Chapter V: Part 5

Still, in the repertory of my imagination lay my Abbess of Parma, until at last I found a niche for her, in “the O’Briens and O’Flahertys,” where something of her character, and a literal description of her apartment, in the monastery of St. Paul, is given; and there she figures away as the Abbess of Moy Cullen.—“_Au reste_,” all that is said in that novel of the foundress of the “holy heart,” is historically true: a young, clever, and wealthy _religieuse_, acting by the agency of the Jesuits, did found that mystic worship, which is still throughout Catholic Europe a sign and a focus of jesuitism.

THE CAP OF LIBERTY.

The cap of liberty, which still adorned the milestones near the French capital, in 1813, and which were to have been effaced, in order to make way for Napoleon’s eagle, were supplanted at the restoration by the _fleur de lis_. This is the history of the French revolution in a single sentence.

Among the Romans, the presentation of a cap was part of the ceremony observed in the manumission of slaves, and, therefore, perhaps, it was adopted as an emblem of freedom. The custom is still preserved at the investiture of a doctor in the university graduations. The circumstance gives a strong meaning to a whimsical speech of Sir R. St. G., who, at the celebrated Catholic dinner at the Black Abbey, at Kilkenny, got very tipsy. During the process he had made several efforts to be as eloquent as his neighbours, but was coughed down as often as he got on his legs. In all the sulkiness of a fuddled man, he resolved to go away; but he discovered that his hat had gone before him, and suddenly finding a pause and a subject for his oratory, he exclaimed, “Gentlemen, I came here to emancipate you, and, d—n you, you have stolen my hat.”

_À propos_ to university graduations: when the present Duke of Gloucester took his degree, his father, who was at Cambridge to witness the ceremony, was also complimented with an honorary doctorate. The opportunity was seized upon by the professors to bring into the speeches (in which they introduce their _children_, the new graduates) an appropriate compliment to their illustrious guest. Of this the royal visitor was duly warned; and as it was supposed that he might not have recently “rubbed up his Latin,” as Queen Elizabeth phrased it, he was directed to be upon the alert, and whenever he caught the word “_principes_,” to infer a compliment and bow accordingly. With the professors of divinity and of law, things passed as had been pre-arranged, but Sir I. P., the Professor of Physic, was “ill at these numbers,” and too indolent to compose a speech especially for the occasion; so away he went with the old humdrum string of common-places, touching the rise, progress, dignity, and importance of the art of honestly committing manslaughter: he had not, however, travelled far, before he arrived at a sentence beginning with “Hippocrates et Galen, principes medicinæ,” and down went the head of the old duke, as if Galen and Hippocrates had belonged to the House of Hanover.

PROVIDENCE.

Aristotle maintained that the barbarians were created expressly to become slaves;—while La Fiteau, a jesuit, who wrote an history of the aboriginal Americans, believed that none but an atheist would dare to say they were creatures of God’s forming. In the same spirit, a modern judge had the assurance to assert that slavery is not contrary to Christianity, because bishops voted for it. Providence is, under all systems, the “_prête-nom_” for the injustices of man.

Madame de Genlis (_Dictionnaire des Etiquettes_) says, “Providence has instilled an irresistible love of the marvellous into the heart of man, in order to predispose him for receiving without difficulty the celestial lights of faith.” Unfortunately for the hypothesis, this capital contrivance has been as much at the service of the “devilish darkness” of a thousand-and-one false religions, as of the “celestial lights” of catholicity. If Voltaire had uttered such a sentiment, it would have been said, and with justice, that his object was to bring religion into contempt, and to expose the roguery of priests, who trade upon the weakness of human nature. Men love the marvellous, because they are greedy of strong sensations; and, as this propensity hurries them into false tastes, so it predisposes them to superstition and false creeds. Protestantism has too little of the marvellous for the warm sensibilities of the south; and even Madame de Genlis’s popery is not wonderful enough for the good people of Spain and Portugal.

TAKING A SHOWER BATH.

A great senator and statesman of the “Irish nation,” being ordered a shower-bath lately, sent to the physician, who had prescribed the remedy, to know if he might soften the shock by wearing a brazen bason on his head. Oh, Cruikshank! what a subject! Bath, bason, statesman, and all!! And yet this being is a particle of the “collective wisdom” to which the destiny of a great nation is confided. Institutions which provide for human happiness can throw up no barricado to stem the influx of human absurdity: that which is made for man, and by man, is inevitably exposed to the imperfections both of the agent and object of all systems.

VIEWS OF THE CATHOLIC QUESTION.

“I suppose, my lord,” said the foreign valet of the Earl of P——, the other day, “I suppose we shall have the opera and the theatres open in England on Sundays, _comme ailleurs_, if the Catholic Bill passes?”

“I have not heard _that_,” replied his lordship, smiling; “and I should rather think the contrary.”

“_Diantre_,” replied the French emancipator, grinding his teeth, “_Eh à quoi bon donc leur émancipation? qu’est ce que ça fait?_”[35]

“Let me send you some turbot, L——,” said Mr. ——, the other day at dinner, to a well known and respectable Irish catholic barrister.

“Turbot,” replied the papist counsellor, coldly, “O! I am emancipated—I have done with fish!”

The Irish catholics hate fish; but are rigorous observers of fasts, and of all forms and ordinances imposed by a church, to which, as much from a point of honour as of faith, they rigidly submit. How many of the idle forms of church discipline will fall into desuetude, with that feeling of sympathy for the persecuted faith that imposed them! a feeling which catholic emancipation will cool down, and obliterate.

VIRAGOS.

Women of strong tempers always govern their husbands; women of strong minds influence them. A man’s sole refuge against an ill-tempered wife is to run away from her, which he generally does when he can. The influence of a clever woman lies in the power she has of hiding it. Still the virago, I believe, has the best of it: for if the man, in affecting to submit, very frequently only conceals, still he endures. The key to the government of all men is their passions; and after these—but this is shewing up the mystery of the craft;

“Plague on it, that rogues can’t be true to themselves.”

FEMALE PERSEVERANCE.

“Nous n’avons point de diable, assez diable, pour tenir tête à
une méchante femme.”[36]

_La Descente de Mezzeten en Enfers._

Why are women so much more pertinacious than men? _Voyons un peu!_ A woman is like a mastiff; once she seizes on an idea, she never lets go, till she has fairly worried out her end. She has no physical strength; no force of reason comparable with man’s; but she has a stronger volition. The toughness of her will is a set-off against the fragility of her means; and she substitutes perseverance for power. Man yields, after a struggle, to her concentrated weakness, because he hates whatever interferes with his enjoyment. Like Falstaff, he loves above all things, “To take mine ease in mine inn;” and to avoid a domestic bore, will assent to much, even when he does not approve. Man is essentially an epicurean; and woman, from necessity, a stoic. In public affairs the mere force of volition often supplies the place of talent and resources; while its absence neutralizes and renders inefficient intellects of the finest and highest quality. To this may be referred much of the success of female intrigue, under the governments which have permitted its operation. It was doubtless to the reiterated attacks of Madame du Barri, that Louis the Fifteenth yielded, when he abandoned the most estimable and enlightened of his ministers, _De Choiseul_; and a similar obstinacy in the unfortunate _Marie Antoinette_ goaded her reluctant husband into that course of duplicity and vacillation, which brought them both to a scaffold.

OPINION.

Intolerance is the offspring of conceit: we push an opinion, because it is our own, and resent contradiction as a personal insult. Very few persons, however, have any lawful right of property in their own ideas. The greatest number of our opinions are corporate, and belong to the age and country in which we happen to be born. No inconsiderable quantity belong to that venerable and respectable personage, our old nurse. Even the few notions which strong thinkers develope for themselves, depend very closely on habits of thought, impressed by tutors and parents, modified by external circumstances, equally uncontrollable. If some of our worthy anti-catholic, anti-reforming, corn-trade-fettering aristocrats, could be made sensible of the very vulgar origin of many of their favourite ideas, they would as soon shake hands with a chimney-sweeper as entertain them.

WIVES OF FOOLS.

Oh! ye women, who have the good, or ill luck (_selon_) to be married to fools, attempt not to reason with your dears—expect not to seduce, and despair of persuading. Wit, grace, and understanding, are only influential with men of feeling and intellect: to such arms the sensible and the clever never fail to yield. But the fool “bears a charmed life.” Remember the maxim of your great law-giver: “_On ne séduit pas un sot; on le dompte._”[37] A fool is incapable of giving quarter, and unworthy of receiving it. The worst of a fool is not that he _is_ a fool, but that he is so self-sufficient and self-conceited; just as obscure people become burthensome, when they imagine themselves important; and as those who live out of the world are unmanageable, from a fancy that all the world is occupied about them. Foolish husbands are always jealous of their authority, and fearful of being supposed to be ruled; they oppose, for the sake of asserting themselves, even when their inclinations are neutral: and once launched into an opposition, they persevere, in spite of conviction, because it does not become their dignity to be less wise than a woman.

LES ROCHERS DE MAD. DE SÉVIGNÉ.

“Travellers ne’er did lie, though fools at home condemn them.”

SHAKSPEARE.

It is no longer possible to exclaim with Madame de Sévigné, “c’est une chose étrange, que les grands voyages!” _Les grands voyages_, on the contrary, have become the most common and every-day events of life! A “good traveller” has ceased to be “something at the latter end of a dinner,” as La Feu has it: and to talk of the “Pyrenean and the river Po,” would now incur for the prosing delinquent the character of a bore, and the penalty of being once heard and ever after avoided. Travelling, even to “Judah’s barren sands,” is no longer a distinction; and the Traveller’s Club has so completely become every body’s club, that it has been proposed, by way of something really exclusive, to start a _crocchio ristretto_ of those who have never travelled at all. To talk of a visit to Paris is as cockney as to prate of the lakes of Cumberland or to cite their poets; to boast of having seen the Pope _pontificate_, is as pure a John-Gilpinism, as to chatter of Fonthill; and to have “swum in a gondola” is no more thought of, God save the mark! than a voyage in the Richmond steamer. The Pacific Ocean and the British Channel have become subjects equally common-place; and if another Peyrouse should disappear from the world, it is odds but he would be picked up in a month by some wandering dandy from Bond-street, or discovered on an _uninhabited island_ by a roving detachment from the Yacht Club.

“How came you to alter your route last year? I thought to have met you at Thebes!”

“Oh! I changed my mind, on hearing that half Bloomsbury were there before me; and so cut off for the North Pole with Parry.”

“Did you meet any one there one knows?”

“No, that’s the charm of it. White bears excepted, one has the place to one’s self. Whom did you have, by the by, at Athens last year?”

“Scarcely a soul; at least, scarcely a soul ‘above buttons.’ There were a few third-rate English and first-rate Irish to be seen, sauntering about the Acropolis, and making _goûtés_ in the Parthenon; but _pas âme qui vive_—that one ever heard of before. The A.’s pushed on for the Pyramids, the B.’s have been some time settled on the brow of Mount Caucasus, C. left us in the spring for the Crimea, and D. joined his eternal Pylades at Ispahan.”

“At Ispahan! what a fellow that D. is, with his eternal pretensions to taste! Go to Ispahan! when one is sick of it, and its Hajji Babas of Bond-street, and all that sort of thing. No one turns his horse’s head to the South now, unless indeed it were in search of the _terra incognita_. It is the merest _pont aux ânes_. One’s very tailor passes his _vacances_ at Smyrna (where mine, by the by, picked up some charming cachemirs, to make cool coats for next winter); and you know the old story of Lady Lydia’s maid and Monsieur Forbin, and the silk parasol, in the ruins of Thebes. The North, Sir, the North is the only thing now, the Frozen sea, or Kamtschatka, _via_ Moscow, that’s my _carte de voyage_ for the next travelling season. Have you seen my Droshka?”

“No; but I have a Britska waiting for me at Petersburgh. I am going to join Lord Frederick J——, who has the prettiest thing on the Sea of Azoff, built by Potemkin. Will you be _des nôtres_?”

“With all my heart. Let us rendezvous at Novogorod, embark at Smolensko on the Dnieper, and so proceed by Kerson and the steppes.”

“Exactly; and that will bring us within two verstes of Lord F.’s villa.”

It is thus that the home-bred youths “prate of their whereabouts.” Not only _il n’y a plus de Pyrénées_, but the total annihilation of time and place seems to have realized the poet’s rant, and to have turned the nursery-dream of Peter Wilkins and his flying men to a “flat reality.” While British travellers are thus illustrating the “march of mind,” by marching off to all parts of the globe, and

“When pleasure begins to grow dull in the East,
Just order their wings and fly off to the West,”

there is a nation which keeps its ground with all that tenacity of a toad on a tile[38]—a nation which, compared by some to tigers, by others to monkeys, and by Voltaire to both, appears to have been the least understood of any nation on earth. For while the North in hordes come swarming, as of old, over the sunny regions of the South, and while the south seems to change sides, hands across, down the middle and up again, in a cosmopolitical country-dance with the natives of the frozen North, the French, who stand between both, are sure to be always found at home. For one French traveller, of either sex, to be met on the high roads of Europe, one thousand, at least, of any, or every other nation, may be seen scampering from the Tagus to the Neva, and from Thebes to the Giant’s Causeway. The French are, in fact, the most grave, sedentary, and immovable people of Europe. Even their women, so falsely accused of vivacity and activity, expend their energies in perpetual movement of mind and muscle. Under the old régime (when the women in France led the lives of the sultanas in the harem, one particular only excepted), all the institutions, both political and social, tended to encourage habits of indolence, in which, in free states, and under happier moral combinations, the sex can never indulge. The very forms and language of high society were borrowed from the inveterate habits of a slavish, idle, and sedentary existence. Did any affliction befal a lady of rank, she forthwith went to bed, to receive the condolence of friends _dans la ruelle_. If she went to drive, it was but to _promener en voiture_; and even in modern Paris, a promenade extends but to a seat in the gardens of the Tuileries, or a chair on the Boulevards.

I had a friend in Paris, some few years ago, who was the most charming and most indolent creature in the world. She was one of the best remains of the old régime of rank and fashion, who had survived the plebeian bustle and democratic activity of the Revolution. Though she had nearly reached her grand climacteric, she was, as she often assured me, still “as active, vivacious, and locomotive as she had been in the flower and bloom of her youth;” and, witty and indolent as Madame du Deffand herself, she was a finely preserved specimen of a genus, now rapidly disappearing, which philosophy might have contemplated with rapturous curiosity. Madame de —— was a perfect impersonation of a lady of fashion of the days of Marie Antoinette. Her _ruelle_ was her empire; her _chaise longue_ her throne. She took her chocolate, and received visits in bed, during the day; rose late, dined at the hour of the old French _souper_, between eight and nine, and sat up half the night, surrounded by her _habitués_, among whom were to be numbered all the _bel esprit_ of Paris.

I was as much with her as my health and our very opposed habits would permit, for she was a perfect study; and I generally left her in the midst of her _media noche_, in all the vigour of spirits which are vulgarly supposed to belong to the early part of the day. As I made many sacrifices to these habits of indolence, I occasionally required them in turn; and I sometimes succeeded in digging her out of her hotel, where she had for years been niched, motionless as the priestesses of the temples of Pompeii, which modern _virtù_ excavates from their domicile of centuries. I once routed her from her bed at mid-day; and had her dressed and driving at Longchamp, just as the _beau monde_ were turning their horses’ heads homeward. I also once produced her, to the amazement of her friends, at the opera, before the ballet was half over; and I actually had her at a _séance_ of the _Institut_ before the expected _discours_ of the long-winded Mons. Quatremère de Quincy had quite concluded.

My indolent and agreeable friend, notwithstanding this decided _vis inertiæ_, talked in raptures of the country (like all French women), and had a _campagne_ three leagues from Paris, about which she raved, and from which her _jardinière_ was duly replenished with March violets, April hyacinths, and _immortels_ all the year. Daily projects were made, and as daily broken, for taking me to this “Délices;” and it was not till after a thousand “Nous remettrons cela à un autre jour,” that the day at last arrived, when, having myself made all the necessary preparations for a formidable journey of three leagues, assisted at the _levée_, hurried forward the toilette, and bribed over Félicie, her unfelicitous _femme de chambre_, to unusual expedition, I at last got Madame de —— under weigh, and absolutely transported her from her _dormeuse au coin du feu_, to her _calèche_. With horses and a coachman as lazy as herself, it was late in the evening when we arrived within view of the iron gates of the _campagne_; and before we had reached the end of the straight avenue of limes, it was so dark that we could scarcely discern the grim, grotesque stone statues of Arlequin and Colombine, which guarded the flight of marble steps, leading to the broad paved terrace on which the _maison de campagne_ was perched.

Before we had reposed from the fatigues of the journey, and swallowed our _goûté_, it was what is vulgarly called pitch-dark; and as the motive for making this _course_ was to see the gardens, the _serres chaudes_, and the luxuriant beds of hyacinths, then in all their “redolence of bloom,” I could not help expressing my disappointment, with a captiousness which afforded infinite amusement to Madame de ——, whose bursts of laughter were interrupted with “Et tout cela pour une fleur! pour un promenade! pour une fatigue manqué!”[39] My ill-humour, however, was at once vanquished, on beholding the gardener enter the room with a lighted lantern, and equipped with a nightcap under his hat, to conduct us to the garden. We immediately followed our guide; and, accompanied by Félicie picking her short steps over the dewy gravel, and her mistress’s fat dog, Sylphide, waddling beside her, we actually saw the hyacinths, and noticed the fine growth of the precocious _petits pois_, by candle-light.

With such inertness and hatred of all movement, it may readily be imagined that a necessity, which soon afterwards occurred to Madame de ——, for visiting the remotest part of the remote province of Bretagne, was an event full of difficulty and annoyance. A considerable property, however, depended on her attendance on the _Cour d’Assise_ of Rennes, and there was no alternative.

After procrastinating from day to day, and being half inclined to incur the risk of absence, and to leave her _procès_ to take care of itself, she at length decided to go on my offering to accompany her. I was just then in a fit of _ennui_ at finding all London in Paris, and was delighted by the hope of visiting a province that had the merit of being free from the incursions of his Britannic Majesty’s somewhat tiresome subjects. My proposition was accepted with a sort of incredulous joy; for a sacrifice of such magnitude was not to be understood: so leaving behind us _tous nos enfans et tous nos maris_, we started for Brittany, on a brilliant April morning, in a style that recalled the travelling of the days of Louis XIV. when the _carrosse d’un Grand Seigneur_ was a moving house, and (from the number of persons to be stuffed into its _portières_, its _sur le devant_, and other holes and corners) a house of no inconsiderable dimensions.

Madame de —— travelled with her own four sleek horses, her own carriage, and as many of her habitual comforts and _nécessaires_ as could be stuffed into its seats, pockets, wells, and imperials. Félicie and Sylphide occupied the back seats, as tenants in common with cushions, pillows, walking-canes, parasols, _vitchouras_, and the _nécessaire de toilette_. Madame de ——, wrapped up in her _douillette_ and cachemir, with _eau de chipre_ in one hand, and her _bonbonnière_ in the other, was obliged to have frequent recourse to both, in order to support her through the fatigue of the day. The historical sites of Rambouillet and Maintenon, on the contrary, kept me fully awake, till we arrived at the old town of ——, one of Madame de Sévigné’s oft-cited stages, on her way to Les Rochers. Here we alighted before the _porte-cochère_ of the _Préfet_ (the uncle of Madame de ——, _à la mode de Bretagne_), whose salon presented in miniature all that is ridiculous, pompous, grovelling, and contemptible in the Court of the Tuileries. The _Préfet_ represented _noblement et avec dignité_; and did the honours by his fair cousin, before his country subjects, as if she were a princess visiting the court of a brother prince; while Madame de ——, on her part, exhibited all the superiority, which Parisian ladies never fail to show off in their penitential pilgrimages to the provinces.

Amused for a time, but delighted to leave behind me the formality of the little court of the Prefecture, it was with no faint pleasure I saw my dilatory friend seated in her carriage at a reasonable hour on the following morning. Being one of those who, like Boileau’s abbot, had never seen the sun rise, the exertion soon overpowered her; and she fell into a profound sleep, in which she was joined by Sylphide and Félicie; while the novelty of all I beheld, kept me in that delightful excitement, in which alone we truly feel the value of existence.

The old feudal dukedom of Bretagne, intact from the common places of British travellers, untrodden by their restless steps, untraced by their busy pens—is still the Bretagne of Louis XIV. The natives continue to preserve their individuality, as in the days of their rude but heroic _souverains_. Genuine and unmixed descendants of the ancient Britons (who took refuge here when expelled from their own country), they remain to this day as unlike the inhabitants of the southern and central provinces of France, as if they still went _in puris naturalibus_, and painted their bodies blue. We had scarcely passed the Loire, when I observed an abrupt change in the physiognomy of the people. In the pure Armorican, or Bas-Breton of the aubergiste of the ancient town of Laval, I was struck by the rhythm and accent of my compatriots, the Celts,[40] and almost fancied myself listening to some Mrs. O’Shaughnessy in Connaught, or to the reading of a page from the Scotch novels. As we proceeded into the department of _Ille et Vilaine_, the heart of the province, the scenery became gradually less and less French. The dense and distant forests, shading to the edge of the flat, extensive heaths, recalled all the romantic desolation of northern dreariness; relieved by patches of rank verdure and flowering orchards, much more picturesque than the vaunted “vine-covered hills” of France.

Bretagne, only united to the French crown in 1532, by the marriage of Francis the First with the grand-daughter of its last duke, was so long governed in the true spirit of feudality by its petty but warlike princes, that its political circumstances, combining with a remote and insulated position, excluded it from all participation in the progressive civilization of Europe. In the Revolution, it suffered much by the Vendean wars, which threw it back nearly to what it was under Louis XIV.; nor has the share which it had in the general reorganization of France, materially changed its original physiognomy, either physically or morally. Rude and remote, however, as it was, it still produced some of the finest and most distinguished characters which illustrate the history of France. The two rival and romantic Dukes, Charles de Blois, and John de Montfort;[41] the heroic Jeanne la Boiteuse, Duchess of the province, in whose right Charles de Blois held the sovereignty; the clever Olivier de Clisson, constable of France; the gallant Tennegui du Chatel; and that flower of chivalry, Bertrand du Guesclin “le franc et loyal,” are characters which belong to the poetry of history, and almost redeem those bold, bad times, which produced such human monsters as Charles le Mauvais, and Pierre le Cruel. It is, perhaps, no false induction to assert, that much of their soldierly frankness and noble simplicity arose from an organization, nourished and preserved by the very localities of the rude clime and wild scenery in which they received their existence.

With the history of Bertrand du Guesclin in my hand, which had been lent me by my host of the Prefecture, (that history which Madame de Sévigné had recommended to Madame de Grignan,) and with my head full of de Montfort and de Blois, and _les grandes compagnies_, and the _maladrins_, and the Black Prince, and Jean Chandos, and the other prominent characters in the great melodrame enacted in Bretagne during the fourteenth century, I was abruptly recalled to the dull realities of the present moment, on the evening of the third day’s journey, by a shock, a concussion, that awoke my sleeping partners, and extorted exclamations from Madame de ——, screams from Félicie, and a loud, shrill, continuous howl from Sylphide. These, with the crashing of _flacons_, and the pious interjections of the coachman Baptiste, and the _gros juron_ of Hypolite the laquais, “gave the world assurance” that we were “abîmés, plantés pour la nuit,”—in one word, that the carriage was not only overturned, but rendered wholly unserviceable, till it should have passed through the renovating hands of a country smith.

To proceed farther was impossible; we were, by a mile or two, less than half-way between Vitri (where we had dined, “à la tour de Sévigné,”) and Rennes, our proposed halt for the night. Baptiste was a Bas-Breton; and having assured us that he knew every step of the road, _comme son bonnet de nuit_, he had turned into a narrow cross road, which was to have shortened the distance by a league. It was this unlucky pretension that produced the accident, which now left us, at sunset, in a dreary by-road, with a broken-down vehicle, and no visible prospect of aid, nearer than Vitri. While Madame de —— was exhausting herself in inefficient complaint, while Félicie was scolding Baptiste from the window, and Sylphide was accompanying both with a _basso continuo_ of howl, I alighted to reconnoitre our position, and discover what chance we had of assistance; and while Baptiste was showing me where the spring was broken, a person approached with a book in his hand, from the gate of a little orchard to the left. As he took off his hat and discovered his tonsured head, he observed, that there was a forge belonging to the château, the turrets of which were visible through the dark woods which cover the whole plain between Vitri and Rennes; that immediate assistance could be had, and the spring patched up, so as to bring us, with careful driving, to Rennes before midnight. The person who gave us this information was an elderly man, of interesting appearance, and in a clerical habit, with a certain _air de prêtre_, which left us no doubt as to his vocation.

“Et le château, Monsieur?” demanded Madame de ——; “what is its name? It probably belongs to some of my friends; for I am connected with nearly all the old noblesse of the province.”

“It is the Château des Rochers, Madame!”

“The Château des Rochers!” reiterated Madame de ——.

“The château of Madame de Sévigné!” I exclaimed, with almost breathless delight.

The stranger bowed assent. “Eh, mon dieu! qui est donc le châtelain? to what noble family has it descended? The Sévignés are extinct; and I believe Les Rochers were bequeathed to the Duchesse de Simiane by her illustrious grandmother.”

“Les Rochers have fallen into various hands within the last half-century, Madame. It was sold, with other national property, at the Revolution. The present proprietor is a rich gentleman of the province, Le Baron de ——. He is at present in Paris; but there will be no difficulty in showing you the château, which may amuse away the time till your carriage is set to rights.”

Madame de ——, who had not heard the name of the present proprietor of Les Rochers, whispered me, “Ah! ma belle, ce Monsieur le Baron d’aujourd’hui est sans doute un de la Bande Noire,”[42] coldly declined the proposition, and as rest, to her, was always enjoyment, she patiently resigned herself to the agreeable infliction of remaining tranquilly in the carriage; while Félicie, who descended to give Sylphide an airing, immediately seated herself on a mossy bank by the road side; and Hypolite, mounting one of the coach-horses, rode off for the smith, the smoke of whose forge was visible at a short distance.

The idea of visiting Les Rochers, whence so many of the inimitable letters of the most charming writer in the world were written, appeared to me rather a pleasant dream, than a reality. I could scarcely credit my luck. So taking the stranger’s offered arm, I promised Madame de —— a speedy return, and proceeded to the shrine of “Notre Dame des Rochers,” with as much devotional enthusiasm as ever carried a jubilee pilgrim across the Pontine Marshes, from the Abruzzi to St. Peter’s. Having cut across the little orchard, we were still involved in a woody copse, which gave us only partial gleams of the white towers of the château. “Envoyez-moi de la vue, et je vous enverrai des arbres,”[43] writes Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignan: and the request is still applicable to the site, which is covered with trees, to the total exclusion of some charming views, which, with a little effort, might be happily commanded from the building. The château and its mass of antique towers stand upon an esplanade, after the manner of the feudal edifices of France. _La cour du château_, spacious and gloomy, is shut in by a ponderous iron gate, through which I gazed with a fluttering heart, while the old porter, summoned by the stranger, went for his keys to give us admission. Nothing could be more antique and picturesque than the architecture, tinged and partially lighted, as it was, by a brilliant sunset. The château is said to date its erection as far back as the fourteenth century; and its high antiquity was verified by a spiral flight of stairs, cut out of a tower in the _corps de logis_; which was flanked by two other towers,—the whole bordered by grim Gothic heads, and monstrous nondescript representations of animals, which incrusted the upper part of the building, from the springing of the roof to its summit. One little tower stood apart, built in the same grotesque style, except that its roof resembled an extinguisher.

“That,” said my cicerone, “is a modern building. It is the chapel mentioned in Madame de Sévigné’s letters, built by her for _le bien bon_, the amiable and witty Abbé de Coulanges.”

The porter now gave us admittance; and as we paused before the interesting edifice, which, with Turkish barbarity, had been recently white-washed, he exclaimed, “It is another thing now, _pardie_, to what it was before the Revolution, with its green and brown walls, and moss, and ivy, and birds’ nests, and what not!—Mais nous avons changés tout cela—nous avons reblanchi toutes ces vieilles masures, à la chaux; et encore donné trois couches bien épaisses en dehors et en dedans.”[44]

The old porter then waddled on before us, and the stranger observed, in a low voice, as if replying to the disgust my looks involuntarily expressed, “Monsieur le Concierge, it seems, has never read the letters of Madame de Sévigné. They have indeed changed this most interesting of all sites into a grotesque _métairie_;” and pointing to a _lavoir_ and stables decorated with Corinthian columns, the curé added, “And yet this is not the worst!”

We were now in the hall of the château, and followed our cicerone through the apartments not closed against the intrusion of strangers; but all had been so recently and thoroughly changed to the modern style of decoration, that there was scarcely any object left to recal _la bellissima madre_, except her portrait by Mignard, which was placed over _le poële_ in the dining-room. Dark, low, and narrow, this apartment could not have been the room in which Madame de Sévigné so often entertained the splendid governor of the province and his lady, the high-bred Palatine, with the jovial, gay, and witty visitors, the Coulanges, Pomenars, and others of rank and talents, whom the assembling of the States General at Rennes brought to the château. Nothing now remained as it had been even so recently as the year 1810.

“Every thing has been destroyed and effaced,” whispered the stranger: “and even the _cabinet de lecture_ and the bedchambers of Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Grignan (where the portrait of _la belle et fière comtesse_ still hangs) have undergone a similar and equally barbarous alteration.”

As these classical and historical apartments were locked up, and as time pressed, and the sun was sinking, we hurried on to the gardens and grounds, so often described by Madame de Sévigné. But still change, barbarous, pitiless change prevailed. New walls, new terraces, new orangeries destroyed all those precious associations so intimately connected with the old. They had also recently cut down those _allées_, planted and watched with such maternal tenderness by Madame de Sévigné; and as their sites were pointed out to me, I could not avoid exclaiming, “Helas! qu’est devenu ce bosquet enchanté?”

“Que voulez-vous, Madame?” asked the old gardener, pettishly. “We have cut them down to make chicken-hatches for Madame.”

The stranger, to console me, exhibited the phenomenon of the echo, so often cited to Madame de Grignan, and which, as it could not be turned to any account for the hen-coops, still remains in all its original mystery.

“L’allée de ma fille still existed in 1810,” said my guide, as evident a Sevignite as myself; “but there now remains not one of those venerable witnesses, which so often shaded and sheltered in their promenades the tenderest of mothers and the most adored of daughters. Not one old and silent confidant exists of those _piquantes causeries_ between the witty _maman beauté_, and that _trésor de folie_, her still wittier son,—of the strange but humorous confessions, followed by such mild reprimands, and such sarcastic pleasantries,—and of those aveux _naïfs de l’aimable vaurien_, who in one night at Lansequenet _mangeait 500 gros chênes à sa mère_, and who, brave as Condé, _spirituel_ as St. Evremont, had entered the lists with Dacier, concerning Horace, had lived with Racine, laughed with Molière, jilted Ninon, _se grisait par bon air_, committed a thousand follies, confessed them all a thousand times to his _belle maman_, and, always forgiven, continued to repent old pleasures at Les Rochers, and to solicit new, on his return to Paris.”

I inquired in vain for those formal and venerable _allées_, ornamented with so many pretty devices, and consecrated by such recollections;—all had fallen victims to the axe of the terrible Baron Breton. Their names, however, still survived; and I had the melancholy pleasure of walking over the ground which was still known as “l’Allée Royale,” “l’Allée du Point du Jour,” “l’Allée de Tremaine,” and “l’Allée de l’Infinie.” At the farther extremity of the Allée Royale, a semi-circular seat of verdure, commanding a delicious view of the _coteaux boisés_ of the immediate neighbourhood, invited us to a momentary halt. This was the charming spot, whence Madame de Sévigné wrote so many of her letters,—“la Place de Madame.” It was decorated with a fine old orange-tree, which had been removed from its vast green-house, in a wooden _caisse_, by the stranger himself, in the absence of the baron. While we gazed on the rich and lovely vista, the sunlight gradually faded from the summits of the loftiest trees, the shadows deepened, and the necessity of returning was acknowledged with regret, and obeyed with reluctance.

Having begged permission, therefore, to gather a little _bouquet_ from the orange-tree which shaded “la Place de Madame,” I again accepted the arm of the courteous cicerone. As we proceeded towards the carriage, my thoughts were so completely transported to the days of the La Rochefoucaulds, the Coulanges, and the La Moussés, that, forgetting the lapse of a century, and of events that had doubled that interval, I inquired if any of the family of the amusing Mademoiselle du Plessis, the _bas bleu_ of Vitri, and the subject of Madame de Sévigné’s humorous delineations, were still in the neighbourhood.[45] He replied, that of the _dramatis personæ_ of Les Rochers, of all those who had played such amusing and characteristic parts in the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné, he knew but one name that had survived the lapse of time and the general _bouleversement_. It was that of Pilois.

“What!” I said, “the favourite and venerable gardener of Madame de Sévigné, who planted those very trees under whose shade we are walking?[46] Do any of his descendants reside here?”

“His great grandson has the honour of addressing you,” he replied, bowing.

We were now within view of the carriage; and taking from my neck a little cross of Irish bogwood, I requested him to accept of it, as a small token of acknowledgment for the pleasure I had derived through his means, in being permitted to visit the shrine of the goddess “of my idolatry,” and to enjoy a conversation with the descendant of her faithful friend and domestic, to whose character his illustrious lady had communicated a classic and deathless interest. The good clergyman blushed, bowed, and accepted my offering, with as much courtesy, and a feeling apparently as deep, as if it had been of “one entire and perfect crysolite.” The spring was now patched up, and pronounced capable of carrying us to Rennes. We therefore bade a hasty adieu to our accidental acquaintance, and soon lost sight of the ancient and memorable towers of Le Château des Rochers.[47]

STRAWBERRY HILL.

“Some cry up Gunnersbury,
For Sion some declare,
And some say that with Chiswick House
No villa can compare;
But ask the beaux of Middlesex,
Who know the country well,
If Strawberry Hill—if Strawberry Hill
Don’t bear away the bell.”

_Earl of Bath’s Ballad on Strawberry Hill._

Lord Byron has somewhere observed, that it has long been the fashion for the _canaille_ of literary criticism to vituperate Horace Walpole, “because he was a gentleman.” An unfounded observation, which the “Edinburgh Review” has successfully refuted,—and refuted upon the testimony of a deeper experience, and more intimate knowledge of the science of literary economy (if the phrase may be allowed,) than could have been attained by one, whose high rank, and high genius, alike placed him far beyond the dabblings of literary intrigue, or the possibility of intellectual subserviency.

If ministers of state best know every man’s price in the political market, if they are best acquainted with the inherent littleness of that “poor human nature,” to the corruptibility of which they have the means of applying such powerful stimulants, such resistless temptations,—the editors of an influential party and periodical work best know of what stuff those “Swiss of the press” are made, who deal out opinion according “to the measure that is measured unto them” by their taskers,—of what mixed metal the current coin of literary criticism is composed, which ductile, though base, takes the mark of any dye impressed on it by the master-worker of the mint. The Edinburgh Reviewers, therefore, told Lord Byron, and told him truly, that, as a body, the periodical critics of the day bore no malice against Lord Orford, because he was “a gentleman,” and that, far from rank being injurious to literary fame, even _he_, Lord Byron, _the star of the ascendant_, stood indebted for the lenity with which the author of “Don Juan” was treated by the most orthodox reviewers in England, at least as much to the elevation of his rank, as to the loftiness of his genius—to his “gentle blood,” as to his splendid talents. The fact is, that if

“A saint in crape be twice a saint in lawn,”

an author in a coronet has _twice_ the chance of obtaining a favourable judgment, that can be expected by mere plebeian talent, which has only its original merits to plead for those “sins” which all literary “flesh is heir to.”

With what indulgence has not the accomplished, but titled Author of “Matilda” been treated by the reviewing hierarchy of the day, even in spite of the little _faux-pas_ which forms the ground-work of his catastrophe,—in spite of the _vertu de moins_ of his _bon-ton_ heroine,—in spite of a moral produced by a cold in the head (when a more legitimate source of poetical justice was at hand, in the fate and story of many fair contemporary _délaissées_ in real life and living frailty)—nay, in spite even of his whiggism, his liberalism, and his anti-Austrianism; and when rebuked, how gently and with what a _patte de velours_ has this lordly author been treated by the great conservators of public and literary morals. What honours indeed have not been done to the light and pleasant pages of one, who has so agreeably added to the daily increasing list of noble authors,[48] and who is certainly something more than “a wit among lords, and a lord among wits.” But who among the literary toparchs, who are so ready to bring mediocrity into fashion, and to patronize the usurpations that can never interfere with their own acknowledged supremacy—who among the great fame-bestowing reviewers, that “give and take away” the bubble reputation, or try to do it, have turned out the author of “Crohoore of the Bill Hook,” and “John Doe,” for public admiration? And yet in these two great pictures of an unopened vein of national manners, there is as bold etching, and as fine masses of _chiaro oscuro_, as were ever produced even by the exquisite burin of the Scottish Rembrandt. It was not, then, the gentility of Horace Walpole, that stood in the way of his preferment in reviews, and his popularity with the members of literary coteries. Yet that he has been borne down, from his own to the present time, both by the corporate bodies, and by the honorary members of criticism, is quite true—his claims to genius denied, his pretensions to taste ridiculed, his style termed “slip-slop,” his “Historic Doubts” doubted, and his villa at Strawberry Hill, which he himself has named “a paper fabric to hold an assemblage of curious trifles,” selected as a _damning proof_ against his antiquarianism, by the learned young gentlemen of the “old lady’s logic”[49]—(the learning which draws fools from their obscurity)—who have always affected to consider it as a “Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome,” and a standing monument of his ignorance of all true _virtù_. And yet Horace Walpole _has_ established his claims to genius by its own highest prerogative—original invention! His “Castle of Otranto” is the first of its genus,[50] and has consecrated him the founder of that delightful school of literary fiction, of which Radcliffe, Scott, and a host of far inferior spirits, are but the disciples;[51] while his “Correspondence” has supplied to British literature that elegant branch of familiar composition, so long a desideratum. The letters of Horace Walpole have almost the merit of original inventions, compared with all the printed collections which preceded his own, (with the sole exception of those of his contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.[52]) The letters of Howell (deemed models in their time) had long been condemned by the standard simplicity of modern taste, which loves epigrams, and hates essays; and had already taken their places on the dusty shelves

“With all such reading as is never read.”

The quaint and peremptory style of Swift’s never _very familiar_ epistles (his Journal to Stella excepted), though certainly a pure and sterling specimen of the English language of the Augustan day, wanted that _laissez-aller_ charm, which is the perfection of letter-writing; and Pope’s _Voiture_-like and _spirituel_ epistles, have all the air of being got up for print, and were evidently as much intended for the public and his publisher, as for his mistress or his friend.[53] Even Addison’s “Letters,” (to whose style and “study” we are ordered by the once colossal dictator of literature—ponderous but not powerful—already a Hercules without his club—to “give up our days and nights,”—a false and despotic counsel! as if every age has not necessarily its own style, dependent upon the progress of society and the development of human intellect and science)—even Addison’s “Letters,” cold, formal, and studied, are as devoid of originality as the travels of which they are supposed to be a journal;[54] while Richardson’s epistles to his literary ladies are tiresome as the homilies of his own “good Mrs. Norton.” Gay (and perhaps Arbuthnot sometimes) has alone given to his letters the charm of that exquisite simplicity, which was the characteristic feature of the talent of the English La Fontaine; and Sterne, whose letters, though witty and agreeable, are affected, came rather too late to be offered as an exception to the studied and pedantic style, which left England without a good letter-writer, while France justly boasted so many.

Good letter-writing is but good conversation carried on by the pen, a familiar talking upon paper, the intimate chit-chat of the fire-side on its travels by post, not invented solely for some “wretch’s aid,” but resorted to by the fond and the feeling to cheat absence of its pang; or by the intellectual, and the social, “for the better carrying on” of that intercourse of mind and imagination, without which life is a blank; or by the gay, and the gossiping, for the circulation of those petty interests and every-day incidents and events, which, if important to none, are resources to all, which prevent time from stagnating, and which originate ideas, the lightness of which gives temporary relief from the great penalties of existence, deep thinking and deep feeling. The best letter, therefore, is that which makes the least demand upon the mind, and the most upon the fancy and the heart. He who writes to be studied, rarely writes to be read; he who writes to be admired, rarely writes to please. Ye Sévignés, and ye Ninons,[55] to whom _l’esprit Rambouillet_ was a source of perpetual ridicule, I invoke the careless spirit that pervades your delightful letters to attest the truth of the observation, and to bear witness in favour of the only letter-writer in the English language, who resembles or who rivals you! The letters of Horace Walpole were written evidently _à trait de plume_,[56] carelessly and playfully, and yet, like those of the goddess of his idolatry, they are eminently “_propres à faire connaître les mœurs, le ton, l’esprit, les usages de son tems_;” indeed he himself confesses, in one of his sketching details of the day, thrown off at a heat for the amusement of George Montague, and of his hero Harry Conway, (whose character and adventures, by the by, give a sort of epic interest to his correspondence) that he was “collecting the follies of the age for the benefit of posterity.” He was in fact, and often unconsciously, the Dangeau of his times and class; and in the course of his agreeable and epistolary gossiping, “enshrined in amber” the ephemeral “flies” of fashion, the autocrats of high society, who, insignificant in themselves, illustrate by their reigning manners and vices the history of the age in which they flourish, as “Kitcats” and “schemers,” the despots of Cornelis or Almack’s.[57] He has also left some characters of men, whose names belong to history, finer and truer than history herself could delineate. The true secret of Horace Walpole’s unpopularity with a large class of professional and amateur literati, who deny his claims to that reputation which genius alone can give, is the unmitigated war, the _guerre à la mort_, which he waged, almost from the go-cart to the tomb, against all pretension, and against all unfounded and self-sufficient claims to distinction. He not only attacked those influential _bodies corporate_, who have obtained authority over public opinion, merely by assuming it,[58] but with daring scepticism, and moral courage, he attacked the false gods of the popular worship of his day, set up by bad taste, or imposed on credulity by audacious talent.[59] He attacked the cant of Warburton,[60] and the affectation of Rousseau. He attacked the buckram heroes and heroines of Richardson, when it was “religion to adore them,”[61] and declared Sir Charles a bore, and Clarissa a quiz! He attacked the authenticity of Ossian, when it was deemed heresy to doubt it. He attacked the most imposing historical fallacies, which ages had consecrated through party prejudice down to the present times. He attacked scientific pedantry in the “old lady’s logic,” and detected literary imposition in the person of Chatterton. He attacked those solemn and sentimental vices of high society, which were then beginning to make their way to England,—from the voluptuous bowers of the Medici, to the sober mansions of the stern and rigid English gentry:[62] and lastly, and worst, the head and front of his offence, he attacked that loyalty which he himself terms “the loyalty to Kings in possession,”—he attacked its _alma mater_, Oxford, as a “nursery of bigotry and nonsense;”[63] and made war upon Toryism in its strongest hold—divine-righted prerogative, and royal infallibility and martyrdom.[64] For such an assailant there could be _point de salut_, and there was none. The blockheads of pretension, more particularly, flew to arms,—a powerful body in all times, “_car l’empire des bêtes est un fait constaté dans l’histoire_:” and though two generations have nearly passed away since the first blow was struck, still the rancour of assuming mediocrity, wounded in its life-nerve, is a bequest that descends from generation to generation:

“Et les envieux meurent, mais non pas l’envie.”