Chapter VII: Appendix: A. Members of Parliament, 316 (5)

Next to Paine in celebrity comes Helen Maria Williams, an eyewitness of the Revolution, whose reminiscences of Madame Roland must have been interesting. She was visited by Sharpe, Rogers, Lord Holland, Kemble, Poole, and Mrs. Cosway, though some English held aloof or even sneered at her. Her attire and manners were certainly open to ridicule,[126] and her cohabitation with John Hurford Stone, the refugee printer, even assuming a secret marriage, exposed her to misconstruction. Stone’s brother William, ruined by twenty-one months’ imprisonment and arrested for debt on his acquittal for treason, had also gone to France, where he became overseer of a paper-hanging factory. We shall hear of him again. There was the widow of Sir Robert Smyth, who remained in Paris after her husband’s death. She and her young children had been painted by Reynolds, and one of those children now married Lambton Este, a son of Charles Este, by turns actor, clergyman, and journalist. Smyth’s old partner, James Millingen, son of a Dutch merchant settled in London, had remained in Paris after the Revolution, though his brother John Gideon had become an English naval official. He was afterwards an eminent archæologist, and his son Michael, archæologist and physician, attended Byron on his deathbed. Anastasia Howard, Baroness Stafford, an ex-nun, had likewise stayed in Paris after her release at the end of the Terror,[127] though her fellow-nuns had in 1800 found a retreat in England. She died in 1807 at the age of eighty-four. Her nephew Charles Jerningham called on her, but though in good health, senility scarcely allowed her to recognise him. This reminds us of her co-religionists at the Austin convent. They, too, had survived the Revolution, and the Superior, Frances Lancaster, must have had much to tell Sir John Carr of how the nunnery was turned into a crowded political prison. Arabella Williams, daughter of David Mallet, author of _Northern Antiquities_, had had more recent troubles. She had spent most of her life in Paris, but visits to London to obtain her share of her mother, Lucy Estob’s, property brought on her the suspicion of the police and she was arrested. The banker Perregaux and others had to exonerate her from the charge of espionage.[128] Another but more recent resident, representing the _demi-monde_, though that term had not yet been invented, was Mrs. Lindsay, the Ellenore of Benjamin Constant’s _Adolphe_, that romance of the Werther and Corinne school, in which the heroine, depicted as a Pole who deserts her old paramour and her children by him, clings to a man anxious to discard her. We do not even know her Christian name, unless she was the ‘Lady Florence Lindsay’ whom Lady Morgan met at Florence in 1819. She is said to have been Irish on the father’s and French on the mother’s side; handsome and sprightly, she had been brought up in good society. She had lived in Paris from 1786 to 1792, and her confiscated tradesmen’s bills, still in the Archives,[129] indicate that she was then the mistress of Comte de Melfort, a man of Scottish Jacobite ancestry. Another of her lovers was Vicomte Chrétien de Lamoignon, who, the last of his family, was wounded at Quiberon, and after the Restoration was created a peer. She left France in 1792, and in 1795 Chateaubriand made her acquaintance in London, where she was on visiting terms with the French aristocratic exiles. He styles her _la dernière des Ninon_. On his going to France in disguise in 1800 she, having meanwhile returned to Paris, met him at Calais, escorted him, and hired temporary lodgings for him near her own house. She paid half the rent and another friend the remainder. Constant met her in 1804, and after passing an agreeable evening with her, received a letter in which she said that they strikingly resembled each other, but ‘this is perhaps one reason the less against our suiting each other. It is because men resemble each other that Heaven created women, who do not resemble them.’[130] Constant would have married her, however, but for her age and for her two illegitimate children. Charles Constant, Benjamin’s cousin, describes her as intelligent but devoid of culture. In 1801 she translated into French Cornelia Knight’s _Life of the Romans_. It is commonly stated that she died at Angoulême in 1820; but if so it was under an assumed name, for I have ascertained that there is no Lindsay on the register. Then there was Mrs. Harvey, _née_ Elizabeth Hill, naturalised in Tuscany, who in 1805 was arrested on an unfounded charge of complicity in Georges’ plot. Her daughter Henrietta, a miniature painter, petitioned for her release and the restitution of her papers, the petition being backed by Denon, curator of the Louvre. Scipio du Roure, son of the Marquis de Grisac and grandson of the Countess of Catherlough, Bolingbroke’s sister, may almost be regarded as an Englishman, for he had been educated at Oxford. He eloped with a Mrs. Sandon, who fired at her pursuing husband, whereupon du Roure was prosecuted as the delinquent. A flaw in the indictment secured his acquittal, but he had to take refuge in France. He arrived in the middle of the Revolution and was a member of the Paris Jacobin Commune, but was imprisoned in the Terror. He was now studying jurisprudence and translating Cobbett’s _Grammar_. He went back to London to claim his mother’s property and that of a half-brother named Knight, and died there in 1822.

The war, putting a stop to British imports, had given a stimulus to French manufactures, several of which were carried on by Englishmen. These were mostly in the provinces, and English tradesmen had scarcely yet reappeared in Paris. Henry Sykes, for instance, unable to continue selling Wedgwood’s pottery in the rue St. Honoré, had in 1792 started cotton-spinning at St. Rémy, though he had originally applied for and obtained the use of the unfinished Madeleine as a factory. The Convention, on the 29th April 1795, granted him a site for the erection of cotton mills at La Magdelaine, near Verneuil (Eure). He was joined in 1802 by his future son-in-law, William Waddington, of Walkeringham, Notts, a descendant of Charles II.’s Pendrells. Waddington, the grandfather of the French statesman of our day, apparently had a visit from his brother Samuel, a hop merchant at Tunbridge, who had published an answer to Burke’s famous pamphlet, and in 1801 had been sentenced to £500 fine and a month’s imprisonment for ‘forestalling.’ His fellow hop-merchants gave him an ovation on his release. Then there was Christopher Potter, who had been an army victualler and whose election for Colchester in 1784 led to the Act disqualifying Government contractors from sitting in Parliament. His successful opponent was Sir Robert Smyth, and the two rivals may have met in Paris. He reopened during the Revolution the porcelain factory at Chantilly formerly carried on by the Condé princes, thus justifying his name--_nomen omen_--but he had now removed to Montereau. A police report of the 8th March 1796 thus denounced him:--

‘The Anglo-Pitts purchase nearly all the national property which
is sold in the department of the Oise. Their chief broker is a
man named Poter (_sic_), owner of the porcelaine factory
at Chantilly, a man who was deep in debt two years ago, but who
has now paid up and is worth more than two millions. He was
twice arrested under the revolutionary government. This man was
twice M.P. in England, and belonged to the Court party. There
is no doubt that he is in France the secret agent of Pitt, with
whom he has been closely connected since the Revolution. He
made many visits to England in 1792 and 1793. Since that time
he has remained at Paris or Chantilly, where he daily makes
purchases.’[131]

This report was made by an ‘observer’ named Martin, whose chief, Marné, sent it in as usual to the Directory. That body, or probably Barras, who seems to have examined these daily reports, instructed Marné to inquire whether Potter really visited England in 1792–1793, whether there was any proof of his connection with the court party, whether there was any probability of his being Pitt’s agent, and what purchases he had made. Martin replied to this veiled rebuke on the 13th March:--

‘I have learned nothing further on Poter. My object was not to
denounce him. I do not know him intimately. I have merely had to
do my duty as observer, and to call attention to him, according
to notices which have been transmitted to me by persons whom I
believe to have no interest in calumniating him. My guarantee of
all the facts is therefore solely for the purpose of my mission.
It is then for the Government to watch any particular person.
Here, however, is my reply to the various questions which have
been submitted to me by citizen Marné, and which I subjoin.

‘1. Poter paid visits to England in 1792 and 1793, without this
implying that he was betraying our cause, for our relations with
England were not suspended till the middle of 1793 if I remember
rightly.

‘2. The real fact, and which Poter cannot contradict, is that
he was twice M.P., and that the kind of popularity which he
had gained induced the Court to place him on the list of
candidates in 1783 or 1784 for making him a Minister. Pitt
was the successful man. After that he fought a duel with the
latter.[132] Was it because he was not a Minister?

Thus the question whether he had then thrown himself into the
Court party remains to be solved. It would not perhaps be
difficult to ascertain the fact, for it is well known that Fox,
driven from office, became more popular than ever. It is also
known that he drew the Prince of Wales into the Opposition.

‘3. As to this I will repeat what I have said above. It is for
the Government to order its agents to watch him. As for me I
promise to neglect nothing in Paris, and if any positive facts
reach me I will transmit them to the Directory. Only yesterday I
ascertained where he lives and the places which he frequents.

‘4. It is quite certain that Poter has made purchases besides
his Chantilly factory. To ascertain this it will merely be
necessary to apply to the Senlis district. I remember having
stated in my report of the 16th (_sic_) that Poter eighteen
months ago was in everybody’s debt, and that now he had settled
with everybody. This is perhaps what has given rise to the
belief that he might have dealings with Pitt in France, for in
fact his fortune at this moment is marvellous; but it may be the
result of great speculations or of stock-jobbing, which in the
last twenty months has made the fortune of so many.

‘I think I have dwelt enough on this subject. I repeat that my
sole object has been to do my duty as surveillant. I will add
this. Formerly entrusted with powers by the General Security
Committee in the department of the Oise, I ascertained that
Poter did much good at Chantilly, that he professed republican
principles, and that I had even occasion to render him justice
before the committee against the persecution which for eleven
months he had been undergoing from the Chantilly revolutionary
committee.’

These reports seem to have induced Barras to make Potter’s acquaintance and to send him first to Malmesbury[133] in Paris in 1796, and next to London in 1797, with an offer to conclude peace for a handsome bribe. On his return he warned the Directory that one of its members regularly communicated its deliberations to England. These relations with Barras probably protected him from further molestation during the Directory, but on the 13th December 1800 a police bulletin again denounced him as an English emissary sent to ruin French pottery and hat-making.[134] In 1800 he was a first-class medallist at the Paris Industrial Exhibition, and in 1802 he was one of the gold medallists to whom Napoleon gave a dinner. His Montereau factory, an old monastery where he employed a hundred men, was burnt down in 1802. He probably remained in France till 1814; he died in England three years later.

Among the silver medallists in 1802 was White, a mechanical inventor, probably the uncle or grandfather of Dupont White, sub-Minister of Justice in 1848, President Carnot’s father-in-law. The exhibits also included a filter by Smith, an Englishman, perhaps the James Smith who in 1813 succeeded to Stone’s printing business.

There were of course teachers of English. They included Robert, of whom Napoleon might have learned the language at the Paris military school, a lost opportunity which he regretted; Mrs. Galignani, _née_ Parsons, who had married an Italian ex-priest, ultimately the founder of the newspaper bearing his name; and Samuel Baldwin, employed before the Revolution in the French Foreign Office, who was arrested as a spy in the Terror, and having been inscribed on a long list of prisoners for trial would, but for Robespierre’s fall, have been guillotined. He had taught English to the Royal Family before 1789, and he was accused of associating with priests and receiving frequent letters from Calais. He latterly published English and Spanish lesson books, and died in 1804, aged seventy-nine. There were also Cresswell, Davies, Fox, Hickie, Boswell, Macdermott, who kept a school, Stubbs, who had a reading-room with such English newspapers as were allowed to enter France, and Roche, probably Hamilton Roche, teacher at the military school, whose son Eugenius became a journalist in London. There were also two maiden ladies named Haines, ultimately joined by a Mrs. Poppleton, who carried on a school. She was probably the wife or widow of George Poppleton, who had taught English. There was likewise the daughter of a Scotsman named James Mather Flint, the widow of the clever but unprincipled anti-revolutionary pamphleteer Rivarol. Flint and his wife settled about 1734 in France, where their daughter Louisa in 1768 translated into French one of Shakespeare’s plays with Dr. Johnson’s notes,[135] and Johnson wrote to her in French a letter of thanks, in which he humorously rallied her on detaining in Paris the sister of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Fanny Reynolds had apparently gone to lodge with the Flints, for Northcote is incorrect in stating that Louisa accompanied her to France. Reynolds himself in the following year, when visiting Paris, called on the Flints. On the death of his wife, Flint, who had embraced Catholicism, entered the priesthood and received a small benefice which was supplemented by a pension of 200 francs from the General Assembly of the Clergy. This pension he enjoyed till the Revolution, and he must have died before 1793, for his daughter alone was then arrested as an Englishwoman. She had, it is true, in 1780 married Rivarol and had given birth to a son, but Rivarol had long deserted her, leaving her and her infant in such distress that the Montyon prize, much to his mortification, was awarded in 1788 to a Frenchwoman who had kindly succoured them. Madame Rivarol afterwards tried to maintain herself by translations from the English. Her faithless husband died in Germany as an _émigré_ in 1810, and her son Daniel was now serving till his death in 1810 in the Danish or Russian army. She herself survived till 1821. She is not likely to have been hunted up by any of her fellow-Britons in 1802 or 1814.

Nor were political refugees likely to be sought by them, otherwise they might have made numerous acquaintances. Most of them were Irish, but King mentions two Englishmen, Ashley, an ex-member of the London Corresponding Society, who had a flourishing business in Paris, and ‘Hodgson,’ a hatter, either Richard Hodson, one of the Reformers prosecuted in 1794, or William Hodson, who in December 1793 incurred twelve months’ imprisonment and a fine of £200 for saying that the world would not be happy till there were no more kings. There was also one Scot, Robert Watson, who had crossed the Channel in 1798, secretary and biographer of Lord George Gordon, alleged teacher of English (but more probably ‘skimmer’ of English newspapers) to Napoleon, rescuer from rain and rats of the Stuart papers at Rome; his career was full of romance, and it ended in the tragedy of suicide at a London inn at the age of eighty-eight. As for the Irish, some had been long domiciled in France, while others had just been liberated under a secret article, or at least a secret understanding, of the Treaty of Amiens. They would, according to French documents, have been executed in Ireland but for the threat of reprisals against General Sir George Don, who, as will be explained hereafter, had been arrested in France.[136] These ex-prisoners included James Napper Tandy, given up by Hamburg, along with James Blackwell, Hervey Montmorency Morris, and Wm. Corbett, to Sir James Craufurd, but all claimed by Napoleon as French officers.[137] Tandy landed at Bordeaux in March 1802, and died there in the following year, not having been allowed to go to Paris. In December 1802, describing himself as a French general, he sent a challenge to Elliott, an English M.P., who had spoken of him as an ‘arch traitor,’ and on Elliott taking no notice of his letter he denounced him as a coward.[138] Morris, who had fought for Austria against the Turks before fighting for the French Revolution, after a visit to Paris returned to Ireland, but in 1811 rejoined the French army. Corbett had escaped from Kilmainham prison, an episode utilised by Miss Edgeworth in one of her stories. He, too, joined the French army, became a general, and later on helped to liberate Greece. Blackwell, who, a student in the Irish College, had joined in the attack on the Bastille, was penniless on now landing in France, and Napoleon first gave him 6000 francs and then a pension of 3000 francs ‘for his services to liberty,’ Napoleon not having yet ceased to talk of liberty. In 1803 Blackwell commanded Napoleon’s Irish legion, Corbett serving under him, as also John Devereux,[139] who, though a conspirator of 1798, waited on Lord Whitworth with a letter of introduction from Lord Moira. He was permitted in 1819 to enlist recruits for Bolivar at Dublin, the British authorities being doubtless glad thus to get rid of restless spirits. He became a general in the service of Colombia, and in 1825 revisited Paris, where, as a ‘most active and dangerous man,’ his movements were suspiciously watched by detectives.[140] Arthur O’Connor, nephew of Lord Longueville and ex-M.P. for Cork, has been already mentioned. He married Condorcet’s daughter, and latterly devoted himself to agriculture and to his village mayoralty. He just lived to see the French empire restored. Robert Emmet returned to Dublin in October 1802, and was executed for a fresh conspiracy. So also was Thomas Russell, who while a soldier in Ireland became acquainted with Tone and was won over to his views. Thomas Addis Emmet, Robert’s brother, went in 1804 to New York, where he became a barrister. William James Macnevin likewise crossed the Atlantic.

Other Irishmen had been or were now employed in the French civil service. Aherne, an ex-priest, had served under Delacroix or Carnot. Nicholas Madgett was in the Foreign Office under the Directory, as also a nephew, Sullivan, who had been a professor of mathematics at La Flèche and had gone with Hoche’s expedition to Ireland.[141] Edward Joseph Lewins, who had dubbed himself first Luines and then de Luynes, as though related to the French duke of that name, had been educated at the Irish College, Paris. Sent by the United Irishmen to France, he was employed by the Directory in missions and reports, and on the abandonment of French expeditions to Ireland he joined the Duc de Larochefoucault-Liancourt in industrial enterprises, to carry on which he applied for the reimbursement of his secret service expenses. Talleyrand endorsed this application.[142] He was afterwards the _soi-disant_ Thompson who, according to Goldsmith, was employed in opening English letters at the post-office, for he had been originally in the Irish post-office. He subsequently had appointments in the Foreign and Education Offices. He was still living in Paris in 1824, but his son refused, doubtless for cogent reasons, to give any information on him to Madden for his history of the United Irishmen. William Duckett, one of the instigators of the mutiny of the Nore, had been employed by the diplomatic committee of the Convention, but eventually turned pedagogue. Patrick Lattin, so brilliant in conversation, according to Lady Morgan, as to reduce Curran and Sheil to silence, had served in the Franco-Irish brigade till 1791, and was in the carriage when Theobald Dillon was murdered by his troops at Lille in 1792. He had settled near Lyons, but occasionally visited Paris, where he died about 1849. But it is not always easy to distinguish him from another Lattin. John Fitzgerald, also a Franco-Irish officer, had emigrated at the Revolution but returned in 1802, and his dinners from 1823 to 1836 drew the best British and French company.[143] William Putnam M’Cabe, one of Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s bodyguard in 1798, was now starting a cotton mill near Rouen, but sold it in 1806 to Waddington. He had hairbreadth escapes from arrest on repeated visits to England and Ireland, and died in Paris in 1821. He had been intimate with Tone,[144] the funeral of whose daughter Mira in March 1803 drew together all the Irish refugees. Tone’s son had entered the French army, but after Waterloo went to America with his mother, who then married an old Scottish friend, Hugh Wilson of Bordeaux. In 1803 she took out a patent for clarifying liquids. Wilson, after a roaming life, ended his days at Santa Cruz in 1829.

The English, of course, found many foreigners in Paris, though except in the aggregate in much smaller numbers than themselves. The Russians were already noted for their prodigality. Swedes were tolerably numerous. The Germans were mostly economical. Among Americans were Rufus King, Livingston, Jay, the Ambassador at London, and the future president, Monroe. There was also Colonel James Swan, a native of Dunfermline, but one of the ‘Boston tea-party,’ whose contracts with the French Government had involved him in litigation with his partner Schweizer, and who, rather than meet what he considered an unjust claim, was to undergo twenty-two years’ imprisonment in a Paris debtors’ prison.[145] Count Rumford, the inventor, now likewise settled in Paris.[146] The visitor of highest rank was the Prince of Orange, afterwards suitor to our Princess Charlotte and ultimately King of Holland. His father had sent him from London to claim an indemnity for the loss of the statthalterate, and he appears to have succeeded in his mission. Charlotte’s eventually successful suitor, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, also visited Paris, but not till 1810, when he offered, it is said, to be aide-de-camp to Napoleon. Higher destinies awaited him. The Russians and Poles included Count Zamoiski, Count Potocki, Prince Troubetski, Prince Galitzin, and Princess Demidoff, an accomplished dancer. Nor should we forget Kosciusko, who had failed to liberate Poland. Shepherd found him in a cottage near the barriers, with a small garden which he cultivated himself. He must have been able to relate Polish imitations of the French Revolution--a massacre of prisoners, a revolutionary tribunal, pillages, and confiscations; but he could claim credit for Stanislas having been honourably treated as a captive, in lieu of having been executed like Louis XVI. Possibly a South American youth, Bolivar, the future Liberator, made his acquaintance. There was also Madame de Krudener, the Delphine of Madame de Staël’s story, now famous for her beauty and her gallantries, not yet for the mysticism which was to captivate the Tsar Alexander and the Queen of Prussia. She was at this time enamoured of the singer Garat, but was shortly to accompany her sick husband who, before reaching Aix, his destination, died of apoplexy. Madame de Staël herself, described in a police note as known for her love of intrigue, was not yet banished from the capital outside which she was miserable, and there was her satellite, Benjamin Constant, not yet much known, though he had been arrested in 1796 for declaring that France needed a king. A fellow Swiss visitor was Pestalozzi, the educationist, noted by the police as having an English pension. Another educationist was the German Campe, who in 1792, along with Cloots, Paine, Priestley, and others, had received French citizenship. He was surprised to find the Parisians taciturn and apathetic, instead of being lively, talkative, and enthusiastic as in 1792. Science was represented by Oersted, who, however, was as yet merely a youth who had gained a travelling scholarship.

Alexander Humboldt did not arrive from South America till 1804, but his brother William, statesman and philologist, was spending three years in Paris. Germany also sent the Landgrave of Hesse Rothenburg and Princess Hohenzollern, the latter anxious to purchase the field in which her guillotined brother, Prince Salm Kyrburg, had been buried. Prince Emanuel of Salm, apparently her uncle, accompanied her on her pious mission. Adam Gottlob von Moltke, a cousin of the famous strategist and like him a Dane, was a versifier of the Klopstock school and was intimate with Niebuhr. On the outbreak of the French Revolution he had styled himself Citizen Moltke. He helped to draw up the Schleswig-Holstein constitution. Another Danish visitor was Baggesen, who had witnessed the Revolution, imitated Klopstock and Wieland, and enjoyed a pension from his sovereign. Samson Heine, father of the poet, a Dusseldorf merchant, was a visitor on business, like several of his Jewish co-religionists. His son was too young to accompany him. Another business visitor was Johann Maria Farina, who opened depôts for his ‘veritable eau de Cologne.’ Frederic Jacobi, a friend of Richter, went in vain quest of health. He revived his acquaintance with Count Schlabrendorf, whom he had met in London in 1786. ‘For eight years,’ said Schlabrendorf, reviewing his revolutionary experiences, ‘it was here all a scuffle like a village beershop, everybody pitching into each other. Then came Bonaparte with a “stop that.” The first thing he did was to blow out the candles. He wanted no questions settled, but merely the stoppage of disputes. Liberty or no liberty, religion or no religion, morality or no morality, was all immaterial to him. Liberty and equality remain, and now nobody opens his mouth or strikes another.’ I may here remark that the comparison of Bonaparte to Cromwell, obvious as it now appears to us, was not made by any English observer, though it did not escape German visitors. Jacobi also went to see St. Martin, the disciple of Boehme and Swedenborg, who had known William Law in England in 1787, and regarded the French Revolution as a precursor of the Day of Judgment. St. Martin, who was living in seclusion till his death in October 1803, said to him, ‘Everybody has told you I am mad, but you see that I am at least a happy madman. If, moreover, some madmen should be fettered there are others to be left unfettered, and I think myself one of the latter.’ A disciple of Jacobi, Jacob Frederic Fries, who had been educated by the Moravians and was ultimately a professor at Jena, was also a visitor. His democratic opinions for a time occasioned his suspension from his post. Frederic Schlegel, an intimate friend of Novalis, studied at the Louvre, was taught Sanscrit by Alexander Hamilton, and lectured on German literature and philosophy. He and his Jewish wife, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, embraced Catholicism in 1803. Less eminent than his brother Augustus, he was an orientalist and art critic. Living with them at Montmartre was Helmine von Klenke, who had made an unfortunate marriage with Baron Hastfer, and having divorced him was destined to be but little more successful with a second mate, Chézy, to whom Schlegel, his teacher of Persian, introduced her. Helmine was cured of a violent headache by Mesmer, who sat beside her at dinner, and unobserved by the other guests made some passes over her forehead. Mesmer, unlike what happened to him in 1781 and 1785, attracted no curiosity. Helmine also met Hardenberg, the future Prussian statesman, Achim von Arnim, a poet and novelist, and Mademoiselle Rodde, daughter of a Swiss professor, and herself at seventeen adorned with a doctor’s degree.[147] Reichardt, the composer, and Fabricius, the Danish naturalist, should also be mentioned. Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow, who had twice visited America, had there embraced Swedenborgianism, had been ruined by a glass speculation, and was now dependent on his pen, likewise visited Paris. An admirer of Napoleon, this historian and pamphleteer had had adventures, and was destined to have others. Julius von Voss, poet and novelist, was another visitor.

Last but not least among the German visitors comes Schopenhauer. His father, Henry Florian Schopenhauer, a Hamburg merchant, with his wife and son, went to London in July 1802. Leaving Arthur at school with the Rev. Thomas Lancaster at Wimbledon, the parents travelled about England and Scotland. They got back to London in October, and after a six weeks’ stay all three embarked for Rotterdam. Mercier, the prolific writer, showed them the sights of Paris. In January 1803 they proceeded to Bordeaux. Thence father and son returned to Hamburg, while the mother went to Toulouse, Toulon, Hyères, and Switzerland, an account of which trip she published. Pecuniary losses affected the father’s mind, and in 1805, at the age of fifty-nine, he fell or threw himself into a canal. Griesbach denies that he committed suicide, alleging that he slipped through a trap-door in his warehouse into the canal. He was an habitual reader of the _Times_, a taste inherited by his son.

The Italians include Bartolini, sculptor of a colossal bust of Napoleon, and a daughter of Beccaria, the Italian philosopher, who had inherited his intelligence and love of liberty, and possessed beauty into the bargain. She had divorced her insane husband. Helen Williams in 1794–1795 had found her residing by the lake of Lugano. She seems to have settled in Paris in 1798, and Paine then made acquaintance with her. She presented Redhead Yorke with a portrait of her father, and Holcroft was now struck by her intelligence and affability. At her house he met Melzi, who had presented the keys of Milan to Napoleon on his entering that city, and who had scandalised lovers of liberty by accepting the vice-presidency of the so-called Cisalpine republic, though Napoleon soon superseded him by his step-son Eugène de Beauharnais. Another well-known Italian, though born in Paris, was Caraccioli, the author of _Pope Ganganelli’s Letters_ and many other works; but he was an octogenarian and died in 1803. Then there was Casti, canon and poet, an imitator of Boccaccio. Prince Jerome Moliterno Pignatelli had figured in Neapolitan politics, and was now conspiring to deliver the Neapolitan ports to England. Though Merry granted him a passport he was stopped at Calais and incarcerated in the Temple, along with his English wife or mistress, a Mrs. Dorinda Newnham, an Irishwoman,[148] possibly the wife of a London alderman and ex-M.P. She was again arrested at Rome in 1809, but liberated as being both ill and mad. It was thought, however, that she had been forewarned of arrest and had burnt her papers.[149] Ultimately both of them got to England.

How did the English demean themselves and what was the impression produced on both sides? Francis Jackson, writing on 2nd February 1802 to Speaker Abbot, says:--

‘I only wish you would extend the efforts of your police to keep
at home a parcel of disorderly women who come abroad without
bringing anything with them that does credit to the national
character. There is Lady C. (Cholmondeley), who is one day taken
up by the police and carried to the chief lock-up for persisting
to drive in the Champs Elysées at forbidden hours and through
forbidden roads. Another day she quarrels with people at the
masquerade. A third she invites a dozen Frenchmen and women to
her house and abuses them all for slaves. Then we have Lady M.
(Monck), whose dear friend would welcome H. M. Williams and who
gets into all the bad company in Paris. You must suppose it is
very bad when here it is reckoned _mauvais ton_. You really
should keep these people at home. As for your swindlers, of whom
there has been a nest here for some time, they are not near so
troublesome, for there are swindlers in all countries and the
police here is very good.’[150]

There is evidently a little exaggeration here, but we have already seen that Lord Whitworth shut his doors against some of his countrymen whose inordinate admiration of Napoleon was not conducive to the maintenance of peace, since it must have given the impression that there was a strong French party in England, so that Napoleon might dictate his own terms. Whitworth acknowledged that the Duke of Bedford, fully alive to Napoleon’s projects, conducted himself very properly, adding, ‘I wish I could say as much of many of my countrymen and countrywomen.’[151] Lady Oxford even considered Napoleon handsome--an opinion, says a royalist spy, not shared by a single Frenchwoman. The Duchess of Gordon, though another of his admirers--pointing to his portrait she would say to the wife of Consul Lebrun, ‘Voilà mon zéro (héros)’--went rather beyond the bounds of politeness when, seated between Berthier and Decrès,[152] Ministers of War and Marine, she said, ‘I am always frightened when I look at you (Berthier), but fortunately you (turning to Decrès) reassure me.’[153] This, however, might pass for one of her usual sallies, intimating that the French army was formidable, but not the navy. Yet Thibaudeau says:--

‘Paris was infatuated with the arrival of these foreigners.
It was a scramble among all classes to give them the best
reception. It was the height of fashion to dine and amuse them
and give them balls; the women especially were enamoured of
the English and had a rage for their fashions. In short France
seemed to eclipse itself before a few thousands of these proud
and unprofitable foreigners, towards whom the attentions of
hospitality were carried to a ridiculous excess. Frenchmen of
the old school did not share this intoxication, but sighed over
this forgetfulness of national dignity.’[154]

And Reichardt speaks of French fops parading English garments, horses, and dogs. Even Napoleon, he says, sent to England for horses and hounds. Frenchmen, with their keen sense of the ludicrous, were amused, he tells us, with the middle-class Englishman, who had never previously visited Paris. Caricaturists depicted him standing open-mouthed in front of public buildings, with the wife in insular toilette or grotesquely aping French fashions. A short play entitled _l’Anglais à Paris_, which was apparently never printed, doubtless made good-humoured fun of the visitors.

At a theatre two of these were once so unceremonious as to take off their coats on a hot July night, whereupon there was a scene. They were obdurate, alleging that this was allowable in London, until a police inspector arrived and expostulated with them. Their habit of carrying umbrellas and their nankeen or black gaiters were, however, adopted by the French, but their beverages probably found less favour, albeit an English tea-warehouse had been opened, as also a beershop which boasted of its _aile_ (sic) as especially suitable for cool or damp weather.

Vernet drew a caricature of the Duchess of Gordon as a stout woman holding her daughter by the hand. There were other family parties. ‘English women,’ says the _Journal des Débats_ (Sept. 1, 1802), ‘are readily to be distinguished. If their grave and becoming demeanour were not sufficiently marked, the group of children accompanying them would be more than enough to show the difference between them and Parisian ladies.’ Although tradesmen were glad to see English customers, they missed the extravagant _milords_ of old times. The Cholmondeleys, indeed, had astonished Calais by their lavishness, requiring five-and-twenty horses for their coaches to Paris, where they were doubtless equally prodigal, and Lord Aberdeen was also lavish; but most of the visitors haggled about prices, bought only cheap goods, and frequented cheap restaurants. Even rich nabobs seemed bent on spending as little as possible. A royalist agent, while remarking that all Europe was infected with the enthusiasm for Bonaparte and hastened to Paris to behold the great man at least once, says:--

‘It is easy to see that curiosity alone attracts foreigners,
especially the English. The proof is that they never make a long
stay among us. They come to see the First Consul, attend the
parade and theatres, visit the museums and other curiosities;
then they leave. Paris is thus for foreigners merely a huge inn,
where they come to examine the consequences of the Revolution
and admire the masterpieces stolen from Italy and Flanders.’[155]

This is corroborated by a Weimar magazine, _London und Paris_, which speaks of the wealthiest visitors as apparently resolved on economising, beating down shopkeepers and chiefly frequenting the museums and other gratuitous spectacles, or gaping from morning to night in the squares and on the bridges. Campe speaks of a fortnight as the average stay, and accepting the obviously exaggerated calculation of a Paris newspaper that there were 32,000 English arrivals a month, he estimated that each spent 30 guineas and that Paris was the richer by 960,000 guineas a month. Reichardt estimated 20 guineas as the cost of the journey and of ten days’ stay in Paris.

As for English impressions of France a few words will suffice. Most of the ‘chiels’ who took notes were struck with the liveliness of French society. The absence of roughness and hustling in the crowds at fireworks and regattas also then, as now, attracted notice. Eyre speaks of the readiness with which Parisian crowds made way for foreigners. On the other hand, the frequency of divorce and of _liaisons_ excited comment. King speaks of obscenity, immorality, and profligacy as universal in Paris, a remark which we might attribute to British cant but for his statement that he also saw drunken Englishmen reeling in the Palais Royal arcades. The term _monsieur_ had been generally revived, though in the public offices _citoyen_ was still retained. Madame Récamier showed visitors of both sexes her sumptuously furnished bedroom. Pinkerton and Hughes were charmed with the affability and grace of Frenchwomen, and Williams wished France and England could bestow on each other the one gaiety the other seriousness, while Miss Plumptree vindicated the virtue of the great majority of Frenchwomen. Miss Edgeworth was struck by the absence of beggars on the coach-roads--in Paris, however, carriages were beset by them--and by the good manners of the lower orders. Forbes found the coachdrivers so polite as to stop and allow their fair passengers to sketch the landscape. Eyre was delighted with the Palais Royal, whereas Redhead Yorke styles it a den of iniquity, and Miss Plumptree considered its erection a greater sin of Égalité Orleans than even his Jacobinical delinquencies.

Holcroft, who had a French wife and had paid previous visits, tells us more than other writers of comparative manners. He himself was taught a lesson of politeness. He was leaning against the mantelpiece apparently monopolising the fire, when a girl came up and in lieu of saying ‘You are in my way,’ employed the delicate periphrasis of ‘I am in your way.’ He took the hint and moved, but this was not all. She touched a cup and saucer on the mantelpiece, expecting him to remove it. He did not perceive her meaning, whereupon she took the cup and saucer and handed it to him. Again when a friend was lolling in a chair with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out, a French lady remarked to Mrs. Holcroft, ‘Look at that Englishman, he is anything but squeamish.’ Yet Holcroft saw Frenchmen in similar attitudes, not to speak of their spitting on the floor or pulling out white handkerchiefs bedaubed with snuff. The French were scandalised at the appearance at the Tuileries of an officer in Highland costume; but Holcroft observed women in male attire in the streets and also at the theatres, where they thus evaded the regulation excluding women from the pit. He saw a married couple undistinguishable in point of dress, but he admits that the woman showed timidity and the utmost propriety. On another occasion, however, he sat behind a girl in male dress who, manifestly to attract his notice, pretended to be making love to a female friend by her side. Little girls, moreover, were frequently dressed as boys, while boys had all sorts of outlandish costumes. Naughty children were often threatened with being sent back to their nurses on the ground that they must be changelings, and putting children out to nurse was so universal that in eighteen months Holcroft, except among the poor, saw only two infants in arms in the streets. He found French politeness in several respects wanting. Shopkeepers were the reverse of obsequious, and when his heels were trodden upon or his coat soiled by a cane or umbrella carried under the arm he seldom received an apology. If, moreover, at a theatre a neighbour borrowed his copy of the play it would have been retained till the end of the performance if Holcroft had not asked for it back.

There were marriages and deaths among the visitors. Lady Catherine Beauclerk, daughter of the Duke of St. Albans, was married at the Embassy to the Rev. James Burgess, the Duchess of Cumberland being present; she died nine months afterwards at Florence. The Baroness Crofton’s daughter was married to St. George Caulfeild of the county Roscommon, probably the ex-Guardsman and man of fashion who on the 2nd February 1803 appeared at Covent Garden as Hamlet. He was ‘well-proportioned and genteel,’ but too laboured in his attitudes and gesticulations. Richard Trench married Miss St. George. Lady Isabel Style died at St. Omer in December 1802, Champion de Crespigny in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1803, and Luttrell in the same month. Sir Robert Chambers, ex-Chief Justice of Bengal, who had intended going south, died in Paris in May 1803, and was buried in the Temple Church, London. Mrs. Charles Ellis, granddaughter of the Earl of Bristol, Lady Mary Eyre, relict of Thomas Eyre and sister of the Earl of Uxbridge, Lady Anne Saltmarsh, and Colonel Alexander Malcolm also died in Paris or the provinces.

Before passing on to the renewal of the war, I may mention some of the return visits to London. These were sufficiently numerous for sheets of voting-papers on Napoleon’s life-consulate to be sent over to the French Embassy. Let us hope that one of these was not filled up by the most prominent visitor, Grégoire, Constitutional Bishop of Blois, who had sat in the Convention, but was happily absent in Savoy at the time of Louis XVI.’s trial. He was no doubt eagerly questioned on the events of the Revolution and on the horrors from which he had rather unaccountably escaped. He plumed himself on being the first Catholic prelate who since 1688 had promenaded in St. James’s Park in full costume, and he wittily remarked to Fulton, ‘The English are a magnanimous, hospitable, and kindly people, and the country would be enchanting if it had but pleased God to give it sunshine and French cookery.’ Sir Joseph Banks showed him the sights of London. Madame Récamier was welcomed at London and Bath. She was noticed by the Prince of Wales, and made or renewed acquaintance with the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Elizabeth Foster, the Marquis of Douglas, his sister the Duchess of Somerset, the Duke of Orleans (afterwards Louis Philippe), and his brothers. Her portrait was in great request, but she was mobbed in Kensington Gardens on account of her transparent French costume.[156] Her husband, the banker, joined her in London in May 1802. Madame Vigée-Lebrun, who had painted Marie Antoinette, went in April 1802 and stayed three years. The Prince of Wales and Lord Byron were among her sitters. Madame Tussaud, an artist of another order, settled permanently in London with her waxwork collections. Delille recited his verses, but was addicted to eating jellies meanwhile, which with his rapid pace made it difficult to understand him. He returned in August 1802, and had obtained or was about to obtain dispensation from deacon’s orders so as to marry his housekeeper. Garnerin, the aeronaut, made a long stay, and ascending at Ranelagh Gardens alighted at Colchester. He made another ascent at Bath. Félissent, the worthless second husband of the great singer Mrs. Billington, had to her surprise followed her from Italy to London; but the Government, doubtless out of friendliness to her, expelled him under the Alien Act. Was he anxious to share the 4000 guineas which she was earning that season, or was he jealous, and not without cause, of the Duke of Sussex? Talleyrand shamelessly gave his brother, Colonel Archambaud (afterwards Duc de Talleyrand), a letter to the Prime Minister, Addington, requesting him to procure the payment of a considerable sum due to him while commanding a regiment of _émigrés_ in English pay. Archambaud returned with the money, but the London newspapers revealing his _incognito_ mission, Napoleon banished him from Paris, as also another Bozon, who had likewise fought against France but had since cringed to Napoleon. Fiévée, the press censor, was sent to write letters on or rather against England in the _Mercure de France_,[157] as also Colonel Beauvoisin, who on his return was ordered by Napoleon to write against Pitt, Grenville, and the Court. He was sent on a second visit with directions not only to write letters to his paper (apparently the _Débats_), and to send all anti-French pamphlets, but to ‘find pretexts for traversing the whole coast from the Thames to beyond Plymouth, the Bristol Channel, Edinburgh and the Scotch coasts.’ He was to ‘have a fixed salary, and extra pay whenever he answers the expectations formed of his talents and fidelity.’[158] Beauvoisin, according to Goldsmith, was intimate with Despard, the conspirator. Bonnecarrère, Madame Bonneuil, who had previously had a mission to Russia, Madame Visconti, mistress of General Berthier, and Madame Gay, are also mentioned by Goldsmith as Napoleon’s emissaries. Military men were also appointed by him as consuls at London, Bristol, Hull, Glasgow, Dublin, Cork, and Jersey; but a letter from Talleyrand to Fauvelet at Dublin, instructing him to make plans of Irish harbours, was intercepted, whereupon the English Government insisted on the withdrawal of these spies, a demand the more easily made by it as it had not itself appointed any consuls to France. A more legitimate visitor was Coquebert, a scientist and diplomatist who was deputed to discuss a commercial treaty, but failed to effect an agreement.

Some of the visitors were of an undesirable class, for in September 1803, when a royal proclamation ordered a general expulsion, the _Times_ said:--

‘What did France send to us? With the exception of a few persons
who came on commercial speculations, she sent a multitude of
adventurers, who were starving at home and hastened hither,
impelled by the reports of our riches and the simplicity of our
character; and in return for the wealth which our nobility and
gentry carried over to their country, they came among us with no
other possessions than their vices.’

Shall we reckon among French visitors Maurice Drummond, a descendant of the Jacobite Drummonds, who took over with him his wife, daughter of Lord Elphinstone, and his daughter Clementina, destined as Lady Clementina Davies to write _Recollections of Society_? She went at Edinburgh to a school kept by the sister of Professor Playfair, and her brother was born in 1807 on British soil. The latter, in 1841, proved his right to the French title of Duke of Melfort and Perth, while in 1853 an Act of Parliament, reversing the attainder, restored to him his ancestral British title of Earl of Perth and Melfort. He survived till 1902, when, his son and grandson having predeceased him, the earldom passed to Viscount Strathallan.

A less doubtful British immigrant was John Gamble, probably brother of the James Gamble who witnessed the Revolution. He had been in partnership as a paper-maker at Essonne with Jules Didot St. Léger, who had married his sister Maria.[159] Accompanied by Nicolas Louis Robert, the Essonne overseer, inventor of a machine for endless paper-making, he started paper-mills in 1804 at Frogmore, Herts, but these did not succeed. Didot himself, however, was more fortunate at Two Waters, Hemel Hempstead, where he remained from 1802 till 1816.

IV

CAPTIVITY

The Rupture--Detentions--Flights and Narrow
Escapes--Life at Verdun--Extortion--Napoleon’s
Rigour--M.P.’s--The _Argus_--Escapes and
Recaptures--Diplomatists--Liberations--Indulgences--Women and
Children--Captures in War--Rumbold--Foreign Visitors--British
Travellers--Deaths--The Last Stage--French Leave--Unpaid Debts.

It is not my purpose to discuss the causes of the renewal of the war. M. Martin Phippson, in the _Revue Historique_, March to June 1901, contends that though England, owing to Addington’s incapacity, was seemingly the aggressor, Napoleon was really so, albeit desirous at the last moment of postponing the rupture till his armaments were completed. Of all the explanations of the rupture the strangest, yet the most recent, is that of M. Albert Sorel, who, quoting some anonymous English writer, represents the renewal of the war as necessary to the English ruling classes in order to avert the establishment of a government like the French.[160] The truth is that all reflecting Englishmen perceived Napoleon to be a tyrant, and Paine, as we have seen, regarded Frenchmen as worse off than the slaves of Constantinople.

The treaty of Amiens, moreover, had never been more than a truce. Whitworth had never appeared to instal himself for a permanency, and English visitors consequently complained of his want of hospitality. On the 13th March 1803 Napoleon rudely apostrophised him at Joséphine’s reception. Whitworth’s own account of this has been published by Mr. Oscar Browning, but Napoleon’s version addressed to Andréossi, which seems to have been overlooked in England, is to be found in his correspondence. It reads thus:--

‘The First Consul being at the presentation of foreigners
which took place to-day at Madame Bonaparte’s, and finding
Lord Whitworth and M. de Markoff side by side, said to them,
“We have been fighting fifteen years (_sic_). It seems
that a storm is brewing at London, and that they want to fight
another fifteen years. The King of England says in his message
that France is preparing offensive armaments. He has been
misled. There is no considerable armament in the French ports,
all having started for St. Domingo. He says that differences
exist between the two Cabinets; I know of none. It is true that
England should evacuate Malta. His Majesty is pledged to this by
treaty. The French nation may be destroyed but not intimidated.”

‘Going round and finding himself alone with M. de Markoff, he
said in a low tone that the discussion related to Malta, that
the British Ministry wanted to keep it seven years, and that you
should not sign treaties when you would not execute them. At the
end of the circle, the English minister being near the door, he
said to him: “Madame Dorset has spent the bad season at Paris;
I ardently hope that she may spend the fine one; but if it is
true that we are to have war, the entire responsibility in the
eyes of God and man will be on those who repudiate their own
signature and refuse to execute treaties.”’

This storm blew over, and on the 30th March the young Duke of Dorset, the Harrow schoolboy, set off to spend Easter with his mother, his two little sisters, and his step-father at Paris. It was also stated that the Embassy was about to be newly furnished. But in April matters again looked threatening. Madame de Rémusat tells us that people collected outside the British Embassy, to judge by the preparations for departure whether there was to be peace or war. Whitworth[161] left Paris on the 12th May and landed at Dover on the 20th. His staff met with some obstacles. Talbot, on his way to Calais, was stopped at St. Denis because his passport had expired. He acknowledged that he ought to have renewed it, but the Prefect of Police, on being consulted, said he was exempt from the decree, and after a few hours’ delay Talbot, who admitted that he had been courteously treated, proceeded on his journey.[162] Mandeville not being allowed, probably for the same informality, to embark at Calais, returned temporarily to Paris. Hodgson, the chaplain, and Maclaurin, the physician to the Embassy, also encountered difficulties. On the 6th May it had been announced in the House of Commons that Andréossi had asked for his passports. On the 17th messages to both Houses and a notification in the _London Gazette_ dated the 16th announced an embargo on all French and Dutch vessels in British ports, together with the issue of letters of marque. On the 19th two French vessels laden with timber and salt were captured off Brest. On the 23rd a decree was communicated to the French Chambers providing that all Englishmen enrolled in the militia or holding commissions in the army or navy should be detained as reprisals for this embargo and capture prior to the declaration of war on the 18th. The decree was even extended by being made applicable to all persons between eighteen and sixty, even if, like clergymen and others, not enrolled in the militia. Talbot before leaving wrote a letter of remonstrance to Talleyrand, who stated that Talbot having no longer any official status he could not reply.