
Before we had reposed from the fatigues of the journey, and swallowed our
_goûté_, it was what is vulgarly called pitch-dark; and as the motive for
making this _course_ was to see the gardens, the _serres chaudes_, and
the luxuriant beds of hyacinths, then in all their “redolence of bloom,”
I could not help expressing my disappointment, with a captiousness which
afforded infinite amusement to Madame de ——, whose bursts of laughter
were interrupted with “Et tout cela pour une fleur! pour un promenade!
pour une fatigue manqué!”[39] My ill-humour, however, was at once
vanquished, on beholding the gardener enter the room with a lighted
lantern, and equipped with a nightcap under his hat, to conduct us to the
garden. We immediately followed our guide; and, accompanied by Félicie
picking her short steps over the dewy gravel, and her mistress’s fat dog,
Sylphide, waddling beside her, we actually saw the hyacinths, and noticed
the fine growth of the precocious _petits pois_, by candle-light.
With such inertness and hatred of all movement, it may readily be
imagined that a necessity, which soon afterwards occurred to Madame de
——, for visiting the remotest part of the remote province of Bretagne,
was an event full of difficulty and annoyance. A considerable property,
however, depended on her attendance on the _Cour d’Assise_ of Rennes, and
there was no alternative.
After procrastinating from day to day, and being half inclined to incur
the risk of absence, and to leave her _procès_ to take care of itself,
she at length decided to go on my offering to accompany her. I was
just then in a fit of _ennui_ at finding all London in Paris, and was
delighted by the hope of visiting a province that had the merit of being
free from the incursions of his Britannic Majesty’s somewhat tiresome
subjects. My proposition was accepted with a sort of incredulous joy;
for a sacrifice of such magnitude was not to be understood: so leaving
behind us _tous nos enfans et tous nos maris_, we started for Brittany,
on a brilliant April morning, in a style that recalled the travelling
of the days of Louis XIV. when the _carrosse d’un Grand Seigneur_ was
a moving house, and (from the number of persons to be stuffed into its
_portières_, its _sur le devant_, and other holes and corners) a house of
no inconsiderable dimensions.
Madame de —— travelled with her own four sleek horses, her own carriage,
and as many of her habitual comforts and _nécessaires_ as could be
stuffed into its seats, pockets, wells, and imperials. Félicie and
Sylphide occupied the back seats, as tenants in common with cushions,
pillows, walking-canes, parasols, _vitchouras_, and the _nécessaire de
toilette_. Madame de ——, wrapped up in her _douillette_ and cachemir,
with _eau de chipre_ in one hand, and her _bonbonnière_ in the other,
was obliged to have frequent recourse to both, in order to support her
through the fatigue of the day. The historical sites of Rambouillet and
Maintenon, on the contrary, kept me fully awake, till we arrived at the
old town of ——, one of Madame de Sévigné’s oft-cited stages, on her
way to Les Rochers. Here we alighted before the _porte-cochère_ of the
_Préfet_ (the uncle of Madame de ——, _à la mode de Bretagne_), whose
salon presented in miniature all that is ridiculous, pompous, grovelling,
and contemptible in the Court of the Tuileries. The _Préfet_ represented
_noblement et avec dignité_; and did the honours by his fair cousin,
before his country subjects, as if she were a princess visiting the court
of a brother prince; while Madame de ——, on her part, exhibited all
the superiority, which Parisian ladies never fail to show off in their
penitential pilgrimages to the provinces.
Amused for a time, but delighted to leave behind me the formality of
the little court of the Prefecture, it was with no faint pleasure I saw
my dilatory friend seated in her carriage at a reasonable hour on the
following morning. Being one of those who, like Boileau’s abbot, had
never seen the sun rise, the exertion soon overpowered her; and she fell
into a profound sleep, in which she was joined by Sylphide and Félicie;
while the novelty of all I beheld, kept me in that delightful excitement,
in which alone we truly feel the value of existence.
The old feudal dukedom of Bretagne, intact from the common places of
British travellers, untrodden by their restless steps, untraced by their
busy pens—is still the Bretagne of Louis XIV. The natives continue to
preserve their individuality, as in the days of their rude but heroic
_souverains_. Genuine and unmixed descendants of the ancient Britons (who
took refuge here when expelled from their own country), they remain to
this day as unlike the inhabitants of the southern and central provinces
of France, as if they still went _in puris naturalibus_, and painted
their bodies blue. We had scarcely passed the Loire, when I observed an
abrupt change in the physiognomy of the people. In the pure Armorican, or
Bas-Breton of the aubergiste of the ancient town of Laval, I was struck
by the rhythm and accent of my compatriots, the Celts,[40] and almost
fancied myself listening to some Mrs. O’Shaughnessy in Connaught, or to
the reading of a page from the Scotch novels. As we proceeded into the
department of _Ille et Vilaine_, the heart of the province, the scenery
became gradually less and less French. The dense and distant forests,
shading to the edge of the flat, extensive heaths, recalled all the
romantic desolation of northern dreariness; relieved by patches of rank
verdure and flowering orchards, much more picturesque than the vaunted
“vine-covered hills” of France.
Bretagne, only united to the French crown in 1532, by the marriage of
Francis the First with the grand-daughter of its last duke, was so
long governed in the true spirit of feudality by its petty but warlike
princes, that its political circumstances, combining with a remote and
insulated position, excluded it from all participation in the progressive
civilization of Europe. In the Revolution, it suffered much by the
Vendean wars, which threw it back nearly to what it was under Louis
XIV.; nor has the share which it had in the general reorganization of
France, materially changed its original physiognomy, either physically or
morally. Rude and remote, however, as it was, it still produced some of
the finest and most distinguished characters which illustrate the history
of France. The two rival and romantic Dukes, Charles de Blois, and John
de Montfort;[41] the heroic Jeanne la Boiteuse, Duchess of the province,
in whose right Charles de Blois held the sovereignty; the clever Olivier
de Clisson, constable of France; the gallant Tennegui du Chatel; and
that flower of chivalry, Bertrand du Guesclin “le franc et loyal,” are
characters which belong to the poetry of history, and almost redeem
those bold, bad times, which produced such human monsters as Charles
le Mauvais, and Pierre le Cruel. It is, perhaps, no false induction to
assert, that much of their soldierly frankness and noble simplicity arose
from an organization, nourished and preserved by the very localities of
the rude clime and wild scenery in which they received their existence.
With the history of Bertrand du Guesclin in my hand, which had been lent
me by my host of the Prefecture, (that history which Madame de Sévigné
had recommended to Madame de Grignan,) and with my head full of de
Montfort and de Blois, and _les grandes compagnies_, and the _maladrins_,
and the Black Prince, and Jean Chandos, and the other prominent
characters in the great melodrame enacted in Bretagne during the
fourteenth century, I was abruptly recalled to the dull realities of the
present moment, on the evening of the third day’s journey, by a shock, a
concussion, that awoke my sleeping partners, and extorted exclamations
from Madame de ——, screams from Félicie, and a loud, shrill, continuous
howl from Sylphide. These, with the crashing of _flacons_, and the pious
interjections of the coachman Baptiste, and the _gros juron_ of Hypolite
the laquais, “gave the world assurance” that we were “abîmés, plantés
pour la nuit,”—in one word, that the carriage was not only overturned,
but rendered wholly unserviceable, till it should have passed through the
renovating hands of a country smith.
To proceed farther was impossible; we were, by a mile or two, less than
half-way between Vitri (where we had dined, “à la tour de Sévigné,”)
and Rennes, our proposed halt for the night. Baptiste was a Bas-Breton;
and having assured us that he knew every step of the road, _comme
son bonnet de nuit_, he had turned into a narrow cross road, which
was to have shortened the distance by a league. It was this unlucky
pretension that produced the accident, which now left us, at sunset, in
a dreary by-road, with a broken-down vehicle, and no visible prospect
of aid, nearer than Vitri. While Madame de —— was exhausting herself
in inefficient complaint, while Félicie was scolding Baptiste from the
window, and Sylphide was accompanying both with a _basso continuo_ of
howl, I alighted to reconnoitre our position, and discover what chance
we had of assistance; and while Baptiste was showing me where the spring
was broken, a person approached with a book in his hand, from the gate
of a little orchard to the left. As he took off his hat and discovered
his tonsured head, he observed, that there was a forge belonging to
the château, the turrets of which were visible through the dark woods
which cover the whole plain between Vitri and Rennes; that immediate
assistance could be had, and the spring patched up, so as to bring us,
with careful driving, to Rennes before midnight. The person who gave us
this information was an elderly man, of interesting appearance, and in a
clerical habit, with a certain _air de prêtre_, which left us no doubt as
to his vocation.