Chapter VI: Appendix: A. Members of Parliament, 316 (4)

Returning in 1809 to England with a passport from Dunkirk for America, he was imprisoned for a short time in Tuthill Fields, but on his release began to write violently against Napoleon. Goldsmith published in 1811 the _Secret History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte_, and he proposed in 1815 that a price should be set on Bonaparte’s head. In spite of these provocative, not to say scurrilous, publications, he after Waterloo settled down quietly in Paris till his death in 1846 as solicitor to the British Embassy. One of his duties was to hand over the letters or parcels which in those days of dear postage and carriage were franked by the Foreign Office, and a friend of mine, sent as a young man to Paris to get a French polish, remembers how Goldsmith used to quiz or banter him on the supposed feminine source of such consignments. But the most romantic event in Goldsmith’s career, a kind of parallel to King’s marriage, was the marriage in 1837 of his handsome daughter Georgiana, born in Paris in 1807, to Lord Lyndhurst, ex-Lord Chancellor. ‘I lived in Paris,’ she told Augustus Hare in 1881, ‘with my father, and I was nobody. I never expected to marry. Why should I? I had no fortune and no attractions.’ Lyndhurst first saw her when visiting Paris with his first wife. He went over again, a widower, in 1837 and made her an offer. Hare speaks of her ‘clever vivacity acquired by her early life in France.’ ‘I had,’ she told him, ‘twenty-six years of the most perfect happiness ever allotted to woman.’ Both husband and wife were curious links with the past, for the former, son of the artist Copley, was born at Boston, U.S., in 1772, four years before the Declaration of Independence, while the widow survived till 1891.

Another man who boxed the political compass was James Redhead Yorke. Visiting Paris in 1792, full of enthusiasm for the Revolution,[103] and imprisoned for sedition at Dorchester, he not only fell in love with his jailer’s daughter, whom he married on his release, but turned anti-Gallican. He nevertheless in 1802 renewed acquaintance with Paine, who said to him, ‘Do you call this a republic? Why, they are worse off than the slaves in Constantinople.’ Yet Paine had originally, like many intelligent Frenchmen, admired Napoleon. Yorke’s _Letters from France_ were reprinted, like King’s, from a newspaper.

A fourth erratic journalist was William Playfair, brother of the Edinburgh geologist. He had helped to capture the Bastille, but was so disillusioned with the Revolution that on returning to London in 1792 he advocated flooding France with forged assignats as the surest means of overturning the Republic. For this Louis Blanc has pilloried him, but reprehensible as the scheme was, Playfair--what an irony in his name!--was not even entitled to originality, for forged Congressional notes had been circulated during the American War of Independence. Although the English Government did not act on Playfair’s suggestion the royalist _émigrés_ did so, and Napoleon, as we shall see, followed the evil example by counterfeiting English, Austrian, and Russian notes. Playfair on this second visit to Paris had no literary purpose, but in 1820 he published a criticism on Lady Morgan’s book on France. His editorship of _Galignani’s Messenger_, his inventions, never lucrative, and his pecuniary troubles need not be detailed. Like King and Goldsmith he must be pronounced an adventurer and a weathercock.

Another journalist, James Parry, had just disposed of the _Courier_, and settled in France. If, as Lord Malmesbury and Goldsmith allege, he had been in the pay of the Directory he deserved, if contempt, forbearance, yet as we shall find he did not obtain any.

Colonel Thomas Thornton had visited France before the Revolution, and had shown hospitality in England to _émigrés_. He was the only visitor whose object was sport, and he took fourteen hounds with him, albeit game was scarce, as for twelve years the peasants had had it all their own way. Wolves, however, still existed. He published in 1806 _A Sporting Tour through France_, and going again after Waterloo he purchased Pont-sur-Seine. The mansion, indeed, had been destroyed by the Cossacks, but the outbuildings were capable of habitation. He sold the property, however, in 1821 to Casimir Périer, the grandfather of the future President of the Republic, and died in Paris seven years later, leaving a will in favour of an illegitimate daughter which was annulled by the English tribunals.

We now come to two lady writers. One was Frances Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Francis Bernard, Governor of Massachusetts, and wife of the Rev. Richard King, a Cambridgeshire clergyman. She was intimate with Hannah More, and founded district visiting societies and schools. She published a _Tour in France_ in which she mentions that Boulogne was full of English who had remained there during the Revolution, and that you could scarcely enter a shop there without being addressed in English. She spent seven months in Paris. The other was Anne Plumptree, novelist and translator, daughter of a Huntingdonshire clergyman, and granddaughter of a Cambridge don. She accompanied the Opies. Though a democrat, she admired Napoleon and actually wished him to invade England. Her _Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France_ (1810) relates chiefly to provincial life, which is an agreeable change after so many books on Paris. I have already mentioned Francis William Blagdon, a prolific author, who, having previously visited France in 1784, published _Paris as it was and as it is_. I may also mention William Thomas Williams, author in 1807 of _The State of France_; David Morrice, a schoolmaster, with his _View of Modern France_ and _Practical Guide from London to Paris_; Stewarton who wrote anonymously or otherwise against Napoleon and Talleyrand; and Israel Worsley, with his _State of France_ (1806). Worsley went back to Dunkirk after Waterloo to re-open a school. In 1828 he undertook to prove the descent of the American Indians from the lost tribes. George Tappen, who was interested in painting and architecture, published a _Tour through France and Italy_.

John Dean Paul, a banker and future baronet, went over in August 1802 as one of a party of five, accompanied by two servants and a courier. He tells us in his anonymous book, _Journal of a Party of Pleasure to Paris_, that a young friend of his in the uniform of the Wiltshire Militia was tapped on the shoulder in the Louvre and asked to what regiment he belonged. The inquirer was Bonaparte, who frequently thus accosted British officers. Paul’s son and heir, then an infant, became unpleasantly notorious fifty years later. His daughter married in 1827 Edward Fox Fitzgerald, son of Lord Edward. She lived till 1891. William Beckford, the author of _Vathek_, had paid several visits to Paris. In October 1782 he passed through it on his way home from Naples. ‘A little impertinent, purse-proud puppy,’ Samuel Meek styled him in his diary, for though staying at the same hotel he had refused to answer an inquiry respecting a nephew of Meek at Naples. He was again in Paris from April 1791 to June 1792, when he ordered a tapestry for his London house, and went on to Lausanne, where he purchased Gibbon’s library. He paid a third visit in February 1793, and left in May with a passport from the municipality viséd by Lebrun, the Foreign Minister; but the Calais authorities detained him until the Convention had been consulted. He left behind him his two riding-horses, which were seized for military baggage trains. The General Safety Committee, declaring them unfit for such work, ordered them to be restored,[104] on the ground that Beckford had offered to present two cart-horses which would be much more serviceable, and that from love of liberty he had lived much in France. We hear no particulars of his visit of May 1802.

As for authors on non-French subjects, their name is legion. Let us begin with poets. Wordsworth, it is true, did not go further than Calais, but I have already named Rogers, who had also seen Paris during the Revolution, and now paid it a second visit. He described Napoleon as having a very strong profile, a sallow but not disagreeable complexion, light grey eyes, and scarcely perceptible eyebrows. Fox commissioned Rogers to buy andirons for him in the Palais Royal Arcades. Then there was Walter Savage Landor, who started with admiration for Napoleon, but found ‘not an atom of liberty left.’ He witnessed the festival in the Tuileries gardens in honour of the life-consulate, and he wrote to his brother: ‘I expected that the sky would have been rent with acclamations. On the contrary, he (Bonaparte) experienced such a reception as was given to Richard III. He was sensibly mortified. All bowed, but he waved to and fro, and often wiped his face with his handkerchief. He retired in about ten minutes.’ On returning home and reprinting his _Gebir_, Landor appended a qualifying note to his line:

‘A mortal man above all mortal praise.’

He called on Paine, and in his _Imaginary Conversations_ (fifth series, XI.) introduced a minute description of him. He represents him as uncombed, unshaven, and unwashed, and as solacing his misfortunes by brandy, yet he makes him foresee Napoleon’s inordinate ambition and fall. Landor revisited Paris in 1814 and 1840. Paine, by the way, was escorted to Havre at the end of August 1802 on his way to America by Thomas, or ‘Clio,’ Rickman, a versifier if not exactly a poet, who named his six sons Paine, Washington, Franklin, Rousseau, Petrarch, and Volney. They were surely to be pitied. Another versifier was William Parsons, who in 1785 had published a magazine at Florence and had associated there with Madame Piozzi, Robert Merry, and Bertie Greatheed. Greatheed, as we have seen, was also now in Paris.

Amongst other writers of works of imagination were Thomas Hope, the author of _Anastasia_, art connoisseur, and father of Beresford Hope;[105] William Combe, who had married Mrs. Cosway’s sister, author of _Dr. Syntax_, a book widely read in its day; and Edgeworth, who was arrested and but for Whitworth’s remonstrance would have been expelled. He fancied that he had been taken for a brother of the Abbé Edgeworth, Louis XVI.’s confessor, a distant kinsman whom he had never even seen; but the police register[106] states that he had indulged in ‘indiscreet talk.’ His eldest son Lovell, as we shall find, did not come off so lightly. Edgeworth was accompanied by his fourth wife, his distinguished daughter Maria, and her younger half-sister Charlotte. He had intended to stay two years, but happily left in time. Maria revisited Paris in 1820.

More matter-of-fact writers included Anthony Aufrere, an art connoisseur, a contributor to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, a translator from the German and Italian, and editor of _Lockhart’s Letters_. Hazlitt, the critic and essayist, who was introduced to Prosper Merimée’s father, the artist, copied at the Louvre, and paid a second visit in 1824. Filon fancifully suggests that the unborn Prosper was influenced by his mother’s impression of Hazlitt. There was also John Allen, the Edinburgh Reviewer, a ‘man of vast information and great conversational powers,’ says Macaulay, but who, living with Lord Holland from 1801 till his death in 1843, wrote little. John Gifford, the Tory pamphleteer, editor of the _Anti-Jacobin Review_, a continuation of the famous _Anti-Jacobin_, had been the author, concocter, or arranger of _Letters from France in 1792_. His visits to France did not lessen his insular prejudices. In contrast to him there was David Williams, Nonconformist minister and schoolmaster, but now best known as founder and secretary of the Royal Literary Fund. He had been in Paris in the winter of 1792, but seemingly did not attend the British dinner at which an address to the Convention was adopted. Madame Roland regretted that he had not been elected a member of that body in lieu of Paine, but he had reason to congratulate himself on this. Lebrun, Minister of Foreign Affairs, entrusted him with a letter to Grenville regretting the imminence of hostilities and suggesting that, as in the previous war, a few packets might continue to ply between Dover and Calais;[107] but the letter received no answer. James Anderson, whose extensive view ranged from chimneys to cattle-breeding and political economy, had corresponded with Washington on ‘moral philosophy and agricultural topics.’ Last, but far from least, was Henry Hallam, as yet a young man of twenty-five.

We now come to four men who made France their home. Quintin Craufurd, a nabob from Manila, acting on his maxim, ‘Make your fortune where you like, but enjoy it at Paris,’ settled there in 1780. He provided the carriage in which the royal family in 1791 attempted to escape. He himself had gone to Brussels, perhaps expecting to meet them, and not venturing to return, his furniture was confiscated. He was now able to resume life in Paris, and frequently played whist with Talleyrand, for cards were his passion. Herbert Croft, nominally a clergyman as well as a baronet, though he had little of the reverend about him, and was dependent on a Government pension of £200, had been the friend of Johnson, whom he furnished with a life of Chatterton. He, like Boswell, was duped by the Ireland forgeries. Just too late to succour Chatterton, he was also just too late to succour a French poet, Grainville, a cousin of Bernardin de St. Pierre; but he happily did not foresee a more direct connection with a third suicide, that of his brother and successor in the title, Princess Charlotte’s surgeon. He wrote in the _Argus_ in 1805 in favour of peace. Becoming the companion of Lady Mary Hamilton, daughter of Lord Leven, another state pensioner (but only to the amount of £80), Croft in 1809 engaged Charles Nodier as his secretary, and Nodier for two years turned into French his and the lady’s productions. Both these amateur authors died in 1816.

The third Anglo-Frenchman was John Fraser Frisell, a Glasgow student who in 1792, at the age of sixteen, went to France to complete his education. Enthusiastic for the Revolution, he was imprisoned for fifteen months at Dijon during the Terror. That imprisonment, however, procured him the lifelong friendship of fellow-captives, Guitant and his wife, who offered him a home from 1794 to 1802, and he thus became intimate with Chateaubriand and Joubert. Chateaubriand styled him the Greek Englishman. Marrying a Frenchwoman, he indulged his passion for Greek authors, for the chase, and for travelling. On the death of a daughter in 1832, Chateaubriand, then himself a political prisoner, wrote an elegy on her. Frisell published in French a treatise on the British constitution, and presented a copy of it to Louis Napoleon in Switzerland, who promised him in return his own sketch of a French constitution. Frisell also contributed to the _Journal des Débats_.[108] He turned Catholic just before his death, which took place at Torquay in 1846.

The fourth Anglo-Frenchman was Henry Grey MacNab, a scion of a Scotch-Irish family who had studied under Reid at Glasgow University. When detained in 1803 he went to Montpellier for eleven years, there studying medicine, political economy, and pedagogy. Before quitting England he had published a pamphlet against a proposed tax on coal, and in Paris in 1808 he wrote on education, on Robert Owen, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer, and on the state of the world at the beginning of the 19th century. He was honorary physician to the Duke of Kent, to whom he dedicated his book on Owen and whose portrait he prefixed to the French translation. He died in Paris in 1823, leaving an unfinished work on premature burial.

Some visitors deserve notice on account of kinsmen or friends. There are Mary and Agnes Berry, for instance, the ‘sister-wives’ of Horace Walpole, one of whom, born in 1743, survived till 1852. They accompanied their father. Mrs. Damer introduced them to Napoleon, his mother, Josephine, and Madame de Staël. This last lady thought Mary by far the cleverest Englishwoman she had met. The Berrys had seen Paris in 1791. They must have been pleased with their visit in the spring of 1802, for they went again in October with Mrs. Damer on their way to Nice and Geneva, passing through Germany and embarking at Hamburg for England in May. We may dispose more summarily of Francis (brother of Sir John) Moore; William Monsell, whose son, successively Paymaster-General, Postmaster-General, and Vice-President of the Board of Trade, became Lord Emly; and Sir Herbert Pakington, grandfather of the Secretary for War of 1867–1868. Henry Bickersteth, surgeon, was the father of the hymnologist and of Lord Langdale, Master of the Rolls, while Sir Henry Tichborne and his brother James were respectively great-uncle and grandfather of the Roger Tichborne personated by Arthur Orton. Henry Herbert Southey, a youth of nineteen studying medicine at Norwich, had there made the acquaintance of William Taylor, whom he now accompanied. His brother, the poet, had, on a visit to Norwich in 1798, formed a friendship with Taylor, in spite of their political and religious differences. Young Southey became physician to George iv. and Queen Adelaide.[109] Timothy Priestley must have been the son of Timothy, brother of the famous Priestley. The two brothers, both Nonconformist ministers, differed in doctrine. James Wollstonecraft was probably one of the three brothers of Mary. He was a London merchant, and in 1798 had been expelled from Paris, apparently as a suspected spy. A Mr. Adderley was probably Charles Bowyer Adderley, great-uncle of the present Lord Norton, but he may have been Thomas Adderley, an Irish M.P. in 1790. Mrs. Peploe of Herefordshire, who accompanied her husband, was the aunt of Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Anthony Storer, Secretary of the Paris Embassy in 1783, was apparently the nephew and heir of Anthony Morris Storer of Purley, a man of fashion and a bibliophile, an M.P. in 1772. General Scott was probably the father-in-law of Canning and of the Duke of Portland; he was reputed to have made money at previous visits by gambling, and Canning’s wife had a bequest of £100,000. Shuckburgh Ashby Apreece had a fascinating wife, the widow of a John Kerr. Her literary receptions at Edinburgh were famous, and people fancied she was the original of Madame de Staël’s _Corinne_. Again a widow, she married in 1812 Sir Humphry Davy. A Mr. Tilt was probably the father of John Tilt, a Brighton physician who introduced into England the speculum, with which he had become acquainted through Récamier. Denis Disney Ffytche was doubtless the nephew of Dr. John Disney, a Lincolnshire vicar related I think to the Tennysons, who became a noted Unitarian minister in London, and also of Lewis Disney of Swinderby, who added his wife’s name of Ffytche. If so, he must have been bent on recovering his uncle’s property at Chambourcy, near Paris, for Lewis Disney, leaving for Switzerland with his two daughters and their governess in March 1793, had been classed as an _émigré_ and had vainly pleaded for restitution. James Forbes, a nabob of whom we shall hear again, was the grandfather of Montalembert, the French historian. Of Richard Trench, a barrister, father of Archbishop Trench, we shall also hear later on. John Sympson Jessopp, a landowner and barrister, was destined to be the father of Dr. Augustus Jessopp. He was accompanied by his younger brother, and we shall hear of them too again.

Should we reckon among Englishmen George Francis Grand, Madame Talleyrand’s first husband? He was a native of Lausanne, but entered the East India Company’s service, started an English factory, and married in India Catherine Noel Judde, daughter of Peter John Worle, a Dane, harbour-master of Chandernagor. He divorced her in India, and in 1798, having returned to Europe in straitened circumstances, obtained a French, divorce likewise. He now repaired to Paris, to solicit through his ex-wife’s influence a Government appointment; but he was unjustly suspected of seeking to extort money from Talleyrand. It was alleged, indeed, that he exacted 80,000 f. by a threat of disputing the validity of the divorce, and that on returning to London he demanded an additional £10,000. ‘Never did a husband,’ writes a Bourbon agent, ‘make so much profit out of his wife’s infidelity, and never did a man play so pitiful a role as M. de Talleyrand.’[110] What is certain is that Grand was assigned a post at the Cape under the so-called Batavian republic, really a French dependency. When England seized the Cape he remained there till his death in 1821.[111] He is said to have married again.

There were fugitives from law or justice, and other black sheep. William Ward, yeoman and land-agent of Benenden, Kent, who had been enthusiastic for the French Revolution, got into difficulties--‘through slovenly book-keeping’ says Mr. C. F. Hardy, editor of the _Benenden Letters_,--and took refuge in France, where he died in 1821, aged ninety-three. He had settled at Valenciennes, and under the Berlin decree of 1807 was for five years, in spite of his age, treated as a prisoner of war. His honesty seems unimpeachable, but as much cannot be said for another land-agent, Thomas Stone, who had acted for the Duke of Bedford and for Lord Digby. They had every apparent reason to trust him, for he was an Enclosure Commissioner and was employed by the Board of Agriculture in writing county reports. His love of style and conviviality, however, led him astray, and he now absconded to Paris with his wife and five children, leaving a large sum due to Lord Digby. He for a time lived in luxury, affected to be bent on improving French agriculture, and talked of buying and stocking a large farm. In reality he had no money, and in 1804 he was charged with forging a cheque, but was acquitted. He more than once applied for permission to visit Normandy to buy sheep, but was refused.[112] Latterly dependent on the earnings of his wife and daughter, he died in Paris in 1815, at the age of eighty-three. Speaking of land-agents reminds me that some small English land-owners, as the Marquis of Buckingham was informed, sold their property, invested part of the proceeds in the funds, so as to ensure the same income as before, and had settled in France on land purchased at ten and a half years’ rental. Such cases, however, must have been very rare, and Napoleon, as we have seen, debarred foreigners from holding real property; but Thomas Talbot, brother of an admiral, may have had the idea of colonisation in France, though he ultimately obtained a grant of 5000 acres on the shore of Lake Erie, where he founded Port Talbot. As for artisans who went over, enticed by reports of high wages and cheap living, they were speedily disillusioned and were glad to return.

We may include among the outlaws, though he was not of English birth, Bodini, who had been editor of _Bell’s Messenger_ and had been expelled under the Alien Act. He joined the staff of the _Argus_ in Paris. A note of the French police describes him as a man of caustic speech, turning everything into ridicule, and consequently having no friends. He pretended, it says, to have made important revelations to Napoleon, for whom, according to another account, he dissected, so to speak, the London newspapers.

We come lastly to _émigrés_ who took the opportunity of returning to France, for several of them were Britons by birth, while others, having resided in England, possess some interest for us. There was Charles Jerningham, who had served in the French army, and now, reclaiming confiscated papers, pleaded that he had never in exile fought against France.[113] Lady Jerningham, his mother, however, was so patriotic an Englishwoman that on the renewal of the war she proposed to raise and head a body of six hundred men, who, in case of invasion, should drive all the cattle from the East Anglian coast into the interior of the country. Daniel Charles O’Connell, of Darrynane, styled in France Count O’Connell, uncle of the Liberator, was one of the earliest arrivals. Entering the French army in 1762 at the age of seventeen, he had taken part in the siege of Gibraltar in 1766, and in 1788 had drawn up articles of war by which the French army is still governed. On the fall of the monarchy he went to England, where in 1796 he married the Countess Bellevue, an exile like himself. In February 1802 he repaired to Paris with his wife and two stepdaughters, in the hope of recovering her property in St. Domingo. He calculated on returning in August, but he stayed, as we shall see, too long. He was naturalised in 1818, and was made a French peer; he died in 1835. Another _émigré_ was Arthur Dillon, a connection of the guillotined general of that name, who had with difficulty escaped from France during the Terror. Curiously enough Réné de Montalembert, though an _émigré_, visited Paris as an English officer, for in 1799 he had entered the British army, and had served in the West Indies and Egypt. He afterwards served in India and Spain, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but after Waterloo returned to France and was appointed to an embassy at Stuttgart. He had married in 1808 James Forbes’s daughter, Eliza Rose, and their son, mostly brought up by Forbes, was the historian of whom Pasquier aptly said, ‘he is an Anglo-Saxon Frenchman.’ Fagan, ex-captain in Dillon’s regiment, who also re-entered France, was despatched in 1810 by Fouché, without Napoleon’s knowledge, to discuss peace with Lord Wellesley. This occasioned Fouché’s dismissal. Alexander d’Arblay preceded his English wife, the famous Fanny Burney. His friend Lauriston had arranged that, after serving a year in St. Domingo, he should retire from the French army on a pension; but on his writing an indiscreet letter to Napoleon to say that he could never bear arms against England he was struck off the roll. Hoping, however, that Napoleon’s irritation would evaporate, he sent for his wife and child in April 1802, and on war breaking out they were unable, being French subjects, to return to England till 1812, when, during the Emperor’s absence, d’Arblay managed to procure a passport for them. He himself had meanwhile obtained a post in the Ministry of the Interior. Lally Tollendal, who went over to obtain restitution of his property, had also married an Englishwoman, Amelia Hardcastle, and in April 1802 she rejoined her husband and his daughter by his first wife.

The most prominent of the returning exiles was Calonne, Louis XVI.’s Minister of Finance. He was the man who, when asked by Marie Antoinette to do something which she acknowledged to be difficult, replied, ‘If it is merely difficult, madam, you may consider it already done: if it is impossible it shall be done.’ Shortly after his dismissal from office he had married Madame Haveley, widow of a rich Paris financier. She is described as English, but I am unable to ascertain her maiden name. Taking refuge in England in 1788, and there assisting Madame La Motte in her scurrilous pamphlet on the diamond necklace, Calonne was at first very bountiful to his fellow-exiles, but he soon quarrelled with them. He went to Paris in May 1802, but must have intended returning to England, for he had applied to Merry for a passport when he was taken ill, and expired on the 30th September. Another prominent politician was Montlosier, the member of the National Assembly who, in opposing the confiscation of the bishops’ revenues, exclaimed, ‘You deprive them of their gold crosses, but they will take the wooden cross which has saved the world.’ He had edited the _Courrier de Londres_, which was so favourable to Napoleon that he was allowed to return from exile and have his paper partly printed in Paris. It was, however, suppressed after a few weeks, and Montlosier was appointed editor of the _Bulletin de Paris_, in which he requited British hospitality by vilifying the English. In all other respects his political career down to his death in 1838 was highly creditable. Cazalès, who before emigrating had deprecated violent measures in the National Assembly, also re-entered France, and was offered, but declined, office under the Consulate.

The Duke and Duchess de Fitz-James--he was a descendant of James II. with the bend sinister--were _émigrés_ of a different stamp, being staunch royalists. So also, I believe, was Colonel O’Mahony. Patrick Wall, who at eighteen had in 1745 been with the Young Pretender, had been wounded at Culloden, and had then entered the French army, in like manner returned to France. An uncle, also a Jacobite refugee, had bequeathed him a handsome property. He died at Chatillon-sur-Seine in 1809.

The returning exiles included a multitude of priests. Sir John Carr crossed over from Southampton to Havre with some of them, one being, he says, ninety-five years of age, who was scarcely expected to land alive. There were also wives and daughters of Toulon refugees. It is unpleasant to read in Henri Martin’s history that some of these clerical passengers afterwards repaid the hospitality they had enjoyed, by vilifying England in episcopal pastorals, in order to curry favour with Napoleon.

III

AMUSEMENTS AND IMPRESSIONS

Parisian Attractions--Napoleon--Foreign Notabilities--Mutual
Impressions--Marriages and Deaths--Return Visits.

It is now time to ask what was seen and done by the visitors. The rue de Rivoli did not yet exist, and a labyrinth of dingy streets separated the Tuileries from the Louvre, but the Champs Elysées were an agreeable promenade, though of course not yet terminated by the Arc de Triomphe, and the Bois de Boulogne had recovered from the vandalism of the Revolution, while on Sundays, when Napoleon held receptions at St. Cloud, the road thither was as crowded with carriages as that to Versailles before 1789. Lovers of art had the opportunity of inspecting the spoils of Italy, a portion of which had to be restored in 1815, though but for Napoleon’s escape from Elba restitution would not have been demanded. He told Lord Ebrington who, as will be seen, visited him in that island that he felt some remorse at having thus despoiled Italy, but he had then thought only of France. Not only was the Louvre thus enriched with paintings and sculptures,[114] but the bronze lion and horses of Venice had been placed on pedestals outside the Tuileries. The biennial Salon also opened at the Louvre in September 1802, and in another part of the building was the Industrial Exhibition visited, as we have seen, by Fox. This, according to a police report, particularly interested the English. ‘Among them,’ it says, ‘have been noticed artisans, who were never tired of examining and admiring, while others tried to understand the mechanism of the objects exhibited. Some observers conclude that this study may lead to imitation of these productions in England.’ But the visitors might be proud of seeing several of their countrymen among the medallists, viz., Hall, who had a pottery at Montereau, near Fontainebleau, and Christopher Potter, of whom more anon. Engraving on glass, too, had been carried to perfection by Robert May O’Reilly, an Irishman whose factory attracted visitors. He published in 1803 a monthly magazine on arts and manufactures. A member of the British Club at Paris in 1792–1793, he had since served in the French army. He audaciously visited London during the peace, thus risking arrest for high treason.[115] There was also the opportunity of witnessing Fulton’s steamboat experiments on the Seine. Fulton mostly lived in Paris from 1799 to 1804, vainly trying to interest the Government first in torpedoes and then, with a view to the invasion of England, in steam navigation. He lived with Joel Barlow, with whom he speculated in panoramas, then a popular novelty. Both, however, went over to England in the summer of 1802. Merry granted a passport to Barlow, but did so by mistake in ignorance of his relations with English agitators, and he suggested that a list of obnoxious foreigners should be sent him, so that he might in future refuse such applications. Yet Barlow after all used an American passport. In notifying a passport to Fulton, Merry, mindful of his proposal for blowing up English vessels, added the warning, ‘verbum sap.’ Fulton was back in Paris in August in 1803, for in that month his steamboat, in the presence of Carnot and Volney, went up and down the Seine for an hour and a half. Another, but much less important, improvement in locomotion was the first attempt, at the instance of Dillon, a Hiberno-Neapolitan engineer, to introduce foot pavements. Guizot married his daughter as his second wife. Professor Charles, whose future young wife was Lamartine’s _innamorata_, lectured on chemistry, moreover, to fashionable audiences. His electrifying machine and scientific apparatus at the Louvre were inspected by Carr. Dupuis, who had sat in the Convention, could be heard expounding his cosmical explanation of myths, which had been enthusiastically adopted by his friend Lalande and by the Abbé Barthélémi. Dupuis also claimed to have in 1778 invented semaphore signals.

The Abbé Morellet, last survivor of the Encyclopedists, might be met in society, full of revolutionary and pre-revolutionary experiences; and Roget de l’Isle, the author of the Marseillaise, frequented Frascati gardens. Henri Beyle was also in Paris, having just quitted the army, and was taking lessons in English from Dawtram and an Irish Franciscan whom he calls ‘Jeki,’ but nobody could foresee in him the future Stendhal, who was to illumine French literature; nor did Sutton Sharpe, junior, till long afterwards make his acquaintance. Sénancour was probably in Paris, superintending the publication of _Obermann_, but he was not likely to be seen in the frivolous or fashionable circles frequented by the English. A few of the visitors, indeed, attended lectures,[116] listening attentively and putting questions to Laplace, Lalande, or Cuvier, but the great majority were bent on pleasure. Frascati, Tivoli, the hotel Richelieu (the _roué’s_ old mansion and grounds, now used not only for a hotel but for balls and concerts), and the so-called Hameau Chantilly were thronged, not to speak of the theatres, which had a very profitable season. Molé, it is true, retired in April 1802, dying in the following December, but there were such tragedians as Talma, Raucourt, Contat, Mars, and George, such dancers as Vestris, who was about, however, to retire, such vocalists as Cherubini, such instrumentalists as Kreutzer. In February 1802 there was the opportunity of witnessing Duval’s _Edouard en Écosse_, which (though intended only as a glorification of the Young Pretender, who in France was always styled Edward) was so boisterously applauded by royalists as applicable to the Bourbons, that Napoleon, present at the second performance, suppressed it. Blangini taught singing, and among his pupils were Miss Whitworth, Quintin Craufurd’s wife and step-daughter, Lady Conyngham, Lady Annesley, and Lady Liddell. The _Journal des Dames_ of May 10, 1802, speaking of the influx of parents anxious for their children to learn accomplishments, says:--‘In what other European city could a pupil have two musicians like Garat and Plantade for singing, two professors like Staybelt and Puppo for the piano, two virtuosi like Bode and Kreutzer for the violin, two composers like Paesiello and Méhul for music, and a man like Deshayes for dancing?’ Paris, moreover, in spite of the Revolution again set the fashions, and though its transparent dresses, ‘worn with such grace,’ says George Jackson, ‘as to reconcile you to them,’ had never, whether on account of modesty or climate, been adopted in England, the _Times_ in 1801 described the way in which Parisian ladies wore their hair. Lap-dogs were frequently to be seen under the arms of promenaders, or in fine weather running at their heels.[117] Shoe-buckles and knee-breeches, though not wigs, had been revived, and foreign ambassadors were resplendent with decorations and diamonds; yet ‘muddy boots and dirty linen were seen at Madame Fouché’s receptions,’ ‘the roughnesses of the Revolution,’ says Jackson, ‘not being yet polished off.’ Mademoiselle Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker, had returned from exile. Bonaparte, too, had imposed costumes on all public functionaries, and Paris had never seen more brilliant uniforms. His two hundred Mamelukes had been sent up to Paris to figure in the review of the 14th July, which was then, as it is now again, the national festival, and in honour of the peace he reviewed 14,000 troops in the Carrousel.

Napoleon took particular note of the British military uniforms at his receptions, and many British officers witnessed a grand review by Moreau on the 8th September 1802. Maurice Dudevant, the future father of George Sand, wrote to his mother:--

‘All these young lords, who are soldiers at home, question me
with avidity on our army. I reply by the recital of our immortal
exploits (in Italy), which they cannot sufficiently admire.’

As for private and official festivities, visitors were all anxious to see Madame Tallien, ‘our Lady of Thermidor,’ now, as I have said, the mistress of the army contractor Ouvrard. Madame Récamier gave musical parties at Clichy, she herself playing on the piano. Madame de Montesson, morganatic widow of the Duke of Orleans, Madame Lebrun, wife of the consul, and Madame Junot (Duchess d’Abrantès) also gave entertainments. At some of these Garat’s inimitable voice was to be heard, though he no longer sang in public. Madame de Genlis, though not able on her pension of 6600 f. to afford dinners, received callers. Talleyrand had been, or was about to be, forced by Napoleon to marry Madame Grand, as the only alternative to dismissing her, in order that ambassadors’ wives might visit his house, and he was very hospitable to English notabilities, though there is no reason to think that our Government had given him the £16,000 on which, as Francis Jackson wrote to Speaker Abbot, he counted for having concluded peace. Spain, however, had given him a like sum, and Jackson satirically suggested that such presents would serve as a _trousseau_ for the lady on the arrival of the dispensation from Rome. But Talleyrand received a dispensation, not from the vow of celibacy, but merely from the obligation of daily reciting the breviary. Whitworth was therefore mistaken in justifying his wife’s acceptance of Madame Talleyrand’s invitations on the ground that the church had sanctioned her marriage.

The _Times_ of January 13, 1803, says:--

‘Monsieur, or rather Madame, Talleyrand’s dinners, exceed all
others in Paris; about 80 persons sat down to the last dinner.
On the table was placed every delicacy possible to be had, and a
servant in livery, belonging to the house, behind every chair.
The second course, put on like magic, more elegant than the
first; around the room, in niches made for the purpose, were
statues of the finest marble, each supporting a basket on its
head, holding a branch of lustres of about ten lights each,
altogether making more than four hundred lights in the room;
the furniture of velvet and gold, corresponding with the other
elegancies; three rooms were fitted up in this manner, forming a
most complete suit. A very handsome salary is allowed to this
Minister, exclusively for the support of his table.’

Talleyrand doubtless allowed his guests plenty of time to do justice to his sumptuous fare, whereas Napoleon unpleasantly hurried over his dinners in half an hour. He deputed prefects, however, to preside in his place at less expeditious state banquets.

Lechevalier, of the Foreign Office, who had lived in England and had taught French to Sir F. Burdett and his wife and her sisters, also laid himself out to be agreeable to British visitors. There was a rage for dancing, not dancing on a volcano ready to explode, as was said in July 1830, but on the ashes of an extinct one.

Conversation, on the other hand, as we learn from German visitors, languished. The salons of the old monarchy, where brilliant paradox and ruthless scepticism had flourished, found no successors. It was not safe to talk politics, for spies abounded, and even the Institute had to avoid philosophy, legislation, or sociology.[118] Riddles were consequently in vogue. But La Métherie, the mineralogist, and his guests ventured to condemn the tyranny of the Consulate, and Besnard relates how Lord Archibald Hamilton, after hearing one of these outbursts, exclaimed, ‘Too fortunate Frenchmen! You have apricots, peaches, cheap and good wine, and yet you complain,’ while, turning to Besnard, he whispered: ‘A peach with us costs 4/ or 5/ and a bottle of champagne or burgundy a guinea.’ The old nobility, indeed, such of them as had remained or returned, were too impoverished to live in great style, but the _nouveaux riches_, financiers and contractors, had installed themselves in rural mansions, yet did not succeed in imitating the old aristocracy. They were lavish in some things, parsimonious in others. Stables, gardens, and woods were allowed to become slovenly. ‘There is at present no veritable society,’ says a contemporary, and nobody in the country kept open house.[119] ‘Those people who chose to be presented at Bonaparte’s court,’ says Mrs. Villiers (afterwards Lady Clarendon), ‘were invited to many magnificent dinners and assemblies (balls) given by the ministers, but as ourselves, with a very few other exceptions, did not feel inclined to pay homage to Bonaparte, the theatres and the entertainments given by foreigners were mostly our resources.’[120] Mrs. Villiers was certainly, as she says, an exception, as also were Montagu and Ryder, a future peer who declined to be introduced to Napoleon, for it was not till the renewal of the war that admiration turned to hatred and that Bonaparte became a bogey with which children were frightened. Even then no Englishman would have gone the length of saying, as a French ecclesiastic has done nearly a century afterwards, that ‘Napoleon was the greatest enemy of God and of mankind. Would that his name could be effaced from human memories!’[121] A royalist agent remarks:--

‘M. de Calonne states that in England the enthusiasm for
Bonaparte is not only general, but carried to an extent which it
is difficult to conceive. The Court and the city, the capital
and the provinces, all classes of citizens, from ministers to
artisans, are agreed to publish his praises and vie in chanting
his victories and the lustre of his rule.’[122]

Yet Phillips’s _Practical Guide during a Journey from London to Paris_, the first book of its kind, had said:--

‘We shall only express our wish that the great man who has done
so much for France and mankind may moderate his ambition and
make the illustrious Washington his political model.’

Englishmen anxious to see republican forms and manners were satirically recommended by the _Times_, December 1, 1802, to lose no time in visiting Paris, or the whole ancient system of the court, with all its formalities and regulations, would arrive before them. ‘The ladies of the old court,’ it added,--

‘are in great request in the circle of Madame Bonaparte, and
several of the most pronounced royalists among the emigrants are
already _bien acclimatés_ at the _Thuilleries_. In the
gardens of this palace, no persons are admitted to walk in the
Jacobin costume. _Cocked hats_ are indispensable to all who
would not be turned out by the sentries. The high _ton_
and extravagance of dress are generally restored, and the
fashions at least are as Anti-Jacobin as possible. _Tu_ and
_Toi_, and _Citoyen_, which for some time have been
banished to the Faux-bourghs and the Offices, are totally out of
use in addressing the Consul or Ministers, and would pass for
the grossness of disaffection at Court. In short, everything
is returning rapidly to that gaiety, splendour, and urbanity,
which is the characteristic of the nation. It was the ingenious
expression of a distinguished lady a few nights since at the
_Thuilleries_--that “she saw the whole of the ancient
monarchy excepting the Bourbons!”’

This reminds us of Victor Hugo’s well-known couplet:--

‘Ce siècle avait deux ans, Rome remplaçait Sparte,
Dejâ Napoléon perçait sous Bonaparte.’

A letter from an officer published in the same journal on the 9th February 1803 says:--

‘Nothing can be more wretched or discontented than all
descriptions of people; all ruined except a few upstarts, who
are immediately self-interested in the present system. It is
completely a military government, and the country is kept quiet
by the bayonet alone:--taxed at half their income, and more
taxes to be laid on.

‘The roads wretched--cut up by the artillery and
ammunition-waggons, and in no places repaired, but a little
picked in on the straight road from Calais to Paris for Lord
Cornwallis. Crowded with turnpikes, the produce of which is
applied to the public purse, and not to mend their ways. The
Inns, as formerly, dirty, and good eating and drinking very
dear. The lower classes are civil,--the higher very haughty.

‘Yet notwithstanding the distress and poverty of the country,
there are no less than 26 theatres open and crowded every night
in Paris, independent of shows, jugglers, etc. Nobody can form
an idea of what an _Opera_ is, unless they have seen the
present style of one in Paris--so superb.

‘The Bishop of Durham would expire at seeing the dresses of the
performers. The ladies are almost quite naked, and really not
covered enough to give the least idea of modesty. There cannot
be anything so profligate, so debauched, or so immoral, as the
ideas or manners of all ranks of people, particularly the higher
class; and poor Virtue and Decency are entirely banished their
Calendars.

‘The daughter of Madame Bonaparte sits every night in a crimson
and gold box at the Opera. The Consul in one directly below,
with a gilded grating towards the audience, who see very little
of him. He leaves the house before the dropping of the curtain,
and escorted by a strong guard of cavalry and torches sets off
full gallop for Malmaison, where he sleeps.’

Another visitor is reported by the _Times_ as describing Paris as ‘more immersed in luxury than at any former period. The theatres are every night full, and the political coffee-houses, unless on particular occasions, nearly empty. Provisions of every kind are cheap and plentiful, and the best wine may be had at three livres the bottle.’

Whether by way of entertaining one another or of reciprocating French hospitality, some of the British visitors gave receptions and balls. Maurice Dudevant speaks of Lady Higginson’s balls, where he seems to have heard French nobles decrying their own country, and he warned Englishmen against judging France by this unpatriotic class. He may have been one of Lord Robert Spencer’s guests at Robert’s famous restaurant. The Duchess of Gordon and Mrs. Orby Hunter were prominent for their entertainments, and a Paris newspaper mentions those of Lady ‘Shumley,’ a phonetic approximation to Cholmondeley. Jerningham speaks of the Duchess of Gordon’s balls, and of her addiction to playing at _hasard_, at which she rattled the dice, and whenever she lost exclaimed, ‘God damn!’ Eliza Orby Hunter, aged twenty-three, was apparently the wife of George Orby Hunter, who afterwards, living at Dieppe, translated Byron into French verse, and died in 1843.[123] The Orby Hunter family were owners of Croyland, Lincolnshire.

‘Paris,’ wrote Colonel Ferrier to his sister, ‘is certainly the place of all others for young men. Plenty of amusement without dissipation; no drinking; if a gentleman was seen drunk here he would be looked upon as a perfect _bête_.’[124] If, however, there was less drinking than in London, there was clearly more gambling. John Sympson Jessopp left with the impression that debauchery abounded. With the natural English desire to see everything, he found himself one night, with his younger brother, in a magnificent gambling-house. Somebody who had lost heavily fell upon the croupier, snatched his rake from him, laid about him furiously, then hit out at a huge chandelier, with scores of wax candles in it, and frantically smashed it. There was terrible panic and confusion. One of the croupiers slipped out through a door leading to a staircase to fetch the police. Jessopp, plucking his brother by the sleeve, managed to get down the stairs and into the street, where they concealed themselves in a doorway. In a few minutes a company of gendarmes hastened up, and leaving two of their comrades at the door mounted the stairs, arrested every soul on the premises, and carried them off to the lock-up. The two young Englishmen, watching their opportunity, hurried back to their hotel. The sequel they never heard.[125] Francis Jackson, moreover, writing to Abbot, described Paris life as an uninterrupted picture of vulgarity and profligacy, and the _Times_ of the 23rd September says:--

‘Paris, under the Regent of Orleans, was not so profligate
and corrupt as it appears to our best travellers at present.
Gambling, debauchery, intemperance, and the insatiable
desire after public spectacles, with all the vices in the
train of indolence and licentiousness, form the monotonous
indiscriminable character of the Citizens.’

Some of the visitors must have shared in the stupefaction felt on the 21st January 1803 at seeing the Madeleine draped in crape in memory of the anniversary of Louis XVI.’s death, but they were as ignorant as the rest of the world that this audacious celebration was the act of a man of English parentage, Hyde de Neuville. The Madeleine, as Holcroft tells us, was then ‘a grand colonnade of lofty uncorniced pillars, rising about roofless, half-finished walls.’

British visitors had the opportunity of mixing with some of their countrymen. There was Paine, until his return in September 1802 to America, where his friend Jefferson had become President, and we have seen that Redhead Yorke and Rickman renewed acquaintance with him. He had had to wait, not only for funds, but for a safe passage without fear of British cruisers. When Redhead Yorke with some difficulty recalled himself to his remembrance, Paine thus unbosomed himself:--

‘Who would have thought that we should meet [again after the
lapse of ten years] at Paris?... They (the French) have shed
blood enough for liberty, and now they have it in perfection!
This is not a country for an honest man to live in. They do
not understand anything at all of the principles of free
government, and the best way (for foreigners) is to leave them
to themselves. You see they have conquered all Europe only to
make it more miserable than it was before....

‘Republic! Do you call this a republic? Why they are worse off
than the slaves at Constantinople, for they are ever expecting
to be bashaws in Heaven by submitting to be slaves below; but
here they believe neither in Heaven nor Hell, and yet are slaves
by choice. I know of no republic in the world except America,
which is the only country for such men as you and I. It is my
intention to get away from this place as soon as possible,
and I hope to be off in autumn. You are a young man, and may
see better times, but I have done with Europe and its slavish
politics.’

Paine, it may be feared, experienced another disillusion on recrossing the Atlantic. Yorke does not seem to have told him of his own change of politics.