i observe that i left calais in the banquette of the diligence at 6 p.m. on the friday night, may 8th, 1835, and reached paris at 3 a.m. on sunday morning—thirty-three hours. i remember my great surprise at finding the entire way paved after the fashion that i had been accustomed to consider proper only for the streets of towns. we used for by far the greatest part of the way the unpaved spaces left on either side of the paved causeway. but the conductor told me that in winter they were generally obliged to keep on the latter the whole way. the horses, two wheelers and three leaders abreast, were almost—indeed i think quite—without exception grey. they were also all, or almost all, stallions. the style of driving struck me as very rough, awkward, violent, and inelegant, but masterful and efficacious. the driver was changed with every relay; and it seemed to me very probable that it was expedient that each man should know such cattle, not only on the road but in the stable.
we breakfasted at abbeville, and dined at beauvais. and i find it recorded that i contrived at{262} both places to find time for a flying visit to the cathedral, and was highly delighted with the noble fragment of a church at the latter city.
i went to bed on arriving at the h?tel de lille et d’albion, which was in those days a very different place from its noisy, pretentious, and vulgar successor of the same name in the rue st. honoré. the old house in the rue des filles de st. thomas has long since disappeared, together with the quiet little street in which it was situated. like its successor it was almost exclusively used by english, but they were the english of the days when personally conducted herds were not. the service was performed by handmaidens in neat caps and white bodices over their coloured skirts. there were no swallow-tail-coated waiters, and the coffee was exquisite! tempi passati, perchè non tornate più?
at ten the next morning i went to no. 6, rue de provence, where i found my parents and my sisters at breakfast.
the object of this paris journey was twofold—the writing a book in accordance with an agreement which my mother had entered into with mr. richard bentley, the father of the publisher of these volumes, and the consultation of a physician to whom she had been especially recommended respecting my father’s health, which was rapidly and too evidently declining. they had been in paris some time already, and had formed a large circle of acquaintance, both english and french. i was told by my mother{263} that the physician, who had seen my father several times, had made no pleasant report of his condition. he did not apprehend any immediately alarming phase of illness, but said that had he been left to guess my father’s age after visiting him, he should have supposed him to be more than four score, the truth being that he was very little more than sixty.
this, my first visit to paris, lasted one month only, from the 9th of may to the 9th of june, and many of the recollections which seem to me now to be connected with it very probably belong to subsequent visits, for my diary, re-opened now for the first time after the interval of more than half a century, was kept, i find, in a very intermittent and slovenly manner. no doubt i found very few minutes for journalising in the four-and-twenty hours of each day.
i well remember that my first impression of lutetia parisiorum—“mudtown of the parisians,” as carlyle translates it—was that of having stepped back a couple of centuries or so in the history of european civilisation and progress. we are much impressed at home, and talk much of the vastness of the changes which the last fifty years have made in our own city, but i think that which the same time has operated in paris is much greater. putting aside the mere extension of streets and dwellings, which, great as it has been in paris, has been much greater in london, the changes in the former city have been far more radical. certainly there are{264} many quarters of london where the eye now rests on that which is magnificent, and which at the time when i knew the town well, presented nothing but what was, if not sordid, at least ugly. but to those who remember the streets of louis philippe’s city, the change in the whole conception of city life, and the manière d’être of the population, is far greater. with the exception of the principal boulevards in the neighbourhood of the recently completed “madeleine,” and its then recently established flower market, the streets were still traversed by filthy and malodorous open ditches, which did more or less imperfectly the duty of sewers, and paris still deserved its name of “mudtown”. wretched little oil lamps, suspended on ropes stretched across the streets, barely served to make darkness visible. water was still carried at so much the bucket up the interminable staircases of the parisian houses by stalwart auvergnats, who came from their mountains to do a work more severe than the parisians could do for themselves.
but another specialty, which very forcibly struck me, and which cannot be said to have been any survival of ways and habits obsolete on the other side of the channel, was the remarkable manner in which the political life of the hour, with its emotions, opinions, and passions, was enacted, so to speak, on the stage of the streets, as a drama is presented on the boards of a theatre. truly he who ran through the streets of paris in those days might read, and indeed could not help reading, the{265} reflection and the manifestation of the political divisions and passions which animated the reign of the bourgeois king, and ended by destroying it.
and in this respect the time of my first visit to paris was a very interesting one. the parisian world was, of course, divided into monarchists and republicans, the latter of whom laboured under the imputation, in some cases probably unjust, but in more entirely merited (as in certain other more modern instances), of being willing and ready to bring their theories into practice by perpetrating or conniving at any odious monstrosity of crime, violence and bloodshed. the fieschi incident had recently enlightened the world on the justice of such accusations.
but the monarchists were more amusingly divided into “parceque bourbon,” supporters of the existing régime, and “quoique bourbon,” tolerators of it. the former, of course, would have preferred the white flag and charles dix; but failing the possibility of such a return to the old ways, were content to live under the rule of a sovereign, who, though not the legitimate monarch by right divine, was at least a scion of the old legitimate race. the “quoique bourbon” partisans were the men who, denying all right to the throne save that which emanated from the will of the people, were yet monarchists from their well-rooted dread of the intolerable evils which republicanism had brought, and, as they were convinced, would bring again upon france, and were therefore contented to{266} support the bourgeois monarchy “although” the man on the throne was an undeniable bourbon.
but what made the streets, the boulevards, the champs elysées, and especially the tuileries garden peculiarly amusing to a stranger, was the circumstance that the parisians all got themselves up with strict attention to the recognised costume proper to their political party. the legitimist, the “quoique bourbon” bourgeois, (very probably in the uniform of the then immensely popular national guard) and the republican in his appropriate bandit-shaped hat and coat with exaggeratedly large lappels, or draped picturesquely in the folds of a cloak, after a fashion borrowed from the other side of the alps, were all distinguishable at a glance. it was then that deliciously graphic line (i forget who wrote it) “feignons à feindre à fin de mieux dissimuler” was applied to characterise the conspirator-like attitudes it pleased these gentlemen to assume.
the truth was that paris was still very much afraid of them. i remember the infinite glee, and the outpouring of ridicule, which hailed the dispersion of a republican “demonstration” (the reader will forgive the anachronism of the phrase), at the porte st. martin, by the judicious use of a powerful fire-engine. the heroes of the drapeau rouge had boasted they would stand their ground against any charge of soldiery. perhaps they would have done so. but the helter-skelter that ensued on the first well-directed jet of cold water from the pipe of a fire-engine furnished paris with laughter for days afterwards.{267}
but, as i have said, paris, not unreasonably, feared them. secret conspiracy is always an ugly enemy to deal with. and no violence of mere speculative opinion would have sufficed, had fear been absent, to cause the very marked repulsion with which all the parisians, who had anything to lose, in that day regarded their republican fellow citizens.
assuredly the conservatives of the parisian world of 1835 were not “the stupid party.” both in their newspapers, and other ephemeral literature, and in the never-ending succession of current mots and jokes which circulated in the parisian salons, they had the pull very decidedly. i remember some words of a parody on one of the republican songs of the day, which had an immense vogue at that time. “on devrait planter le chêne,” it ran, “pour l’arbre de la liberté” (it will be remembered that planting “trees of liberty” was one of the common and more harmless “demonstrations” of the republican party). “ses glands nouriraient sans peine les cochons qui l’ont planté.” and the burthen of the original which ran, “mourir pour la patrie, c’est le sort le plus beau le plus digne d’envie,” was sufficiently and very appositely caricatured by the slight change of “mourir pour la patrie” into “nourris par la patrie,” &c.
to a stranger seeing paris as i saw it, and frequenting the houses which i frequented, it seemed strange that such a community should have considered itself in serious danger from men who {268}seemed to me, looking from such a stand-point, a mere handful of skulking melodramatic enthusiasts, playing at conspiracy and rebellion rather than really meditating it. but i was not at that time fully aware how entirely the real danger was to be found in regions of paris, and strata of its population which were as entirely hidden from my observation, as if they had been a thousand miles away. but though i could not see the danger, i saw unmistakably enough the fear it inspired in all classes of those who, as i said before, had anything to lose.
it was this fear that made the national guard the heroes of the hour. it was impossible but that such a body of men—parisian shopkeepers put into uniform (those of them who would condescend to wear it; for many used to be seen, who contented themselves with girding on a sabre and assuming a firelock, while others would go to the extent of surmounting the ordinary black coat with the regulation military shako)—should afford a target for many shafts of ridicule. the capon-lined paunches of a considerable contingent of these well-to-do warriors were an inexhaustible source of not very pungent jokes. but paris would have been frightened out of its wits at the bare suggestion of suppressing these citizen saviours of society. of course they were petted at the tuileries. no reception or fête of any kind was complete without a large sprinkling of these shopkeeping guardsmen, and their presence on such occasions was the subject of an unfailing series of historiettes.
i remember an anecdote excellently illustrative{269} of the time, which was current in the salons of the “parceque bourbon” society of the day. a certain elderly duchess of the vieille roche, a dainty little woman, very mignonne, whose exquisite parure and still more exquisite manners scented the air at a league’s distance, to use the common french phrase, with the odour of the most aristocratic salons of the quartier st. germain, was, at one of louis philippe’s tuileries receptions, about to take from the tray handed round by a servant the last of the ices which it had contained, when a huge outstretched hand, with its five wide-spread fingers, was protruded from behind over her shoulder, and the refreshment of which she was about to avail herself was seized by a big national guard with the exclamation, “enfoncèe la petite mère!”
nevertheless, it may be safely asserted that the little duchess, and all the world she moved in, would have been infinitely more dismayed had they gone to the tuileries and seen no national guards there.
among the many persons of note with whom i became more or less well acquainted during that month, no one perhaps stands out more vividly in my recollection than chateaubriand. he also, though standing much aloof from the noise and movement of the political passions of the time, was an aristocrat jusqu’au bout des ongles, in appearance, in manners, in opinions, and general tone of mind. the impression to this effect immediately produced on one’s first presentation was in no{270} degree due to any personal advantages. he was not, when i knew him, nor do i think he ever could have been, a good looking man. he stooped a good deal, and his head and shoulders gave me the impression of being somewhat too large for the rest of his person. the lower part of his face too, was, i thought, rather heavy.
but his every word and movement were characterised by that exquisite courtesy which was the inalienable, and it would seem incommunicable, specialty of the seigneurs of the ancien régime. and in his case the dignified bearing of the grand seigneur was tempered by a bonhomie which produced a manner truly charming.
and having said all this, it may seem to argue want of taste or want of sense in myself, to own, as truthfulness compels me to do, that i did not altogether like him. i had a good deal of talk with him, and that to a youngster of my years and standing was in itself very flattering, and i felt as if i were ungrateful for not liking him. but the truth in one word is, that he appeared to me to be a “tinkling cymbal.” i don’t mean that he was specially insincere as regarded the person he was talking to at the moment. what i do mean is, that the man did not seem to me to have a mind capable of genuine sincerity in the conduct of its operations. he seemed to me a theatrically-minded man. immediately after making his acquaintance i read the génie du chrétienisme, and the book confirmed my impression of the{271} man. he honestly intends to play a very good and virtuous part, but he is playing a part.
he was much petted in those days by the men, and more especially by the women of the ancien régime and the quartier st. germain. but i suspect that he was a good deal quizzed, and considered an object of more or less good-natured ridicule by the rest of the parisian world. i fancy that he was in straitened circumstances. and the story went that he and his wife put all they possessed into a box, of which each of them had a key, and took from day to day what they needed, till one fine day they met over the empty box with no little surprise and dismay.
chateaubriand thought he understood english well, and rather piqued himself upon the accomplishment. but i well remember his one day asking me to explain to him the construction of the sentence, “let but the cheat endure, i ask not aught beside.” my efforts to do so during the best part of half an hour ended in entire failure.
he was in those days reading in madame récamier’s salon at the abbaye-aux-bois (in which building my mother’s friend, miss clarke, also had her residence), those celebrated mémoires d’outretombe, of which all paris, or at least all literary and political paris, was talking. immense efforts were made by all kinds of notabilities to obtain an admission to these readings. but the favoured ones had been very few. and my{272} mother was proportionably delighted at the arrangement that a reading should be given expressly for her benefit. m. de chateaubriand had ceased these séances for the nonce, and the gentleman who had been in the habit of reading for him had left paris. but by the kindness of miss clarke and madame récamier, he was induced to give a sitting at the abbaye expressly for my mother. this arrangement had been made before i reached paris, and i consequently to my great regret was not one of the very select party. my mother was accompanied by my sisters only. i benefited however in my turn by the acquaintance thus formed, and subsequently passed more than one evening in madame récamier’s salon at the abbaye-aux-bois in the rue du bac.
my mother, in her book on paris and the parisians, writes of that reading as follows:—“the party assembled at madame récamier’s on this occasion did not, i think, exceed seventeen, including madame récamier and m. de chateaubriand. most of these had been present at former readings. the duchesses de larochefoucauld and de noailles, and one or two other noble ladies, were among them. and i felt it was a proof that genius is of no party, when i saw a grand-daughter of general lafayette enter among us. she is married to a gentleman who is said to be of the extreme coté gauche.” the passage of the mémoires selected for the evening’s reading was the account of the author’s memorable visit to prague to visit the{273} royal exiles. “many passages,” writes my mother, “made a profound impression on my fancy and on my memory, and i think i could give a better account of some of the scenes described than i should feel justified in doing, as long as the noble author chooses to keep them from the public eye. there were touches that made us weep abundantly; and then he changed the key, and gave us the prettiest, the most gracious, the most smiling picture of the young princess and her brother that it was possible for pen to trace. and i could have said, as one does in seeing a clever portrait, ‘that is a likeness, i’ll be sworn for it.’”
it may be seen from the above passage, and from some others in my mother’s book on paris and the parisians, that her estimate of the man chateaubriand was a somewhat higher one, than that which i have expressed in the preceding pages. she was under the influence of the exceeding charm of his exquisite manner. but in the following passage, which i am tempted to transcribe by the curious light it throws on the genesis of the present literary history of france, i can more entirely subscribe to the opinions expressed:—
“the active, busy, bustling politicians of the hour have succeeded in thrusting everything else out of place, and themselves into it. one dynasty has been overthrown, and another established; old laws have been abrogated, and hundreds of new{274} ones formed; hereditary nobles have been disinherited, and little men made great. but amidst this plenitude of destructiveness, they have not yet contrived to make any one of the puny literary reputations of the day weigh down the renown of those who have never lent their voices to the cause of treason, regicide, rebellion, or obscenity. the literary reputations both of chateaubriand and lamartine stand higher beyond all comparison than those of any other living french authors. yet the first, with all his genius, has often suffered his imagination to run riot; and the last has only given to the public the leisure of his literary life. but both of them are men of honour and principle, as well as men of genius; and it comforts one’s human nature to see that these qualities will keep themselves aloft, despite whatever squally winds may blow, or blustering floods assail them. that both chateaubriand and lamartine belong rather to the imaginative than to the positif class cannot be denied; but they are renowned throughout the world, and france is proud of them. the most curious literary speculations, however, suggested by the present state of letters in this country, are not respecting authors such as these. they speak for themselves, and all the world knows them and their position. the circumstance decidedly the most worthy of remark in the literature of france at the present time is the effect which the last revolution appears to have produced. with the{275} exception of history, to which both thiers (?)[b] and mignet have added something that may live, notwithstanding their very defective philosophy, no single work has appeared since the revolution of 1830 which has obtained a substantial, elevated, and generally acknowledged reputation for any author unknown before that period—not even among all the unbridled ebullitions of imagination, though restrained neither by decorum, principle, nor taste. not even here, except from one female pen, which might become, were it the pleasure of the hand that wields it, the first now extant in the world of fiction,” (of course, georges sand is alluded to,) “has anything appeared likely to survive its author. nor is there any writer, who during the same period has raised himself to that station in society by means of his literary productions, which is so universally accorded to all who have acquired high literary celebrity in any country.
“the name of guizot was too well known before the revolution for these observations to have any reference to him.” (cousin should not have been forgotten.) “and however much he may have distinguished himself since july, 1830, his reputation was made before. there are, however, little writers in prodigious abundance.... never, i believe, was there any period in which the printing presses of france worked so hard as at present. the revolution of 1830 seems to have set all the minor spirits in motion. there is scarcely a boy so{276} insignificant, or a workman so unlearned, as to doubt his having the power and the right to instruct the world.... to me, i confess, it is perfectly astonishing that any one can be found to class the writers of this restless clique as ‘the literary men of france.’... do not, however, believe me guilty of such presumption as to give you my own unsupported judgment as to the position which this ‘new school,’ as the décousu folks always call themselves, hold in the public esteem. my opinion on this subject is the result of careful inquiry among those who are most competent to give information respecting it. when the names of such as are best known among this class of authors are mentioned in society, let the politics of the circle be what they may, they are constantly spoken of as a pariah caste that must be kept apart.
“‘do you know ——?’ has been a question i have repeatedly asked respecting a person whose name is cited in england as the most esteemed french writer of the age—and so cited, moreover, to prove the low standard of french taste and principle.
“‘no, madame,’ has been invariably the cold answer.
“‘or——?’
“‘no; he is not in society.’
“‘or——?’
“‘oh, no! his works live an hour—too long—and are forgotten.’”
now, are the writers of french literature of the{277} present day, whose names will at once present themselves to every reader’s mind, to be deemed superior to those of louis philippe, who “lent their voices to the cause of treason, regicide, rebellion, or obscenity,” and were unrestrained by either “decorum, principle, or taste”? for it is most assuredly no longer true that the writers in question are held to be a “pariah caste,” or that they are not known and sought by “society.” the facilis decensus progress of the half century that has elapsed since the cited passages were written, is certainly remarkable.
there is one name, however, which cannot be simply classed as one of the décousus. victor hugo had already at that day made an european reputation. but the following passage about him from my mother’s book on paris and the parisians is so curious, and to the present generation must appear so, one may almost say, monstrous, that it is well worth while to reproduce it.
“i have before stated,” she writes, “that i have uniformly heard the whole of the décousu school of authors spoken of with unmitigated contempt, and that not only by the venerable advocates for the bon vieux temps, but also, and equally, by the distinguished men of the present day—distinguished both by position and ability. respecting victor hugo, the only one of the tribe to which i allude who has been sufficiently read in england to justify his being classed by us as a person of general celebrity, the feeling is more remarkable still. i have never{278} mentioned him or his works to any person of good moral feeling or cultivated mind who did not appear to shrink from according him even the degree of reputation that those who are received as authority among our own cities have been disposed to allow him. i might say that of him france seems to be ashamed.” (my italics.) “‘permit me to assure you,’ said one gentleman gravely and earnestly, ‘that no idea was ever more entirely and altogether erroneous than that of supposing that victor hugo and his productions can be looked on as a sort of type or specimen of the literature of france at the present hour. he is the head of a sect, the high priest of a congregation who have abolished every law, moral and intellectual, by which the efforts of the human mind have hitherto been regulated. he has attained this pre-eminence, and i trust that no other will arise to dispute it with him. but victor hugo is not a popular french author.’”
my recollections of all that i heard in paris, and my knowledge of the circles (more than one) in which my mother used to live, enable me to testify to the absolute truth of the above representation of the prevalent parisian feeling at that day respecting victor hugo. yet he had then published his lyrics, notre dame de paris, and the most notable of his dramas; and i think no such wonderful change of national opinion and sentiment as the change from the above estimate to that now universally recognised in france, can be met with in the records of european literary history. is it not passing strange{279} that whole regions of paris should have been but the other day turned, so to speak, into a vast mausoleum to this same “pariah,” and that i myself should have seen, as i did, the pantheon not yet cleared from the wreck of garlands and inscriptions and scaffoldings for spectators, all of which had been prepared to do honour to his obsequies?
but it must be observed that the violent repulsion and reprobation with which he was in those days regarded by all his countrymen, save the extreme and restless spirits of the republican party, cannot fairly be taken as the result and outcome of genuine literary criticism. all literary judgments in france were then subordinated to political party feeling, and that was intensified by the most fatal of all disqualifications for the formation of sound and equable estimates—by fear. all those well-to-do detesters of victor hugo and all his works, the “quoique bourbons” as well as the “parceque bourbons,” the prosperous supporters of the new régime as well as the regretful adherents of the old, lived in perpetual fear of the men whose corypheus and hierophant was victor hugo, and felt, not without reason, that the admittedly ricketty throne of the citizen king and those sleek and paunchy national guardsmen alone stood between them and the loss of all they held dearest in the world. nevertheless, the contrast between the judgments and the feeling of 1835 and those of fifty years later is sufficiently remarkable.
much has been said, especially in england, of the{280} great writer’s historical inaccuracy in treating of english matters. but an anecdote which my mother gives in her book is worth reproducing for the sake of the evidence it gives that in truth victor hugo was equally ignorantly and carelessly inaccurate when speaking of home matters, on which, at least, it might have been thought that he would have been better informed.
“an able lawyer, and most accomplished gentleman and scholar, who holds a distinguished station in the cour royale” (in all probability berryer), “took us to see the palais de justice. having shown us the chamber where criminal trials are carried on, he observed that this was the room described by victor hugo in his romance, adding, ‘he was, however, mistaken here, as in most places where he affects a knowledge of the times of which he writes. in the reign of louis xi. no criminal trials ever took place within the walls of this building, and all the ceremonies as described by him resemble much more a trial of yesterday than of the age at which he dates his tale.’”
georges sand, certainly upon the whole the most remarkable literary figure in the french world at the time of my visit to paris, vidi tantum. that i had an opportunity of doing on various occasions. she was a person on whom, quite apart from her literary celebrity, the eye of any observer would have dwelt with some speculative curiosity. she was hardly to be called handsome, or even pretty, but was still decidedly attractive. the large eyes{281} à fleur de tête, and the mobile and remarkably expressive mouth rendered the face both attractive and stimulative of interest. the features were unmistakably refined in character and expression, and the mouth—the most trustworthy evidence-giving feature upon that point—was decidedly that of a high-bred woman.
she was at that period of her varied career acting as well as writing in a manner which attracted the attention of louis philippe’s very vigilant and abnormally suspicious police. she had recently left paris for an excursion in the tête-à-tête company of the well known abbé de lamenais, who was at that time giving much trouble and disquietude to the official guardians of the altar and the throne. his comings and goings were the object of vigilant supervision on the part of the police authorities; and it so happened by a strange chance that the report of the official observers of this little excursion, which reached the official head-quarters, reached me also. and all the watchers had to tell was that the abbé and the lady his companion shared the same bedchamber at the end of their first day’s journey. now the abbé de lamenais was an old, little, wizened, dried-up, dirty—very dirty—priest. it is possible, but i have reason to think highly improbable, that economy was the motive of this strange chamber comradeship. but i was then, and am still, very strongly convinced that the sole purpose of it was to outrage the lady’s (and the priest’s) censors,{282} to act differently from everybody else, and to give evidence of superiority to conventionality and “prejudice.”
i wrote very carefully and conscientiously some few years subsequently a long article on georges sand in the foreign quarterly which attracted some attention at the time. i should write in many respects differently now. the lady in subsequent years put a considerable quantity of “water into her wine”—and though not altogether in the same sense,—i have done so too.
to both guizot and thiers i had the honour of being introduced. if i were to say that neither of them seemed to me to have entirely the manners and bearing of a gentleman, i should probably be thought to be talking affected and offensive nonsense. and i do not mean to say so in the ordinary english every-day use of the term. what i mean is that they were both of them very far from possessing that grand seigneur manner, which as i have said so markedly distinguished chateaubriand, and many another frenchman whom i knew in those days; by no means all of them belonging to the aristocratic caste, party, or class. guizot looked for all the world like a village schoolmaster, and seemed to me to have much the manner of one. he stooped a good deal, and poked his head forwards. i remember thinking that he was, in manner, more like an englishman than a frenchman; and that it was a matter of curious speculation to me at the time, whether this effect might have been{283} produced by the fact that he was a protestant, and an earnest one, instead of being a roman catholic. possibly my impression of his schoolmaster-like deportment may have been the result of his manner to me. i was but a boy, with no claim at all to the honour of being noticed by him in any way. but i remember being struck by the difference of the manner of thiers in this respect.
all my prejudices and all that i knew of the two men disposed me to feel far the higher respect for guizot. and my opinion still is that i judged rightly, whether in respect to character or intellectual capacity. not but that i thought and think that thiers was the brighter and in the ordinary sense of the term the cleverer man of the two. there was no brightness about the premier abord of guizot, though doubtless a longer and more intimate acquaintance than was granted to me would have corrected this impression. but thiers was, from the bow with which he first received you to the latest word you heard from him, all brightness. of dignity he had nothing at all. if guizot might have been taken for a schoolmaster, thiers might have been mistaken for a stockbroker, say, a prosperous, busy, bustling, cheery stockbroker, or any such man of business. and if guizot gave one the impression of being more english than french, his great rival was unmistakeably and intensely french. i have no recollection of having much enjoyed my interview with m. guizot. but i was happy during more than one evening spent in thiers’s house in paris.{284}
of madame récamier i should have said the few words i have to say about the impression so celebrated a woman produced upon me, when i was speaking of her salon in a previous page. but they may be just as well said here. of the beauty for which she was famed throughout europe, of course little remained, when i saw her in 1835. but the grace, which was in a far greater degree unique, remained in its entirety. i think she was the most gracefully moving woman i ever saw. the expression of her face had become perhaps a little sad, but it was sweet, attractive, full of the promise of all good things of heart and mind. if i were to say that her management of her salon might be compared in the perfection of its tactical success with that of a successful general on the field, it might give the idea that management and discipline were visible, which would be a very erroneous one. that the perfection of art lies in the concealment of it, was never more admirably evidenced than in her “administration” as a reine de salon. a close observer might perceive, or perhaps rather divine only, that all was marshalled, ordered, and designed. yet all was, on the part at least of the guests, unconstrained ease and enjoyment. that much native talent, much knowledge of men and women, and exquisite tact must have been needed for this perfection in the art of tenir salon cannot be denied. finally it may be said that a great variety of historiettes, old and new, left me with the unhesitating conviction that despite the unfailing tribute to{285} an éclat such as hers, of malicious insinuations (all already ancient history at the time of which i am writing), madame récamier was and had always been a truly good and virtuous christian woman.
miss clarke, also, as has been said an inmate of the abbaye-aux-bois, and a close friend of her celebrated neighbour, i became intimate with. she was an eccentric little lady, very plain, brimfull of talent, who had achieved the wonderful triumph of living, in the midst of the choicest society of paris, her own life after her own fashion, which was often in many respects a very different fashion from that of those around her, without incurring any of the ridicule or anathemas with which such society is wont to visit eccentricity. i remember a good-naturedly recounted legend to the effect, that she used to have her chemises, which were constructed after the manner of those worn by the grandmothers of the present generation, marked with her name in full on the front flap of them; and that this flap was often exhibited over the bosom of her dress in front! she too was a reine de salon after her fashion—a somewhat different one from that of her elegant neighbour. there was, at all events, a greater and more piquant variety to be found in it. all those to be found there were, however, worth seeing or hearing for one reason or another. her method of ruling the frequenters of her receptions might be described as simply shaking the heterogeneous elements well together. but it answered so far as to make an evening at her house unfailingly amusing{286} and enjoyable. she was very, and i think i may say, universally popular. she subsequently married m. mohl, the well-known orientalist, whom i remember to have always found, when calling upon him on various occasions, sitting in a tiny cabinet so absolutely surrounded by books, built up into walls all round him, as to suggest almost inevitably the idea of a mouse in a cheese, eating out the hollow it lived in.
referring to my mother’s book on paris and the parisians for those extracts from it which i have given in the preceding pages, i find the following passage, the singular forecast of which, and its bearing on the present state of things in france, tempts me to transcribe it. speaking in 1835, and quoting the words of a high political authority, whom she had met “at the house of the beautiful princess b——” (belgiojoso), she writes: “‘you know,’ he said, ‘how devoted all france was to the emperor, though the police was somewhat tight, and the conscriptions heavy. but he had saved us from a republic, and we adored him. for a few days, or rather hours, we were threatened again five years ago by the same terrible apparition. the result is that four millions of armed men stand ready to protect the prince who chased it. were it to appear a third time, which heaven forbid! you may depend upon it, that the monarch who should next ascend the throne of france might play at “le jeu de quilles” with his subjects and no one be found to complain.’” (my italics.) on the margin of{287} the page on which this is printed, my mother has written in the copy of the book before me, “vu et approuvé. dec. 10th, 1853. f. t.”
the mention of the princess belgiojoso in the above passage reminds me of a memorable evening which i spent at her house, and of my witnessing there a singular scene, which at the present day may be worth recounting.
the amusement of the evening consisted in hearing liszt and the princess play on two pianos the whole of the score of mozart’s don giovanni! the treat was a delightful one; but i dare say that i should have forgotten it but for the finale of the performance. no sooner was the last note ended than the nervous musician swooned and slid from his seat, while the charming princess, in whom apparently matter was less under the dominion of mind, or at least of nerve, was as fresh as at the beginning!
my month at paris, with its poor thirty times twenty-four hours, was all too short for half of what i strove to cram into it. and of course i could please myself with an infinitude of recollections of things and places, and occasions, and above all, persons, who doubtless contributed more to the making of that month one of the pleasantest i have to look back on, than any of the celebrities whom i had the good fortune to meet. but it may be doubted whether any such rambling reminiscences would be equally pleasing to my readers.
{288}
there is one anecdote, however, of a well remembered day, which i must tell, before bringing the record of my first visit to paris to a conclusion.
a picnic party—rather a large one, and consisting of men and women of various nationalities—had been organised for a visit to the famous and historic woods of montmorenci. we had a delightful day, and my memory is still, after half a century, crowded with very vivid remembrances of the places and persons, and things done and things said, which rendered it such. but as for the places, have they not been described and re-described in all the guide books that were ever written? and as for the persons, alas! the tongues that chattered so fast and so pleasantly are still for evermore, and the eyes that shone so brightly are dim, if not, as in most instances, closed in their last sleep! but it is only with an incident that formed the finale of our day there that i mean to trouble the reader.
thackeray, then an unknown young man, with whom i that day became acquainted for the first time, was one of our party. some half-dozen of us—the boys of the party—thinking that a day at montmorenci could not be passed selon les prescriptions without a cavalcade on the famous donkeys, selected a number of them, and proceeded to urge the strongly conservative animals probably into places, and certainly into paces, for which their life-long training had in no wise prepared them. a variety of struggles between man and beast ensued with divers vicissitudes of victory, till at last {289}thackeray’s donkey, which certainly must have been a plucky and vigorous beast, succeeded in tossing his rider clean over his long ears, and as ill luck would have it, depositing him on a heap of newly broken stones. the fall was really a severe one, and at first it was feared that our picnic would have a truly tragic conclusion. but it was soon ascertained that no serious mischief had been done, beyond that, the mark of which the victim of the accident bore on his face to his dying day.
i think that when i climbed to the banquette of the lille diligence to leave paris, on the morning of the 7th of june, 1835, it was the first time that the prospect of a journey failed in any way to compensate me for quitting what i was leaving behind.
