Chapter II: Introduction (2)

Or else, again, if it were too hot to sing, or we were too tired, M. le Major, forsaking the realms of fairy-land, and uncovering his high bald head as he walked, would gravely and reverently tell us of his great master, of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days--never of St. Helena; he would not trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how, virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore. And on all the little party a solemn, awe-struck stillness would fall as we listened, and on some of us the sweet nostalgia of bed!

Oh, the good old time!

The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle of Madame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk--a gleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white--a scent of sandalwood--a rustle that told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet, that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back to Mimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions.

On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most of the way home (to please her mother)--a frail burden, with her poor, long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against my ear--she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieve me, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so I was called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my name was Peter).

She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom, and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about the Erl-king--"mais comme ils sont la tous les deux" (meaning the Prince and the Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien a craindre."

And Mimsey was _si bonne camarade_, in spite of her solemnity and poor health and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciative of small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed to have no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite of her eternal gravity--for she was a real tomboy at heart--that I soon carried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, and would have done anything for her.

As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half a martyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun.

"Ah, vous ne la comprenez pas, cette enfant; vous verrez un jour quand ca ira mieux! vous verrez! elle est comme sa mere ... elle a toutes les intelligences de la tete et du coeur!" and he would wish it had pleased Heaven that he should be her grandfather--on the maternal side.

_L'art d'etre grandpere!_ This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldier had learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter of his own. He was a _born_ grandfather!

Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common--music, for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, and roast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil, which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves were eddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, or drifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped through the dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.

She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and the fireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think of the desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge home by wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, with Alfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Medor; swishing our way through the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripe horse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns and beechnuts here and there as we went.

And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesome and shivery it must be out there by the _mare_, as we squatted and chatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room before the candles were lit--_entre chien et loup_, as was called the French gloaming--while Therese was laying the tea-things, and telling us the news, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in the drawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet west behind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there was light, and the appetites were let loose.

I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall every incident of that sweet epoch--to ache with the pangs of happy remembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us there is no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and my consolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth, health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhood itself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happy recollections.

That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore apt to pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place, my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy of learning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently as English or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had to translate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latter languages--a task which has remained unfinished--and to render the "Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid" into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greece and Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, the Collect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not all beer and skittles.

It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.

Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's, opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize) the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.

Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth--a mere social test--a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter _h_, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into consideration; it was not to be done at the price.

In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their sons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by the way, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee for bed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something like thirty pounds a year.

The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes of exclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so grateful and comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly British public-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a dead language. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never had before; some of us even manage to do so already.

That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point their morals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty, familiar, and appropriate lines out of Horace or Virgil; and why Latin is so little quoted in French talk, except here and there by a weary shop-walker, who sighs--

"Varium et mutabile semper femina!" as he rolls up the unsold silk; or exclaims, "O rus! quando te aspiciam!" as he takes his railway ticket for Asnieres on the first fine Sunday morning in spring.

But this is a digression, and we have wandered far away from Mr. Slade.

Good old Slade!

We used to sit on the tone posts outside the avenue gate and watch for his appearance at a certain distant corner of the winding street.

With his green tail coat, his stiff shirt collar, his flat thumbs stuck in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, his long flat feet turned inward, his reddish mutton-chop whiskers his hat on the back of his head, and his clean, fresh, blooming, virtuous, English face--the sight of him was not sympathetic when he appeared at last.

Occasionally, in the course of his tuition, illness or domestic affairs would, to his great regret, detain him from our midst, and the beatitude we would experience when the conviction gradually dawned upon us that we were watching for him in vain was too deep for either words or deeds or outward demonstration of any sort. It was enough to sit on our stone posts and let it steal over us by degrees.

These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous, perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectable English tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.

And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientious Englishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. And then what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half an afternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard, round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!

It was our way in those days to think that everything English was beastly--an expression our parents thought we were much too fond of using.

But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable sentiment. For there was _another_ English family in Passy--the Prendergasts, an older family than ours--that is, the parents (and uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or _vice versa_) I cannot tell. Let us hope the former.

They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their type was a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the original of those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artists have sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. It had prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a receding jaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, that swerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples' heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable British self-righteousness.

At the sudden sight of it (especially on Sundays) all the cardinal virtues became hateful on the spot and respectability a thing to run away from. Even that smooth, close-shaven cleanliness was so Puritanically aggressive as to make one abhor the very idea of soap.

Its accent, when it spoke French (in shops), instead of being musical and sweet and sympathetic, like Madame Seraskier's, was barbarous and grotesque, with dreadful "ongs," and "angs," and "ows," and "ays"; and its manner overbearing, suspicious, and disdainful; and then we could hear its loud, insolent English asides; and though it was tall and straight and not outwardly deformed, it looked such a kill-joy skeleton at a feast, such a portentous carnival mask of solemn emptiness, such a dreary, doleful, unfunny figure of fun, that one felt Waterloo might some day be forgiven, even in Passy; but the Prendergasts, _never_!

I have lived so long away from the world that, for all I know, this ancient British type, this "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore," may have become extinct, like another, but less unprepossessing bird--the dodo; whereby our state is the more gracious.

But in those days, and generalizing somewhat hastily as young people are apt to do, we grew to think that England must be full of Prendergasts, and did not want to go there.

To this universal English beastliness of things we made a few exceptions, it is true, but the list was not long: tea, mustard, pickles, gingerbread-nuts, and, of all things in the world, the English loaf of household bread that came to us once a week as a great treat and recompense for our virtues, and harmonized so well with Passy butter. It was too delicious! But there was always a difficulty, a dilemma--whether to eat it with butter alone, or with "cassonade" (French brown sugar) added.

Mimsey knew her own mind, and loved it with French brown sugar, and if she were not there I would save for her half of my slices, and carefully cassonade them for her myself.

On the other hand, we thought everything French the reverse of beastly--except all the French boys we knew, and at M. Saindou's there were about two hundred; then there were all the boys in Passy (whose name was legion, and who _did not_ go to M. Saindou's), and we knew all the boys in Passy. So that we were not utterly bereft of material for good, stodgy, crusty, patriotic English prejudice.

Nor did the French boys fail to think us beastly in return, and sometimes to express the thought; especially the little vulgar boys, whose playground was the street--the _voyous de Passy_. They hated our white silk chimney-pot hats and large collars and Eton jackets, and called us "sacred godems," as their ancestors used to call ours in the days of Joan of Arc. Sometimes they would throw stones, and then there were collisions, and bleedings of impertinent little French noses, and runnings away of cowardly little French legs, and dreadful wails of "O la, la! O, la, la--maman!" when they were overtaken by English ones.

Not but what _our_ noses were made to bleed now and then, unvictoriously, by a certain blacksmith--always the same young blacksmith--Boitard!

It is always a young blacksmith who does these things--or a young butcher.

Of course, for the honor of Great Britain, one of us finally licked him to such a tune that he has never been able to hold up his head since. It was about a cat. It came off at dusk, one Christmas Eve, on the "Isle of Swans," between Passy and Grenelle (too late to save the cat).

I was the hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfred and Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, who so far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings. Madge and Mimsey looked on, terrified and charmed.

It did not last long, and was worthy of being described by Homer, or even in _Bell's Life_. That is one of the reasons why I will not describe it. The two Prendergasts seemed to enjoy it very much while it lasted, and when it was over they remembered themselves again, and said nothing, and stalked away.

As we grew older and wiser we had permission to extend our explorations to Meudon, Versailles, St. Germain, and other delightful places; to ride thither on hired horses, after having duly learned to ride at the famous "School of Equitation," in the Rue Duphot.

Also, we swam in those delightful summer baths in the Seine, that are so majestically called "Schools of Natation," and became past masters in "la coupe" (a stroke no other Englishman but ourselves has ever been quite able to manage), and in all the different delicate "nuances" of header-taking--"la coulante," "la hussarde," "la tete-beche," "la tout ce que vous voudrez."

Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris.

For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately old mansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and high walls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignified seclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in days gone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knights templars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert.

And that other more famous island, la Cite, where Paris itself was born, where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray, leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hotel-Dieu.

Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing and perspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses of the great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (the Place du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with high slate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to have such romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, and wondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one of these very dwellings must have been the Hotel de Gondelaurier, where, according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeralda once danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damsel Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she so transcended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she was but an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there, before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her final undoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spell the beloved name of "Phebus."

Close by was the Morgue, that grewsome building which the great etcher Meryon has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that it had for me in those days--and has now, as I see it with the charmed eyes of Memory.

La Morgue! what a fatal twang there is about the very name!

After gazing one's fill at the horrors within (as became a healthy-minded English boy) it was but a step to the equestrian statue of Henri Quatre, on the Pont-Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, by the way); there, astride his long-tailed charger, he smiled, _le roy vert et galant,_ just midway between either bank of the historic river, just where it was most historic; and turned his back on the Paris of the Bourgeois King with the pear-shaped face and the mutton-chop whiskers.

And there one stood, spellbound in indecision, like the ass of Buridan between two sacks of oats; for on either side, north or south of the Pont-Neuf, were to be found enchanting slums, all more attractive the ones than the others, winding up and down hill and roundabout and in and out, like haunting illustrations by Gustave Dore to _Drolatick Tales_ by Balzac (not seen or read by me till many years later, I beg to say).

Dark, narrow, silent, deserted streets that would turn up afterwards in many a nightmare--with the gutter in the middle and towerlets and stone posts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was _defendre d'afficher_), with bits of old battlement at the top, and overhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray old gardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! And suggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the street corners--"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," "Rue de la Vieille Truanderie," "Impasse de la Tour de Nesle," etc., that appealed to the imagination like a chapter from Hugo or Dumas.

And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty, self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their own hair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appalling wickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of either sex; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, lusty blind beggars, merry creeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned about their sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms or legs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from one underground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests and barefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and there a jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or a cuirassier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa," or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black _bonnets a poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers, conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes and straw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, and staring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at the pork-butcher's wife!

Then a proletarian wedding procession--headed by the bride and bridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best--all singing noisily together. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed by sympathetic eyes on its way to the Hotel-Dieu; or the last sacrament, with bell and candle, bound for the bedside of some humble agonizer _in extremis_--and we all uncovered as it went by.

And then, for a running accompaniment of sound the clanging chimes, the itinerant street cries, the tinkle of the _marchand de coco,_ the drum, the _cor de chasse,_ the organ of Barbary, the ubiquitous pet parrot, the knife-grinder, the bawling fried-potato monger, and, most amusing of all, the poodle-clipper and his son, strophe and antistrophe, for every minute the little boy would yell out in his shrill treble that "his father clipped poodles for thirty sous, and was competent also to undertake the management of refractory tomcats," upon which the father would growl in his solemn bass, "My son speaks the truth"--_L'enfant dit vrai!_

And rising above the general cacophony the din of the eternally cracking whip, of the heavy carwheel jolting over the uneven stones, the stamp and neigh of the spirited little French cart-horse and the music of his many bells, and the cursing and swearing and _hue! dia!_ of his driver! It was all entrancing.

Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Passy--by the quays, walking on the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (till a gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli, the Champs Elysees, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussee de la Muette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as it was then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, and before this poor scribe had reached his teens?

Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet as one gazed from the heights of Passy, with all its pinnacles and spires and gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields, its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July, its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord, where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettable fountains.

There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlike our tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread that stately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recently ennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the French" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.

Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sun was setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected the blood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire, with the cold blue east for a background.

Dear Paris!

Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a small English boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or his nurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination; all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning of life: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent of a hound.

Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. le Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugene Sue and _Les Mysteres_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers who sold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_au cinqueme_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cook with, and all.

There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinating and romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house were afloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, but always full of interest and charm!

One knew at a sniff as one passed the _porte cochere_ what kind of people lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, and what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burned tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fond of Gruyere cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidable cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or butter, and liked their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sipped black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun with mice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; and bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them too long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's dispensation.

For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous clang.

I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense by the altar-steps.

"_Le pauvre en sa cabane ou le chaume le couvre
Est sujet a ses lois;
Et la garde qui veille aux barrieres du Louvre
N'en defend point nos rois_."

And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic, synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes and days gone by.

Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an

"_Air doux et tendre
Jadis aime_!"

Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!

* * * * *

In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away and apart.

Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. le Major to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dear Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen her since.

* * * * *

Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.

My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal irony of fate.

So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come home at last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou (with a nice little old castle to match), called la Mariere, which had belonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we were Pasquier de la Mariere, of quite a good old family); and there we were to live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be French for evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary _pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his own again, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heaven knows what for!

My mother, who was beside herself with grief, went over to London, where this miserable accident had occurred, and had barely arrived there when she was delivered of a still-born child, and died almost immediately; and I became an orphan in less than a week, and a penniless one. For it turned out that my father had by this time spent every penny of his own and my mother's capital, and had, moreover, died deeply in debt. I was too young and too grief-stricken to feel anything but the terrible bereavement, but it soon became patent to me that an immense alteration was to be made in my mode of life.

A relative of my mother's, Colonel Ibbetson (who was well off) came to Passy to do his best for me, and pay what debts had been incurred in the neighborhood, and settle my miserable affairs.

After a while it was decided by him and the rest of the family that I should go back with him to London, there to be disposed of for the best, according to his lights.

And on a beautiful June Morning, redolent of lilac and syringa, gay with dragon-flies and butterflies and bumblebees, my happy childhood ended as it had begun. My farewells were heartrending (to me), but showed that I could inspire affection as well as feel it, and that was some compensation for my woe.

"Adieu, cher Monsieur Gogo. Bonne chance, et le Bon Dieu vous benisse," said le Pere et la Mere Francois. Tears trickled down the Major's hooked nose on to his mustache, now nearly white.

Madame Seraskier strained me to her kind heart, and blessed and kissed me again and again, and rained her warm tears on my face; and hers was the last figure I saw as our fly turned into the Rue de la Tour on our way to London, Colonel Ibbetson exclaiming--

"Gad! who's the lovely young giantess that seems so fond of you, you little rascal, hey? By George! you young Don Giovanni, I'd have given something to be in your place! And who's that nice old man with the long green coat and the red ribbon? A _vieille moustache_, I suppose: almost like a gentleman. Precious few Frenchmen can do that!"

Such was Colonel Ibbetson.

And then and there, even as he spoke, a little drop of sullen, chill dislike to my guardian and benefactor, distilled from his voice, his aspect, the expression of his face, and his way of saying things, suddenly trickled into my consciousness--never to be whiped away!

As for so poor Mimsey, her grief was so overwhelming that she could not come out and wish me goodbye like the others; and it led, as I afterwards heard, to a long illness, the worst she ever had; and when she recovered it was to find that her beautiful mother was no more.

Madame Seraskier died of the cholera, and so did le Pere et la Mere Francois, and Madame Pele, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M. le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of our own, Therese, the devoted Therese, to whom we were all devoted in return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned in vain.

The _maison de sante_ was broken up. M. le Major and his friends went and roosted on parole elsewhere, until a good time arrived for them, when their lost leader came back and remained--first as President of the French Republic, then as Emperor of the French themselves. No more parole was needed after that.

My grandmother and Aunt Plunket and her children fled in terror to Tours, and Mimsey went to Russia with her father.

Thus miserably ended that too happy septennate, and so no more at present of

"_Le joli lieu de ma naissance_!"

Part Two

The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself, that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull reading, I fear.

My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged to educate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "English gentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason I did not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it was because he had injured my father through life in many ways, and my father had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it was because he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl, and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India for seven years, and just before his departure my father and mother were married, and a year after that I was born.)

So Pierre Pasquier de la Mariere, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became Master Peter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where he spent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especially at that age.

I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at the back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the cattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house, a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday morning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream of Passy, of my dear dead father and mother and Madame Seraskier.

For the first term or two they were ever in my thoughts, and I was always trying to draw their profiles on desks and slates and copybooks, till at last all resemblance seemed to fade out of them; and then I drew M. le Major till his side face became quite demoralized and impossible, and ceased to be like anything in life. Then I fell back on others: le Pere Francois, with his eternal _bonnet de colon_ and sabots stuffed with straw; the dog Medor, the rocking-horse, and all the rest of the menagerie; the diligence that brought me away from Paris; the heavily jack-booted couriers in shiny hats and pigtails, and white breeches, and short-tailed blue coats covered with silver buttons, who used to ride through Passy, on their way to and fro between the Tuileries and St. Cloud, on little, neighing, gray stallions with bells round their necks and tucked-up tails, and beautiful heads like the horses' heads in the Elgin Marbles.

In my sketches they always looked and walked and trotted the same way: to the left, or westward as it would be on the map. M. le Major, Madame Seraskier, Medor, the diligences and couriers, were all bound westward by common consent--all going to London, I suppose, to look after me, who was so dotingly fond of them.

Some of the boys used to admire these sketches and preserve them--some of the bigger boys would value my idealized (!) profiles of Madame Seraskier, with eyelashes quite an inch in length, and an eye three times the size of her mouth; and thus I made myself an artistic reputation for a while. But it did not last long, for my vein was limited; and soon another boy came to the school, who surpassed me in variety and interest of subject, and could draw profiles looking either way with equal ease; he is now a famous Academician, and seems to have preserved much of his old facility.[A]

[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have here omitted several pages, containing a description in detail of my cousin's life "at Bluefriars"; and also the portraits (not always flattering) which he has written of masters and boys, many of whom are still alive, and some of whom have risen to distinction; but these sketches would be without special interest unless the names were given as well, and that would be unadvisable for many reasons. Moreover, there is not much in what I have left out that has any bearing on his subsequent life, or the development of his character. MADGE PLUNKET.]

* * * * *

Thus, on the whole, my school career was neither happy nor unhappy, nor did I distinguish myself in any way, nor (though I think I was rather liked than otherwise) make any great or lasting friendships; on the other hand. I did not in any way disgrace myself, nor make a single enemy that I knew of. Except that I grew our of the common tall and very strong, a more commonplace boy than I must have seemed (after my artistic vein gad run itself dry) never went to a public school. So much for my outer life at Bluefriars.

But I had an inner world of my own, whose capital was Passy, whose fauna and flora were not to be surpassed by anything in Regent's Park or the Zoological Gardens.

It was good to think of it by day, to dream of it by night, _although I had not yet learned how to dream!_

There were soon other and less exclusive regions, however, which I shared with other boys of that bygone day. Regions of freedom and delight, where I heard the ominous crack of Deerslayer's rifle, and was friends with Chingachgook and his noble son--the last, alas! of the Mohicans: where Robin Hood and Friar Tuck made merry, and exchanged buffets with Lion-hearted Richard under the green-wood tree: where Quentin Durward, happy squire of dames, rode midnightly by their side through the gibbet-and-gipsy-haunted forests of Touraine.... Ah! I had my dream of chivalry!

Happy times and climes! One must be a gray-coated school-boy, in the heart of foggy London, to know that nostalgia.

Not, indeed, but what London has its merits. Sam Weller lived there, and Charley Bates, and the irresistible Artful Dodger--and Dick Swiveller, and his adorable Marchioness, who divided my allegiance with Rebecca of York and sweet Diana Vernon.

It was good to be an English boy in those days, and care for such friends as these! But it was good to be a French boy also; to have known Paris, to possess the true French feel of things--and the language.

Indeed, bilingual boys--boys double-tongued from their very birth (especially in French and English)--enjoy certain rare privileges. It is not a bad thing for a school-boy (since a school-boy he must be) to hail from two mother-countries if he can, and revel now and then in the sweets of homesickness for that of his two mother-countries in which he does not happen to be; and read _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in the cloisters of Bluefriars, or _Ivanhoe_ in the dull, dusty prison-yard that serves for a playground in so many a French _lycee_!

Without listening, he hears all round him the stodgy language of every day, and the blatant shouts of his school-fellows, in the voices he knows so painfully well--those shrill trebles, those cracked barytones and frog-like early basses! There they go, bleating and croaking and yelling; Dick, Tom, and Harry, or Jules, Hector, and Alphonse! How vaguely tiresome and trivial and commonplace they are--those too familiar sounds; yet what an additional charm they lend to that so utterly different but equally familiar word-stream that comes silently flowing into his consciousness through his rapt eyes! The luxurious sense of mental exclusiveness and self-sequestration is made doubly complete by the contrast!

And for this strange enchantment to be well and thoroughly felt, both his languages must be native; not acquired, however perfectly. Every single word must have its roots deep down in a personal past so remote for him as to be almost unremembered; the very sound and printed aspect of each must be rich in childish memories of home; in all the countless, nameless, priceless associations that make it sweet and fresh and strong, and racy of the soil.

Oh! Porthos, Athos, and D'Artagnan--how I loved you, and your immortal squires, Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton! How well and wittily you spoke the language I adored--better even than good Monsieur Lallemand, the French master at Bluefriars, who could wield the most irregular subjunctives as if they had been mere feathers--trifles light as air.

Then came the Count of Monte-Cristo, who taught me (only too well) his terrible lesson of hatred and revenge; and _Les Mysteres de Paris, Le Juif Errant_, and others.

But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can express what I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deep into my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgotten history of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filled with pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school. It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those well-spent hours!

[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]

That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all my books. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! I vowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I might hunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my own eyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.

And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the dark slum--how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubled consciousness for months:

_Grouille, greve, greve, grouille,
File, File, ma quenouille:_

_File sa corde au bourreau
Qui siffle dans le preau.

[Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!"]

Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a few years.

I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent at Bluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, close by--a paradise. It was kept by a delightful old French lady who had seen better days, and was very kind to me, and did not lend me all the books I asked for!

Thus irresistibly beguiled by these light wizards of our degenerate age, I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the older enchanters--Homer, Horace, Virgil--whom I was sent to school on purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other dunces, when it was too late.

* * * * *

And I was not only given to dream by day--I dreamed by night; my sleep was full of dreams--terrible nightmares, exquisite visions, strange scenes full of inexplicable reminiscence; all vague and incoherent, like all men's dreams that have hitherto been; _for I had not yet learned how to dream_.

A vast world, a dread and beautiful chaos, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of life, too shadowy and dim to leave any lasting impression on the busy, waking mind; with here and there more vivid images of terror or delight, that one remembered for a few hours with a strange wonder and questioning, as Coleridge remembered his Abyssinian maid who played upon the dulcimer (a charming and most original combination).

The whole cosmos is in a man's brains--as much of it, at least, as a man's brains will hold; perhaps it is nowhere else. And when sleep relaxes the will, and there are no earthly surroundings to distract attention--no duty, pain, or pleasure to compel it--riderless Fancy takes the bit in its teeth, and the whole cosmos goes mad and has its wild will of us.

Ineffable false joys, unspeakable false terror and distress, strange phantoms only seen as in a glass darkly, chase each other without rhyme or reason, and play hide-and-seek across the twilit field and through the dark recesses of our clouded and imperfect consciousness.

And the false terrors and distress, however unspeakable, are no worse than such real terrors and distress as are only too often the waking lot of man, or even so bad; but the ineffable false joys transcend all possible human felicity while they last, and a little while it is! We wake, and wonder, and recall the slight foundation on which such ultra-human bliss has seemed to rest. What matters the foundation if but the bliss be there, and the brain has nerves to feel it?

Poor human nature, so richly endowed with nerves of anguish, so splendidly organized for pain and sorrow, is but slenderly equipped for joy.

What hells have we not invented for the afterlife! Indeed, what hells we have often made of this, both for ourselves and others, and at really such a very small cost of ingenuity, after all!

Perhaps the biggest and most benighted fools have been the best hell-makers.

Whereas the best of our heavens is but a poor perfunctory conception, for all that the highest and cleverest among us have done their very utmost to decorate and embellish it, and make life there seem worth living. So impossible it is to imagine or invent beyond the sphere of our experience.

Now, these dreams of mine (common to many) of the false but ineffable joys, are they not a proof that there exist in the human brain hidden capacities, dormant potentialities of bliss, unsuspected hitherto, to be developed some day, perhaps, and placed within the reach of all, wakers and sleepers alike?

A sense of ineffable joy, attainable at will, and equal in intensity and duration to (let us say) an attack of sciatica, would go far to equalize the sorrowful, one-sided conditions under which we live.

* * * * *

But there is one thing which, as a school-boy, I never dreamed--namely, that I, and one other holding a torch, should one day, by common consent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of the brain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule had been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which all who run may reach.

* * * * *

At last I left school for good, and paid a visit to my Uncle Ibbetson in Hopshire, where he was building himself a lordly new pleasure-house on his own land, as the old one he had inherited a year or two ago was no longer good enough for him.

It was an uninteresting coast on the German Ocean, without a rock, or a cliff, or a pier, or a tree; even without cold gray stones for the sea to break on--nothing but sand!--a bourgeois kind of sea, charmless in its best moods, and not very terrible in its wrath, except to a few stray fishermen whom it employed, and did not seem to reward very munificently.

Inland it was much the same. One always thought of the country as gray, until one looked and found that it was green; and then, if one were old and wise, one thought no more about it, and turned one's gaze inward. Moreover, it seemed to rain incessantly.

But it was the country and the sea, after Bluefriars and the cloisters--after Newgate, St. Bartholomew, and Smithfield.

And one could fish and bathe in the sea after all, and ride in the country, and even follow the hounds, a little later; which would have been a joy beyond compare if one had not been blessed with an uncle who thought one rode like a French tailor, and told one so, and mimicked one, in the presence of charming young ladies who rode in perfection.

In fact, it was heaven itself by comparison, and would have remained so longer but for Colonel Ibbetson's efforts to make a gentleman of me--an English gentleman.

What is a gentleman? It is a grand old name; but what does it mean?

At one time, to say of a man that he is a gentleman, is to confer on him the highest title of distinction we can think of; even if we are speaking of a prince.

At another, to say of a man that he is _not_ a gentleman is almost to stigmatize him as a social outcast, unfit for the company of his kind--even if it is only one haberdasher speaking of another.

_Who_ is a gentleman, and yet who _is not_?

The Prince of Darkness was one, and so was Mr. John Halifax, if we are to believe those who knew them best; and so was one "Pelham," according to the late Sir Edward Bulwer, Earl of Lytton, etc.; and it certainly seemed as if _he_ ought to know.

And I was to be another, according to Roger Ibbetson, Esquire, of Ibbetson Hall, late Colonel of the--, and it certainly seemed as if he ought to know too! The word was as constantly on his lips (when talking to _me_) as though, instead of having borne her Majesty's commission, he were a hairdresser's assistant who had just come into an independent fortune.

This course of tuition began pleasantly enough, before I left London, by his sending me to his tailors, who made me several beautiful suits; especially an evening suit, which has lasted me for life, alas; and these, after the uniform of the gray-coat school, were like an initiation to the splendors of freedom and manhood.

Colonel Ibbetson--or Uncle Ibbetson, as I used to call him--was my mother's first cousin; my grandmother, Mrs. Biddulph, was the sister of his father, the late Archdeacon Ibbetson, a very pious, learned, and exemplary divine, of good family.

But his mother (the Archdeacon's second wife) had been the only child and heiress of an immensely rich pawnbroker, by name Mendoza; a Portuguese Jew, with a dash of colored blood in his veins besides, it was said; and, indeed, this remote African strain still showed itself in Uncle Ibbetson's thick lips, wide open nostrils, and big black eyes with yellow whites--and especially in his long, splay, lark-heeled feet, which gave both himself and the best bootmaker in London a great deal of trouble.

Otherwise, and in spite of his ugly face, he was not without a certain soldier-like air of distinction, being very tall and powerfully built. He wore stays, and an excellent wig, for he was prematurely bald; and he carried his hat on one side, which (in my untutored eyes) made him look very much like a "_swell_," but not quite like a _gentleman_.

To wear your hat jauntily cocked over one eye, and yet "look like a gentleman!"

It can be done, I am told; and has been, and is even still! It is not, perhaps, a very lofty achievement--but such as it is, it requires a somewhat rare combination of social and physical gifts in the wearer; and the possession of either Semitic or African blood does not seem to be one of these.

Colonel Ibbetson could do a little of everything--sketch (especially a steam-boat on a smooth sea, with beautiful thick smoke reflected in the water), play the guitar, sing chansonnettes and canzonets, write society verses, quote De Musset--

_"Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone
Une Andalouse au sein bruni?"_

He would speak French whenever he could, even to an English ostler, and then recollect himself suddenly, and apologize for his thoughtlessness; and even when he spoke English, he would embroider it with little two-penny French tags and idioms: "Pour tout potage"; "Nous avons change tout cela"; "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?" etc.; or Italian, "Chi lo sa?" "Pazienza!" "Ahime!" or even Latin, "Eheu fugaces," and "Vidi tantum!" for he had been an Eton boy. It must have been very cheap Latin, for I could always understand it myself! He drew the line at German and Greek; fortunately, for so do I. He was a bachelor, and his domestic arrangements had been irregular, and I will not dwell upon them; but his house, as far as it went, seemed to promise better things.

His architect, Mr. Lintot, an extraordinary little man, full of genius and quite self-made, became my friend and taught me to smoke, and drink gin and water.