Chapter IV: Part 4

Barty came back from his holidays full of Whitby, and its sailors and whalers, and fishermen and cobles and cliffs--all of which had evidently had an immense attraction for him. He was always fond of that class; possibly also some vague atavistic sympathy for the toilers of the sea lay dormant in his blood like an inherited memory.

And he brought back many tokens of these good people's regard--two formidable clasp-knives (for each of which he had to pay the giver one farthing in current coin of the realm); spirit-flasks, leather bottles, jet ornaments; woollen jerseys and comforters knitted for him by their wives and daughters; fossil ammonites and coprolites; a couple of young sea-gulls to add to his menagerie; and many old English marine ditties, which he had to sing to M. Bonzig with his now cracked voice, and then translate into French. Indeed, Bonzig and Barty became inseparable companions during the Thursday promenade, on the strength of their common interest in ships and the sea; and Barty never wearied of describing the place he loved, nor Bonzig of listening and commenting.

"Ah! mon cher! ce que je donnerais, moi, pour voir le retour d'un baleinier a Ouittebe! Quelle 'marine' ca ferait! hein? avec la grande falaise, et la bonne petite eglise en haut, pres de la Vieille Abbaye--et les toits rouges qui fument, et les trois jetees en pierre, et le vieux pont-levis--et toute cette grouille de mariniers avec leurs femmes et leurs enfants--et ces braves filles qui attendent le retour du bien-aime! nom d'un nom! dire que vous avez vu tout ca, vous--qui n'avez pas encore seize ans ... quelle chance!... dites--qu'est-ce que ca veut bien dire, ce

'Ouile me sekile ro!'

Chantez-moi ca encore une fois!"

And Barty, whose voice was breaking, would raucously sing him the good old ditty for the sixth time:

"Weel may the keel row, the keel row, the keel row,
Weel may the keel row
That brings my laddie home!"

which he would find rather difficult to render literally into colloquial seafaring French!

He translated it thus:

"Vogue la carene,
Vogue la carene
Qui me ramene
Mon bien aime!"

"Ah! vous verrez," says Bonzig--"vous verrez, aux prochaines vacances de Paques--je ferai un si joli tableau de tout ca! avec la brume du soir qui tombe, vous savez--et le soleil qui disparait--et la maree qui monte et la lune qui se leve a l'horizon! et les mouettes et les goelands--et les bruyeres lointaines--et le vieux manoir seigneurial de votre grand-pere ... c'est bien ca, n'est-ce pas?"

"Oui, oui, M'sieur Bonzig--vous y etes, en plein!"

And the good usher in his excitement would light himself a cigarette of caporal, and inhale the smoke as if it were a sea-breeze, and exhale it like a regular sou'-wester! and sing:

"Ouile--me--sekile ro,
Tat brinn my ladde ome!"

Barty also brought back with him the complete poetical works of Byron and Thomas Moore, the gift of his noble grandfather, who adored these two bards to the exclusion of all other bards that ever wrote in English. And during that year we both got to know them, possibly as well as Lord Whitby himself. Especially "Don Juan," in which we grew to be as word-perfect as in _Polyeucte_, _Le Misanthrope_, _Athalie_, _Philoctete_, _Le Lutrin_, the first six books of the AEneid and the Iliad, the _Ars Poetica_, and the _Art Poetique_ (Boileau).

Every line of these has gone out of my head--long ago, alas! But I could still stand a pretty severe examination in the now all-but-forgotten English epic--from Dan to Beersheba--I mean from "I want a hero" to "The phantom of her frolic grace, Fitz-Fulke!"

Barty, however, remembered everything--what he ought to, and what he ought not! He had the most astounding memory: wax to receive and marble to retain; also a wonderful facility for writing verse, mostly comic, both in English and French. Greek and Latin verse were not taught us at Brossard's, for good French reasons, into which I will not enter now.

We also grew very fond of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, quite openly--and of De Musset under the rose.

"C'etait dans la nuit brune
Sur le clocher jauni,
La lune,
Comme un point sur son i!"

(not for the young person).

I have a vague but pleasant impression of that year. Its weathers, its changing seasons, its severe frosts, with Sunday skatings on the dangerous canals, St.-Ouen and De l'Ourcq; its genial spring, all convolvulus and gobeas, and early almond blossom and later horse-chestnut spikes, and more lime and syringa than ever; its warm soft summer and the ever-delightful school of notation by the Isle of Swans.

This particular temptation led us into trouble. We would rise before dawn, Barty and Jolivet and I, and let ourselves over the wall and run the two miles, and get a heavenly swim and a promise of silence for a franc apiece; and run back again and jump into bed a few minutes before the five-o'clock bell rang the reveille.

But we did this once too often--for M. Dumollard had been looking at Venus with his telescope (I _think_ it was Venus) one morning before sunrise, and spied us out _en flagrant delit_; perhaps with that very telescope. Anyhow, he pounced on us when we came back. And our punishment would have been extremely harsh but for Barty, who turned it all into a joke.

After breakfast M. Merovee pronounced a very severe sentence on us under the acacia. I forget what it was--but his manner was very short and dignified, and he walked away very stiffly towards the door of the etude. Barty ran after him without noise, and just touching his shoulders with the tips of his fingers, cleared him at a bound from behind, as one clears a post.

M. Merovee, in a _real_ rage this time, forgot his dignity, and pursued him all over the school--through open windows and back again--into his own garden (Tusculum)--over trellis railings--all along the top of a wall--and finally, quite blown out, sat down on the edge of the tank: the whole school was in fits by this time, even M. Dumollard--and at last Merovee began to laugh too. So the thing had to be forgiven--but only that once!

Once also, that year, but in the winter, a great compliment was paid to la perfide Albion in the persons of MM. Josselin et Maurice, which I cannot help recording with a little complacency.

On a Thursday walk in the Bois de Boulogne a boy called out "A bas Dumollard!" in a falsetto squeak. Dumollard, who was on duty that walk, was furious, of course--but he couldn't identify the boy by the sound of his voice. He made his complaint to M. Merovee--and next morning, after prayers, Merovee came into the school-room, and told us he should go the round of the boys there and then, and ask each boy separately to own up if it were he who had uttered the seditious cry.

"And mind you!" he said--"you are all and each of you on your 'word of honor'--_l'etude entiere_!"

So round he went, from boy to boy, deliberately fixing each boy with his eye, and severely asking--"Est-ce _toi_?" "Est-ce _toi_?" "Est-ce _toi_?" etc., and waiting very deliberately indeed for the answer, and even asking for it again if it were not given in a firm and audible voice. And the answer was always, "Non, m'sieur, ce n'est pas moi!"

But when he came to each of _us_ (Josselin and me) he just mumbled his "Est-ce toi?" in a quite perfunctory voice, and didn't even wait for the answer!

When he got to the last boy of all, who said "Non, m'sieur," like all the rest, he left the room, saying, tragically (and, as I thought, rather theatrically for _him_):

"Je m'en vais le coeur navre--il y a un lache parmi vous!" (My heart is harrowed--there's a coward among you.)

There was an awkward silence for a few moments.

Presently Rapaud got up and went out. We all knew that Rapaud was the delinquent--he had bragged about it so--overnight in the dormitory. He went straight to M. Merovee and confessed, stating that he did not like to be put on his word of honor before the whole school. I forget whether he was punished or not, or how. He had to make his apologies to M. Dumollard, of course.

To put the whole school on its word of honor was thought a very severe measure, coming as it did from the head master in person. "La parole d'honneur" was held to be very sacred between boy and boy, and even between boy and head master. The boy who broke it was always "mis a la quarantaine" (sent to Coventry) by the rest of the school.

"I wonder why he let off Josselin and Maurice so easily?" said Jolivet, at breakfast.

"Parce qu'il aime les Anglais, ma foi!" said M. Dumollard--"affaire de gout!"

"Ma foi, il n'a pas tort!" said M. Bonzig.

Dumollard looked askance at Bonzig (between whom and himself not much love was lost) and walked off, jauntily twirling his mustache, and whistling a few bars of a very ungainly melody, to which the words ran:

"Non! jamais en France,
Jamais Anglais ne regnera!"

As if we wanted to, good heavens!

(By-the-way, I suddenly remember that both Berquin and d'Orthez were let off as easily as Josselin and I. But they were eighteen or nineteen, and "en Philosophie," the highest class in the school--and very first-rate boys indeed. It's only fair that I should add this.)

By-the-way, also, M. Dumollard took it into his head to persecute me because once I refused to fetch and carry for him and be his "moricaud," or black slave (as du Tertre-Jouan called it): a mean and petty persecution which lasted two years, and somewhat embitters my memory of those happy days. It was always "Maurice au piquet pour une heure!"... "Maurice a la retenue!"... "Maurice prive de bain!"... "Maurice consigne dimanche prochain!" ... for the slightest possible offence. But I forgive him freely.

First, because he is probably dead, and "de mortibus nil desperandum!" as Rapaud once said--and for saying which he received a "twisted pinch" from Merovee Brossard himself.

Secondly, because he made chemistry, cosmography, and physics so pleasant--and even reconciled me at last to the differential and integral calculus (but never Barty!).

He could be rather snobbish at times, which was not a common French fault in the forties--we didn't even know what to call it.

For instance, he was fond of bragging to us boys about the golden splendors of his Sunday dissipation, and his grand acquaintances, even in class. He would even interrupt himself in the middle of an equation at the blackboard to do so.

"You mustn't imagine to yourselves, messieurs, that because I teach you boys science at the Pension Brossard, and take you out walking on Thursday afternoons, and all that, that I do not associate _avec des gens du monde_! Last night, for example, I was dining at the Cafe de Paris with a very intimate friend of mine--he's a marquis--and when the bill was brought, what do you think it came to? you give it up?" (vous donnez votre langue aux chats?). "Well, it came to fifty-seven francs, fifty centimes! We tossed up who should pay--et, ma foi, le sort a favorise M. le Marquis!"

To this there was nothing to say; so none of us said anything, except du Tertre-Jouan, _our_ marquis (No. 2), who said, in his sulky, insolent, peasantlike manner:

"Et comment q'ca s'appelle, vot' marquis?" (What does it call itself, your marquis?)

Upon which M. Dumollard turns very red ("pique un soleil"), and says:

"Monsieur le Marquis Paul--Francois--Victor du Tertre-Jouan de Haultcastel de St.-Paterne, vous etes un paltoquet et un rustre!..."

And goes back to his equations.

Du Tertre-Jouan was nearly six feet high, and afraid of nobody--a kind of clodhopping young rustic Hercules, and had proved his mettle quite recently--when a brutal usher, whom I will call Monsieur Boulot (though his real name was Patachou), a Meridional with a Horrible divergent squint, made poor Rapaud go down on his knees in the classe de geographie ancienne, and slapped him violently on the face twice running--a way he had with Rapaud.

It happened like this. It was a kind of penitential class for dunces during play-time. M. Boulot drew in chalk an outline of ancient Greece on the blackboard, and under it he wrote--

"Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes!"

"Rapaud, translate me that line of Virgil!" says Boulot.

"J'estime les Danois et leurs dents de fer!" says poor Rapaud (I esteem the Danish and their iron teeth). And we all laughed. For which he underwent the brutal slapping.

The window was ajar, and outside I saw du Tertre-Jouan, Jolivet, and Berquin, listening and peeping through. Suddenly the window bursts wide open, and du Tertre-Jouan vaults the sill, gets between Boulot and his victim, and says:

"Le troisieme coup fait feu, vous savez! touchez-y encore, a ce moutard, et j'vous assomme sur place!" (Touch him again, that kid, and I'll break your head where you stand!).

There was an awful row, of course--and du Tertre-Jouan had to make a public apology to M. Boulot, who disappeared from the school the very same day; and Tertre-Jouan would have been canonized by us all, but that he was so deplorably dull and narrow-minded, and suspected of being a royalist in disguise. He was an orphan and very rich, and didn't fash himself about examinations. He left school that year without taking any degree--and I don't know what became of him.

This year also Barty conceived a tender passion for Mlle. Marceline.

It was after the mumps, which we both had together in a double-bedded infirmerie next to the lingerie--a place where it was a pleasure to be ill; for she was in and out all day, and told us all that was going on, and gave us nice drinks and tisanes of her own making--and laughed at all Barty's jokes, and some of mine! And wore the most coquettish caps ever seen.

Besides, she was an uncommonly good-looking woman--a tall blonde with beautiful teeth, and wonderfully genial, good-humored, and lively--an ideal nurse, but a terrible postponer of cures! Lord Archibald quite fell in love with her.

"C'est moi qui voudrais bien avoir les oreillons ici!" he said to her. "Je retarderais ma convalescence autant que possible!"

"Comme il sait bien le francais, votre oncle--et comme il est poli!" said Marceline to the convalescent Barty, who was in no hurry to get well either!

When we did get well again, Barty would spend much of his play-time fetching and carrying for Mlle. Marceline--even getting Dumollard's socks for her to darn--and talking to her by the hour as he sat by her pleasant window, out of which one could see the Arch of Triumph, which so triumphantly dominated Paris and its suburbs, and does so still--no Eiffel Tower can kill that arch!

I, being less precocious, did not begin my passion for Mlle. Marceline till next year, just as Bonneville and Jolivet trois were getting over theirs. Nous avons tous passe par la!

What a fresh and kind and jolly woman she was, to be sure! I wonder none of the masters married her. Perhaps they did! Let us hope it wasn't M. Dumollard!

It is such a pleasure to recall every incident of this epoch of my life and Barty's that I should like to go through our joint lives day by day, hour by hour, microscopically--to describe every book we read, every game we played, every _pensum_ (_i.e._, imposition) we performed; every lark we were punished for--every meal we ate. But space forbids this self-indulgence, and other considerations make it unadvisable--so I will resist the temptation.

La pension Brossard! How often have we both talked of it, Barty and I, as middle-aged men; in the billiard-room of the Marathoneum, let us say, sitting together on a comfortable couch, with tea and cigarettes--and always in French whispers! we could only talk of Brossard's in French.

"Te rappelles-tu l'habit neuf de Berquin, et son chapeau haute-forme?"

"Te souviens-tu de la vieille chatte angora du pere Jaurion?" etc., etc., etc.

Idiotic reminiscences! as charming to revive as any old song with words of little meaning that meant so much when one was four--five--six years old! Before one knew even how to spell them!

"Paille a Dine--paille a Chine--
Paille a Suzette et Martine--
Bon lit a la Dumaine!"

Celine, my nurse, used to sing this--and I never knew what it meant; nor do I now! But it was charming indeed.

Even now I dream that I go back to school, to get coached by Dumollard in a little more algebra. I wander about the playground; but all the boys are new, and don't even know my name; and silent, sad, and ugly, every one! Again Dumollard persecutes me. And in the middle of it I reflect that, after all, he is a person of no importance whatever, and that I am a member of the British Parliament--a baronet--a millionaire--and one of her Majesty's Privy Councillors! and that M. Dumollard must be singularly "out of it," even for a Frenchman, not to be aware of this.

"If he only knew!" says I to myself, says I--in my dream.

Besides, can't the man see with his own eyes that I'm grown up, and big enough to tuck him under my left arm, and spank him just as if he were a little naughty boy--confound the brute!

Then, suddenly:

"Maurice, au piquet pour une heure!"

"Moi, m'sieur?"

"Oui, vous!"

"Pourquoi, m'sieur!"

"Parce que ca me plait!"

And I wake--and could almost weep to find how old I am!

And Barty Josselin is no more--oh! my God! ... and his dear wife survived him just twenty-four hours!

* * * * *

Behold us both "en Philosophie!"

And Barty the head boy of the school, though not the oldest--and the brilliant show-boy of the class.

Just before Easter (1851) he and I and Rapaud and Laferte and Jolivet trois (who was nineteen) and Palaiseau and Bussy-Rabutin went up for our "bachot" at the Sorbonne.

We sat in a kind of big musty school-room with about thirty other boys from other schools and colleges. There we sat side by side from ten till twelve at long desks, and had a long piece of Latin dictated to us, with the punctuation in French: "un point--point et virgule--deux points--point d'exclamation--guillemets--ouvrez la parenthese," etc., etc.--monotonous details that enervate one at such a moment!

Then we set to work with our dictionaries and wrote out a translation according to our lights--a _pion_ walking about and watching us narrowly for cribs, in case we should happen to have one for this particular extract, which was most unlikely.

Barty's nose bled, I remember--and this made him nervous.

Then we went and lunched at the Cafe de l'Odeon, on the best omelet we had ever tasted.

"Te rappelles-tu cette omelette?" said poor Barty to me only last Christmas as ever was!

Then we went back with our hearts in our mouths to find if we had qualified ourselves by our "version ecrite" for the oral examination that comes after, and which is so easy to pass--the examiners having lunched themselves into good-nature.

There we stood panting, some fifty boys and masters, in a small, whitewashed room like a prison. An official comes in and puts the list of candidates in a frame on the wall, and we crane our necks over each other's shoulders.

And, lo! Barty is plucked--_colle_! and I have passed, and actually Rapaud--and no one else from Brossard's!

An old man--a parent or grandparent probably of some unsuccessful candidate--bursts into tears and exclaims,

"Oh! que malheur--que malheur!"

A shabby, tall, pallid youth, in the uniform of the College Ste.-Barbe, rushes down the stone stair's shrieking,

"Ca pue l'injustice, ici!"

One hears him all over the place: terrible heartburns and tragic disappointments in the beginning of life resulted from failure in this first step--a failure which disqualified one for all the little government appointments so dear to the heart of the frugal French parent. "Mille francs par an! c'est le Pactole!"

* * * * *

Barty took his defeat pretty easily--he put it all down to his nose bleeding--and seemed so pleased at my success, and my dear mother's delight in it, that he was soon quite consoled; he was always like that.

To M. Merovee, Barty's failure was as great a disappointment as it was a painful surprise.

"Try again Josselin! Don't leave here till you have passed. If you are content to fail in this, at the very outset of your career, you will never succeed in anything through life! Stay with us as my guest till you can go up again, and again if necessary. _Do_, my dear child--it will make me so happy! I shall feel it as a proof that you reciprocate in some degree the warm friendship I have always borne you--in common with everybody in the school! Je t'en prie, mon garcon!"

Then he went to the Rohans and tried to persuade them. But Lord Archibald didn't care much about Bachots, nor his wife either. They were going back to live in England, besides; and Barty was going into the Guards.

I left school also--with a mixture of hope and elation, and yet the most poignant regret.

I can hardly find words to express the gratitude and affection I felt for Merovee Brossard when I bade him farewell.

Except his father before him, he was the best and finest Frenchman I ever knew. There is nothing invidious in my saying this, and in this way. I merely speak of the Brossards, father and son, as Frenchmen in this connection, because their admirable qualities of heart and mind were so essentially French; they would have done equal honor to any country in the world.

I corresponded with him regularly for a few years, and so did Barty; and then our letters grew fewer and farther between, and finally left off altogether--as nearly always happens in such cases, I think. And I never saw him again; for when he broke up the school he went to his own province in the southeast, and lived there till twenty years ago, when he died--unmarried, I believe.

Then there was Monsieur Bonzig, and Mlle. Marceline, and others--and three or four boys with whom both Barty and I were on terms of warm and intimate friendship. None of these boys that I know of have risen to any world-wide fame; and, oddly enough, none of them have ever given sign of life to Barty Josselin, who is just as famous in France for his French literary work as on this side of the Channel for all he has done in English. He towers just as much there as here; and this double eminence now dominates the entire globe, and we are beginning at last to realize everywhere that this bright luminary in our firmament is no planet, like Mars or Jupiter, but, like Sirius, a sun.

Yet never a line from an old comrade in that school where he lived for four years and was so strangely popular--and which he so filled with his extraordinary personality!

* * * * *

So much for Barty Josselin's school life and mine. I fear I may have dwelt on them at too great a length. No period of time has ever been for me so bright and happy as those seven years I spent at the Institution F. Brossard--especially the four years I spent there with Barty Josselin. The older I get, the more I love to recall the trivial little incidents that made for us both the sum of existence in those happy days.

La chasse aux souvenirs d'enfance! what better sport can there be, or more bloodless, at my time of life?

And all the lonely pathetic pains and pleasures of it, now that _he_ is gone!

The winter twilight has just set in--"betwixt dog and wolf." I wander alone (but for Barty's old mastiff, who follows me willy-nilly) in the woods and lanes that surround Marsfield on the Thames, the picturesque abode of the Josselins.

Darker and darker it grows. I no longer make out the familiar trees and hedges, and forget how cold it is and how dreary.

"Je marcherai les yeux fixes sur mes pensees,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit--
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbe, les mains croisees:
Triste--et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit."

(This is Victor Hugo, not Barty Josselin.)

It's really far away I am--across the sea; across the years, O Posthumus! in a sunny play-ground that has been built over long ago, or overgrown with lawns and flower-beds and costly shrubs.

Up rises some vague little rudiment of a hint of a ghost of a sunny, funny old French remembrance long forgotten--a brand-new old remembrance--a kind of will-o'-the-wisp. Chut! my soul stalks it on tiptoe, while these earthly legs bear this poor old body of clay, by mere reflex action, straight home to the beautiful Elisabethan house on the hill; through the great warm hall, up the broad oak stairs, into the big cheerful music-room like a studio--ruddy and bright with the huge log-fire opposite the large window. All is on an ample scale at Marsfield, people and things! and I! sixteen stone, good Lord!

How often that window has been my beacon on dark nights! I used to watch for it from the train--a landmark in a land of milk and honey--the kindliest light that ever led me yet on earth.

I sit me down in my own particular chimney-corner, in my own cane-bottomed chair by the fender, and stare at the blaze with my friend the mastiff. An old war-battered tomcat Barty was fond of jumps up and makes friends too. There goes my funny little French remembrance, trying to fly up the chimney like a burnt love-letter....

Barty's eldest daughter (Roberta), a stately, tall Hebe in black, brings me a very sizable cup of tea, just as I like it. A well-grown little son of hers, a very Ganymede, beau comme le jour, brings me a cigarette, and insists on lighting it for me himself. I like that too.

Another daughter of Barty's, "la rossignolle," as we call her--though there is no such word that I know of--goes to the piano and sings little French songs of forty, fifty years ago--songs that she has learnt from her dear papa.

Heavens! what a voice! and how like his, but for the difference of sex and her long and careful training (which he never had); and the accent, how perfect!

Then suddenly:

"A Saint-Blaize, a la Zuecca ...
Vous etiez, vous etiez bien aise!
A Saint-Blaize, a la Zuecca ...
Nous etions, nous etions bien la!
Mais de vous en souvenir
Prendrez-vous la peine?
Mais de vous en souvenir,
Et d'y revenir?
A Saint-Blaize, a la Zuecca ...
Vivre et mourir la!"

So sings Mrs. Trevor (Mary Josselin that was) in the richest, sweetest voice I know. And behold! at last I have caught my little French remembrance, just as the lamps are being lit--and I transfix it with my pen and write it down....

And then with a sigh I scratch it all out again, sunny and funny as it is. For it's all about a comical adventure I had with Palaiseau, the sniffer at the fete de St.-Cloud--all about a tame magpie, a gendarme, a blanchisseuse, and a volume of de Musset's poems, and doesn't concern Barty in the least; for it so happened that Barty wasn't there!

* * * * *

Thus, in the summer of 1851, Barty Josselin and I bade adieu forever to our happy school life--and for a few years to our beloved Paris--and for many years to our close intimacy of every hour in the day.

I remember spending two or three afternoons with him at the great exhibition in Hyde Park just before he went on a visit to his grandfather, Lord Whitby, in Yorkshire--and happy afternoons they were! and we made the most of them. We saw all there was to be seen there, I think; and found ourselves always drifting back to the "Amazon" and the "Greek Slave," for both of which Barty's admiration was boundless.

And so was mine. They made the female fashions for 1851 quite deplorable by contrast--especially the shoes, and the way of dressing the hair; we almost came to the conclusion that female beauty when unadorned is adorned the most. It awes and chastens one so! and wakes up the knight-errant inside! even the smartest French boots can't do this! not the pinkest silken hose in all Paris! Not all the frills and underfrills and wonderfrills that M. Paul Bourget can so eloquently describe!

My father had taken a house for us in Brunswick Square, next to the Foundling Hospital. He was about to start an English branch of the Vougeot-Conti firm in the City. I will not trouble the reader with any details about this enterprise, which presented many difficulties at first, and indeed rather crippled our means.

"'QUAND ON PERD, PAR TRISTE OCCURRENCE,
SON ESPERANCE,
ET SA GAITE,
LE REMEDE AU MELANCOLIQUE
C'EST LA MUSIQUE
ET LA BEAUTE'"
]

My mother was anxious that I should go to one of the universities, Oxford or Cambridge; but this my father could not afford. She had a great dislike to business--and so had I; from different motives, I fancy. I had the wish to become a man of science--a passion that had been fired by M. Dumollard, whose special chemistry class at the Pension Brossard, with its attractive experiments, had been of the deepest interest to me. I have not described it because Barty did not come in.

Fortunately for my desire, my good father had great sympathy with me in this; so I was entered as a student at the Laboratory of Chemistry at University College, close by--in October, 1851--and studied there for two years, instead of going at once into my father's business in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury, which would have pleased him even more.

At about the same time Barty was presented with a commission in the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, and joined immediately.

Nothing could have been more widely apart than the lives we led, or the society we severally frequented.

I lived at home with my people; he in rooms on a second floor in St. James's Street; he had a semi-grand piano, and luxurious furniture, and bookcases already well filled, and nicely colored lithograph engravings on the walls--beautiful female faces--the gift of Lady Archibald, who had superintended Barty's installation with kindly maternal interest, but little appreciation of high art. There were also foils, boxing-gloves, dumbbells, and Indian clubs; and many weapons, ancient and modern, belonging more especially to his own martial profession. They were most enviable quarters. But he often came to see us in Brunswick Square, and dined with us once or twice a week, and was made much of--even by my father, who thoroughly disapproved of everything about him except his own genial and agreeable self, which hadn't altered in the least.

My father was much away--in Paris and Dijon--and Barty made rain and fine weather in our dull abode, to use a French expression--_il y faisait la pluie et le beau temps_. That is, it rained there when he was away, and he brought the fine weather with him; and we spoke French all round.

The greatest pleasure I could have was to breakfast with Barty in St. James's Street on Sunday mornings, when he was not serving his Queen and country--either alone with him or with two or three of his friends--mostly young carpet warriors like himself; and very charming young fellows they were. I have always been fond of warriors, young or old, and of whatever rank, and wish to goodness I had been a warrior myself. I feel sure I should have made a fairly good one!

Then we would spend an hour or two in athletic exercises and smoke many pipes. And after this, in the summer, we would walk in Kensington Gardens and see the Rank and Fashion. In those days the Rank and Fashion were not above showing themselves in the Kensington Gardens of a Sunday afternoon, crossing the Serpentine Bridge again and again between Prince's Gate and Bayswater.

Then for dinner we went to some pleasant foreign pot-house in or near Leicester Square, where they spoke French--and ate and drank it!--and then back again to his rooms. Sometimes we would be alone, which I liked best: we would read and smoke and be happy; or he would sketch, or pick out accompaniments on his guitar; often not exchanging a word, but with a delightful sense of close companionship which silence almost intensified.

Sometimes we were in very jolly company: more warriors; young Robson, the actor who became so famous; a big negro pugilist, called Snowdrop; two medical students from St. George's Hospital, who boxed well and were capital fellows; and an academy art student, who died a Royal Academician, and who did not approve of Barty's mural decorations and laughed at the colored lithographs; and many others of all sorts. There used to be much turf talk, and sometimes a little card-playing and mild gambling--but Barty's tastes did not lie that way.

His idea of a pleasant evening was putting on the gloves with Snowdrop, or any one else who chose--or fencing--or else making music; or being funny in any way one could; and for this he had quite a special gift: he had sudden droll inspirations that made one absolutely hysterical--mere things of suggestive look or sound or gesture, reminding one of Robson himself, but quite original; absolute senseless rot and drivel, but still it made one laugh till one's sides ached. And he never failed of success in achieving this.

Among the dullest and gravest of us, and even some of the most high-minded, there is often a latent longing for this kind of happy idiotic fooling, and a grateful fondness for those who can supply it without effort and who delight in doing so. Barty was the precursor of the Arthur Robertses and Fred Leslies and Dan Lenos of our day, although he developed in quite another direction!

Then of a sudden he would sing some little twopenny love-ballad or sentimental nigger melody so touchingly that one had the lump in the throat; poor Snowdrop would weep by spoonfuls!

By-the-way, it suddenly occurs to me that I'm mixing things up--confusing Sundays and week-days; of course our Sunday evenings were quiet and respectable, and I much preferred them when he and I were alone; he was then another person altogether--a thoughtful and intelligent young Frenchman, who loved reading poetry aloud or being read to; especially English poetry--Byron! He was faithful to his "Don Juan," his Hebrew melodies--his "O'er the glad waters of the deep blue sea." We knew them all by heart, or nearly so, and yet we read them still; and Victor Hugo and Lamartine, and dear Alfred de Musset....

And one day I discovered another Alfred who wrote verses--Alfred the Great, as we called him--one Alfred Tennyson, who had written a certain poem, among others, called "In Memoriam"--which I carried off to Barty's and read out aloud one wet Sunday evening, and the Sunday evening after, and other Sunday evenings; and other poems by the same hand: "Locksley Hall," "Ulysses," "The Lotos-Eaters," "The Lady of Shalott"--and the chord of Byron passed in music out of sight.

Then Shelley dawned upon us, and John Keats, and Wordsworth--and our Sunday evenings were of a happiness to be remembered forever; at least they were so to me!

If Barty Josselin were on duty on the Sabbath, it was a blank day for Robert Maurice. For it was not very lively at home--especially when my father was there. He was the best and kindest man that ever lived, but his businesslike seriousness about this world, and his anxiety about the next, and his Scotch Sabbatarianism, were deadly depressing; combined with the aspect of London on the Lord's day--London east of Russell Square! Oh, Paris ... Paris ... and the yellow omnibus that took us both there together, Barty and me, at eight on a Sunday morning in May or June, and didn't bring us back to school till fourteen hours later!

I shall never forget one gloomy wintry Sunday--somewhere in 1854 or 5, if I'm not mistaken, towards the end of Barty's career as a Guardsman.

Twice after lunch I had called at Barty's, who was to have been on duty in barracks or at the Tower that morning; he had not come back; I called for him at his club, but he hadn't been there either--and I turned my face eastward and homeward with a sickening sense of desolate ennui and deep disgust of London for which I could find no terms that are fit for publication!

And this was not lessened by the bitter reproaches I made myself for being such a selfish and unworthy son and brother. It was precious dull at home for my mother and sister--and my place was _there_.

They were just lighting the lamps as I got to the arcade in the Quadrant--and there I ran against the cheerful Barty. Joy! what a change in the aspect of everything! It rained light! He pulled a new book out of his pocket, which he had just borrowed from some fair lady--and showed it to me. It was called _Maud_.

We dined at Pergolese's, in Rupert Street--and went back to Barty's--and read the lovely poem out loud, taking it by turns; and that is the most delightful recollection I have since I left the Institution F. Brossard!

Occasionally I dined with him "on guard" at St. James's Palace--and well I could understand all the attractions of his life, so different from mine, and see what a good fellow he was to come so often to Brunswick Square, and seem so happy with us.

The reader will conclude that I was a kind of over-affectionate pestering dull dog, who made this brilliant youth's life a burden to him. It was really not so; we had very many tastes in common; and with all his various temptations, he had a singularly constant and affectionate nature--and was of a Frenchness that made French thought and talk and commune almost a daily necessity. We nearly always spoke French when together alone, or with my mother and sister. It would have seemed almost unnatural not to have done so.

I always feel a special tenderness towards young people whose lives have been such that those two languages are exactly the same to them. It means so many things to me. It doubles them in my estimation, and I seem to understand them through and through.

Nor did he seem to care much for the smart society of which he saw so much; perhaps the bar sinister may have made him feel less at his ease in general society than among his intimates and old friends. I feel sure he took this to heart more than any one would have thought possible from his careless manner.

He only once alluded directly to this when we were together. I was speaking to him of the enviable brilliancy of his lot. He looked at me pensively for a minute or two, and said, in English:

"You've got a kink in your nose, Bob--if it weren't for that you'd be a deuced good-looking fellow--like me; but you ain't."

"Thanks--anything else?" said I.

"Well, I've got a kink in my birth, you see--and that's as big a kill-joy as I know. I hate it!"

It _was_ hard luck. He would have made such a splendid Marquis of Whitby! and done such honor to the proud old family motto:

"Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis!"

Instead of which he got himself a signet-ring, and on it he caused to be engraved a zero within a naught, and round them:

"Rohan ne puis, roi ne daigne. Rien ne suis!"

Soon it became pretty evident that a subtle change was being wrought in him.

He had quite lost his power of feeling the north, and missed it dreadfully; he could no longer turn his back-somersault with ease and safety; he had overcome his loathing for meat, and also his dislike for sport--he had, indeed, become a very good shot.

But he could still hear and see and smell with all the keenness of a young animal or a savage. And that must have made his sense of being alive very much more vivid than is the case with other mortals.

He had also corrected his quick impulsive tendency to slap faces that were an inch or two higher up than his own. He didn't often come across one, for one thing--then it would not have been considered "good form" in her Majesty's Household Brigade.

When he was a boy, as the reader may recollect, he was fond of drawing lovely female profiles with black hair and an immense black eye, and gazing at them as he smoked a cigarette and listened to pretty, light music. He developed a most ardent admiration for female beauty, and mixed more and more in worldly and fashionable circles (of which I saw nothing whatever); circles where the heavenly gift of beauty is made more of, perhaps, than is quite good for its possessors, whether female or male.

He was himself of a personal beauty so exceptional that incredible temptations came his way. Aristocratic people all over the world make great allowance for beauty-born frailties that would spell ruin and everlasting disgrace for women of the class to which it is my privilege to belong.

Barty, of course, did not confide his love-adventures to me; in this he was no Frenchman. But I saw quite enough to know he was more pursued than pursuing; and what a pursuer, to a man built like that! no innocent, impulsive young girl, no simple maiden in her flower--no Elaine.

But a magnificent full-blown peeress, who knew her own mind and had nothing to fear, for her husband was no better than herself. But for that, a Guinevere and Vivien rolled into one, _plus_ Messalina!

Nor was she the only light o' love; there are many naughty "grandes dames de par le monde" whose easy virtue fits them like a silk stocking, and who live and love pretty much as they please without loss of caste, so long as they keep clear of any open scandal. It is one of the privileges of high rank.

Then there were the ladies gay, frankly of the half-world, these--laughter-loving hetaerae, with perilously soft hearts for such as Barty Josselin! There was even poor, listless, lazy, languid Jenny, "Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea!"

His heart was never touched--of that I feel sure; and he was not vain of these triumphs; but he was a very reckless youth, a kind of young John Churchill before Sarah Jennings took him in hand--absolutely non-moral about such things, rather than immoral.

He grew to be a quite notorious young man about town; and, most unfortunately for him, Lord (and even Lady) Archibald Rohan were so fond of him, and so proud, and so amiably non-moral themselves, that he was left to go as he might.

He also developed some very rowdy tastes indeed--and so did I!

It was the fashion for our golden youth in the fifties to do so. Every night in the Haymarket there was a kind of noisy saturnalia, in which golden youths joined hands with youths who were by no means golden, to give much trouble to the police, and fill the pockets of the keepers of night-houses--"Bob Croft's," "Kate Hamilton's," "the Piccadilly Saloon," and other haunts equally well pulled down and forgotten. It was good, in these regions, to be young and big and strong like Barty and me, and well versed in the "handling of one's daddles." I suppose London was the only great city in the world where such things could be. I am afraid that many strange people of both sexes called us Bob and Barty; people the mere sight or hearing of whom would have given my poor dear father fits!

Then there was a little public-house in St. Martin's Lane, kept by big Ben the prize-fighter. In a room at the top of the house there used to be much sparring. We both of us took a high degree in the noble art--especially I, if it be not bragging to say so; mostly on account of my weight, which was considerable for my age. It was in fencing that he beat me hollow: he was quite the best fencer I ever met; the lessons at school of Bonnet's prevot had borne good fruit in his case.

Then there were squalid dens frequented by touts and betting-men and medical students, where people sang and fought and laid the odds and got very drunk--and where Barty's performances as a vocalist, comic and sentimental (especially the latter), raised enthusiasm that seems almost incredible among such a brutalized and hardened crew.

One night he and I and a medical student called Ticklets, who had a fine bass voice, disguised ourselves as paupers, and went singing for money about Camden Town and Mornington Crescent and Regent's Park. It took us about an hour to make eighteen pence. Barty played the guitar, Ticklets the tambourine, and I the bones. Then we went to the Haymarket, and Barty made five pounds in no time; most of it in silver donations from unfortunate women--English, of course--who are among the softest-hearted and most generous creatures in the world.

"O lachrymarum fons!"

I forget what use we made of the money--a good one, I feel sure.

I am sorry to reveal all this, but Barty wished it. Forty years ago such things did not seem so horrible as they would now, and the word "bounder" had not been invented.

* * * * *

My sister Ida, when about fourteen (1853), became a pupil at the junior school in the Ladies' College, 48 Bedford Square. She soon made friends--nice young girls, who came to our house, and it was much the livelier. I used to hear much of them, and knew them well before I ever saw them--especially Leah Gibson, who lived in Tavistock Square, and was Ida's special friend; at last I was quite anxious to see this paragon.

One morning, as I carried Ida's books on her way to school, she pointed out to me three girls of her own age, or less, who stood talking together at the gates of the Foundling Hospital. They were all three very pretty children--quite singularly so--and became great beauties; one golden-haired, one chestnut-brown, one blue-black. The black-haired one was the youngest and the tallest--a fine, straight, bony child of twelve, with a flat back and square shoulders; she was very well dressed, and had nice brown boots with brown elastic sides on arched and straight-heeled slender feet, and white stockings on her long legs--a fashion in hose that has long gone out. She also wore a thick plait of black hair all down her back--another departed mode, and one not to be regretted, I think; and she swung her books round her as she talked, with easy movements, like a strong boy.

"That's Leah Gibson," says my sister; "the tall one, with the long black plait."

Leah Gibson turned round and nodded to my sister and smiled--showing a delicate narrow face, a clear pale complexion, very beautiful white pearly teeth between very red lips, and an extraordinary pair of large black eyes--rather close together--the blackest I ever saw, but with an expression so quick and penetrating and keen, and yet so good and frank and friendly, that they positively sent a little warm thrill through me--though she was only twelve years old, and not a bit older than her age, and I a fast youth nearly twenty!

And finding her very much to my taste, I said to my sister, just for fun, "Oh--_that's_ Leah Gibson, is it? then some day Leah Gibson shall be Mrs. Robert Maurice!"

From which it may be inferred that I looked on Leah Gibson, at the first sight of her, as likely to become some day an extremely desirable person.

She did.

The Gibsons lived in a very good house in Tavistock Square. They seemed very well off. Mrs. Gibson had a nice carriage, which she kept entirely with her own money. Her father, who was dead, had been a wealthy solicitor. He had left a large family, and to each of them property worth L300 a year, and a very liberal allowance of good looks.

Mr. Gibson was in business in the City.

Leah, their only child, was the darling of their hearts and the apple of their eyes. To dress her beautifully, to give her all the best masters money could procure, and treat her to every amusement in London--theatres, the opera, all the concerts and shows there were, and give endless young parties for her pleasure--all this seemed the principal interest of their lives.

Soon after my first introduction to Leah, Ida and I received an invitation to a kind of juvenile festivity at the Gibsons', and went, and spent a delightful evening. We were received by Mrs. Gibson most cordially. She was such an extremely pretty person, and so charmingly dressed, and had such winning, natural, genial manners, that I fell in love with her at first sight; she was also very playful and fond of romping; for she was young still, having married at seventeen.

Her mother, Mrs. Bletchley (who was present), was a Spanish Jewess--a most magnificent and beautiful old person in splendid attire, tall and straight, with white hair and thick black eyebrows, and large eyes as black as night.

In Leah the high Sephardic Jewish type was more marked than in Mrs. Gibson (who was not Jewish at all in aspect, and took after her father, the late Mr. Bletchley).

It is a type that sometimes, just now and again, can be so pathetically noble and beautiful in a woman, so suggestive of chastity and the most passionate love combined--love conjugal and filial and maternal--love that implies all the big practical obligations and responsibilities of human life, that the mere term "Jewess" (and especially its French equivalent) brings to my mind some vague, mysterious, exotically poetic image of all I love best in woman. I find myself dreaming of Rebecca of York, as I used to dream of her in the English class at Brossard's, where I so pitied poor Ivanhoe for his misplaced constancy.

If Rebecca at fifty-five, was at all like Mrs. Bletchley, poor old Sir Wilfred's regrets must have been all that Thackeray made them out to be in his immortal story of _Rebecca and Rowena_.

Mr. Gibson was a good-looking man, some twelve or fifteen years older than his wife; his real vocation was to be a low comedian; this showed itself on my first introduction to him. He informally winked at me and said:

"Esker voo ker jer dwaw lah vee? Ah! kel Bonnure!"

This idiotic speech (all the French he knew) was delivered in so droll and natural a manner that I took to him at once. Barty himself couldn't have been funnier!

Well, we had games of forfeits and danced, and Ida played charming things by Mendelssohn on the piano, and Leah sang very nicely in a fine, bold, frank, deep voice, like a choir-boy's, and Mrs. Gibson danced a Spanish fandango, and displayed feet and ankles of which she was very proud, and had every right to be; and then Mr. Gibson played a solo on the flute, and sang "My Pretty Jane"--both badly enough to be very funny without any conscious effort or straining on his part. Then we supped, and the food was good, and we were all very jolly indeed; and after supper Mr. Gibson said to me:

"Now, Mister Parleyvoo--can't _you_ do something to amuse the company? You're _big_ enough!"

I professed my willingness to do _anything_--and wished I was as Barty more than ever!

"Well, then," says he--"kneel to the wittiest, bow to the prettiest--and kiss the one you love best."

This was rather a large order--but I did as well as I could. I went down on my knees to Mr. Gibson and craved his paternal blessing; and made my best French bow with my heels together to old Mrs. Bletchley; and kissed my sister, warmly thanking her in public for having introduced me to Mrs. Gibson: and as far as mere social success is worth anything, I was the Barty of that party!

Anyhow, Mr. Gibson conceived for me an admiration he never failed to express when we met afterwards, and though this was fun, of course, I had really won his heart.

It is but a humble sort of triumph to crow over--and where does Barty Josselin come in?

Pazienza!

"Well--what do you think of Leah Gibson?" said my sister, as we walked home together through Torrington Square.

"I think she's a regular stunner," said I--"like her mother and her grandmother before her, and probably her _great_-grandmother too."

And being a poetical youth, and well up in my Byron, I declaimed:

"She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes."...