Read Ebook: What I Remember Volume 2 by Trollope Thomas Adolphus

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I left London some days earlier than she did, and travelled by Ostend, Cologne, and Mannheim, my principal object being to visit my old friend, Mrs. Fauche, who was living at the latter place. I passed three or four very pleasant days there, including, as I find by my diary, sundry agreeable jaunts to Heidelberg, Carlsruhe, &c. My mother and I had arranged to meet at Paris on the 4th of December, and at that date I punctually turned up there.

I think that I saw Paris and the Parisians much more satisfactorily on this occasion than during my first visit; and I suspect that some of the recollections recorded in these pages as connected with my first visit to Paris, belong really to this second stay there, especially I think that this must have been the case with regard to my acquaintance with Chateaubriand, though I certainly was introduced to him at the earlier period, for I find the record of much talk with him about Brittany, which was a specially welcome subject to him.

It was during this second visit that I became acquainted with Henry Bulwer, afterwards Lord Dalling, and at that time first secretary of the British legation. My visits were generally, perhaps always, paid to him when he was in bed, where he was lying confined by, if I remember rightly, a broken leg, I used to find his bed covered with papers and blue-books, and the like. And I was told that the whole, or at all events the more important part of the business of the embassy was done by him as he lay there on the bed, which must have been for many a long hour a bed of suffering.

Despite certain affectations--which were so palpably affectations, and scarcely pretended to be aught else, that there was little or nothing annoying or offensive in them--he was a very agreeable man, and was unquestionably a very brilliant one. He came to dine with me, I remember, many years afterwards at my house in Florence, when he insisted on being carried up stairs, as we thought at the time very unnecessarily. But for aught I know such suspicion may have wronged him. At all events his disability, whatever it may have been, did not prevent him from making himself very agreeable.

Ward got very drunk that night, I remember, and we deemed it fortunate that our diplomatist guest had departed before the outward signs of his condition became manifest.

On the 29th of August in the same year she writes at great length of the indignation and fury produced in Paris by the announcement of the Quadruple Alliance. She is immensely impressed by the fact that "people gathered in the streets and discussed the question in the open air." "Ireland, Poland, and Italy are to rise to the cry of Liberty." But she goes on to say, "Small causes produce great effects. Much of this warlike disposition has arisen from the fact of Thiers having bought a magnificent horse to ride beside the King at the late review." She proceeds to ridicule the minister in a tone very naturally suggested by the personal appearance of the little great man under such circumstances, which no doubt furnished Paris with much fun. But she goes on to suggest that the personal vanity which made the prospect of such a public appearance alluring to him was reinforced by "certain other secondary but still important considerations of a different nature, looking to the results which might follow from the exhibition of a war policy. This desirable end being attained beyond even the most sanguine hopes, the martial fever seems on the decline."

Now all this gossip may be accepted as evidencing the tone prevailing in the very inmost circles of the citizen king's friends and surroundings, and as such is curious.

Writing on the 8th of October in the same year, after speaking at great length of Madame Laffarge, and of the extraordinary interest her trial excited, dividing all Paris into Laffargists and anti-Laffargists, and almost superseding war as a general topic of conversation, she passes to the then burning subject of the fortification of Paris, and writes as follows--curiously enough, considering the date of her letter:--

A letter of the 8th of August, 1842, written from Fulham Palace, contains some interesting notices of the grief and desolation caused by the sad death of the Duke of Orleans.

A letter of the 3rd April, 1842, contains among a quantity of the gossip of the day an odd story, which, the writer says, "is putting Rome in a ferment, and the clergy in raptures." I think I remember that it made a considerable stir in ecclesiastic circles at the time. A certain M. Ratisbonne, a Jew, it seems entered a church in Rome , with a friend, a M. de Bussi?res, who had some business to transact in the sacristy. The Jew, who professed complete infidelity, meantime was looking at the pictures. But M. de Bussi?res, when his business was done, found him prostrate on the pavement in front of a picture of the Madonna. The Jew on coming to himself declared that the Virgin had stepped from her frame, and addressed him, with the result, as he said, that having fallen to the ground an infidel, he rose a convinced Christian! Mademoiselle D'Henin writes in a tone which indicates small belief in the miracle, but seems to accept as certain the further facts, that the convert gave all he possessed to the Church and became a monk.

I have recently--even while transcribing these extracts from her letters--heard of the death, within the last few years, of the writer of them. She died in England, I am told, and unmarried. Her sympathies and affections were always strongly turned to her mother's country, as indeed may be in some degree inferred from even those passages of her letters which have been given. And I can well conceive that the events which, each more disastrous than its predecessor, followed in France shortly after the date of the last of them, may have rendered, especially after the death of her parents, a life in France distasteful to her. But I, and, I think, my mother also, had entirely lost sight of her for very many years. Had I imagined that she was living in England, I should undoubtedly have endeavoured to see her.

Here are a few jottings at random from my diary, which may still have some little interest.

"Madame Le Roi, a daughter of General Hoche, told me , that as she was driving on the boulevard a day or two ago, a sou piece was thrown with great violence at the window of her carriage, smashing it to pieces. This, she said, was because her family arms were emblazoned on the panel. Most of the carriages in Paris, she said, had no arms on them for fear of similar attacks."

The frequent occasions on which subsequently I saw Ristori produced an impression on me very much the reverse. I remember thinking Ristori's "Mirra" too good, so terribly true as to be almost too painful for the theatre. I thought Rachel's "Marie Stuart" upon the whole her finest performance, though "Adrienne" ran it hard.

Then there were brilliant receptions at the English Embassy and at the Austrian Embassy . My diary remarks that stars and gold lace and ribbons of all the Orders in Christendom were more abundant at the latter, but female beauty at the former. I remember much admiring that of Lady Honoria Cadogan, and that of a very remarkably lovely Visconti girl, a younger sister of the Princess Belgiojoso. But despite this perfect beauty, my diary notes, that it was "curious to observe the unmistakable superiority as a human being of the young English patrician." I remember that the "sit-down" suppers at the Austrian Embassy--a separate little table for every two, three, or four guests--were remarked on as a novelty by the Parisians.

Then at Miss Clarke's I find Fauriel, "the first Proven?al scholar in Europe," delightful, and am disgusted with Merim?e, because he manifested self-sufficiency, as it seemed to my youthful criticism, by pooh-poohing the probability of the temple at Lanleff in Brittany having been aught else than a church of the Templars.

Then comes a breakfast with Pepe, at which I met the President Thibeaudeau, "a grey old man who makes a point of saying rude, coarse, and disagreeable things, which his friends call dry humour. He found fault with everything at the breakfast table."

"Well, sir," said he in reply to the chairman's indignant questioning, "what could I do? I was werry busy at the time. So when the gentleman says as his name was Luscombe, I could do no better than tell him to go to h'ell for his luggage, and he'd have found it there all right!"

I find chronicled a long talk with Mohl one evening at Madame R?camier's. The room was very full of notable people of all sorts, and the tide of chattering was running very strong. "How can anything last long in France?" said he, in reply to my having said that it had been somewhat short-lived. "Reputations are made and pass away. It is impossible that they should endure. It is in such places as this that they are destroyed. The friction is prodigious!"

I may insert here the following short note from Madame Mohl, because the manner of it is very characteristic of her. It is, as was usual with her, undated.

"Yours ever,

"MARY MOHL."

All the capital letters in the above transcript, except those in her name are mine, she uses none. The note is written in headlong hurry.

Mignet, whom I met at the house of Thiers, I liked too, but Mohl was my favourite.

It was all very amusing, with as much excitement and interest of all kinds crammed into a few weeks as might have lasted one for a twelvemonth. And I liked it better than teaching Latin to the youth of Birmingham. But it would seem that there was something that I liked better still. For on March 30th, leaving my mother in the full swing of the Parisian gaieties, I bade adieu to them all and once again "took to the road," bound on an excursion through Central France.

My journey through central France took me by Chartres, Orleans, down the Loire to Nantes, then through La Vend?e to Fontenay, Niort, Poitiers, Saintes, Rochefort, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Angouleme, Limoges, and thence back to Paris. On looking at the book for the first time since I read the proof-sheets I find it amusing. The fault of it, as an account of the district traversed, is, that it treats of the localities described on a scale that would have needed twenty volumes, instead of two, to complete the story of my tour in the same proportion. I do not remember that any of my critics noted this fault. Perhaps they feared that on the first suggestion of such an idea I should have set about mending the difficulty by the production of a score of other volumes on the subject! I could easily have done so. I was in no danger of incurring the anathema launched by Sterne--I think it was Sterne--against the man who went from Dan to Beersheba and found all barren. I found matter of interest everywhere, and could have gone on doing so, as it seemed to me in those days, for ever.

The part of France I visited is not much betravelled by Englishmen, and the general idea is that it is not an interesting section of the country. I thought, and still think, otherwise. My notion is, that if a line were drawn through France from Calais to the centre of the Pyrenean chain, by far the greater part of the prettiest country and most interesting populations, as well as places, would be found to the westward of it. I do not think that my bill of fare excited any great interest in the reading world. But I suppose that I contrived to interest a portion of it; for the book was fairly successful.

I remember well a certain morning in York Street when we--my mother and I--held a solemn audit of accounts. It was found that during her residence in York Street she had spent a good deal more than she had supposed. She had entertained a good deal, giving frequent "little dinners." But dinners, however little, are apt in London to leave tradesmen's bills not altogether small in proportion to their littleness. "The fact is," said my mother, "that potatoes have been quite exceptionally dear." For a very long series of years she never heard the last of those exceptional potatoes. But despite the alarming deficit caused by those unfortunate vegetables, I do not think the abandonment of the establishment in York Street was caused by financial considerations. She was earning in those years large sums of money--quite as large as any she had been spending--and might have continued in London had she been so minded.

So we turned our backs on London without a thought of regret and once again "took the road;" but this time separately, my mother going to my sister at Penrith and I to pass the summer months in wanderings in Picardy, Lorraine, and French Flanders, and the ensuing winter in Paris.

In the beginning of April, 1841, after a little episode of spring wandering in the Tyrol and Bavaria , my mother and I started for Italy. Neither of us had at that time conceived the idea of making a home there. The object of the journey, which had been long contemplated by my mother, was the writing of a book on Italy, as she had already done on Paris and on Vienna.

We made, however, several pleasant acquaintances and some fast friends, principally at Florence, and thus paved the way, although little intending it at the time, for our return thither.

Our visit was rendered shorter than it would probably otherwise have been by my mother's strong desire to be with my sister, who was expecting the birth of her first child at Penrith. And for this purpose we left Rome in February, 1842, in very severe weather. We crossed the Mont Cenis in sledges--which to me was a very acceptable experience, but to my mother was one, which nothing could have induced her to face, save the determination not to fail her child at her need.

We did not, however, change the diligence for the sledges till we came to the descent on the northern side. But as we made our slow way to the top our vehicle was supported from time to time on either side by twelve strapping fellows, who put their shoulders to it.

I appreciated during that journey, though I was glad to see the mountain in its winter dress, the recommendation not to let your flight be in the winter.

I accompanied my mother to Penrith, and forthwith devoted myself heart and body to the preparation of our new house, and the beautifying of the very pretty paddock in which it was situated. I put in some hundreds of trees and shrubs with my own hands, which prospered marvellously, and have become, I have been told, most luxuriant shrubberies. I was bent on building a cloistered walk along the entire top of the field, which would have afforded a charming ambulatory sheltered from the north winds and from the rain, and would have commanded the most lovely views, while the pillars supporting the roof would have presented admirable places for a world of flowering climbing plants. And doubtless I should have achieved it, had we remained there. But it would have run into too much money to be undertaken immediately,--fortunately; for, inasmuch as there was nothing of the sort in all that country side, no human being would have given a stiver more for the house when it came to be sold, and the next owner would probably have pulled it down. There was no authority for such a thing. Had it been suffered to remain it would probably have been called "Trollope's folly!"

Subsequently, but not immediately after we left it, the place--oddly enough I forget the name we gave it--became the property and the residence of my brother-in-law.

Of my life at Penrith I need add nothing to the jottings I have already placed before the reader on the occasion of my first visit to that place.

One of my first visits was to my brother's chief. He was a master of foxhounds and hunted the country. And I well remember my astonishment, when the door of this gentleman's residence was opened to me by an extremely dirty and slatternly bare-footed and bare-legged girl. I found him to be a very friendly and hospitable good fellow, and his wife and her sister very pleasant women. I found too that my brother stood high in his good graces by virtue of simply having taken the whole work and affairs of the postal district on his own shoulders. The rejected of St. Martin's-le-Grand was already a very valuable and capable officer.

Anthony duly joined me as proposed, and we had a grand walk over the mountains above the Killeries. I don't forget and never shall forget--nor did Anthony ever forget; alas! that we shall never more talk over that day again--the truly grand spectacular changes from dark thick enveloping cloud to brilliant sunshine, suddenly revealing all the mountains and the wonderful colouring of the intertwining sea beneath them, and then back to cloud and mist and drifting sleet again. It was a glorious walk. We returned wet to the skin to "Joyce's Inn," and dined on roast goose and whisky punch, wrapped in our blankets like Roman senators!

One other scene I must recall. The reader will hardly believe that it occurred in Ireland. There was an election of a member for I forget what county or borough, and my brother and I went to the hustings--the only time I ever was at an election in Her Majesty's dominions. What were the party feelings, or the party colours, I utterly forget. It was merely for the fun of the thing that we went there. The fun indeed was fast and furious. The whole scene on the hustings, as well as around them, seemed to me one seething mass of senseless but good-humoured hustling and confusion. Suddenly in the midst of the uproar an ominous cracking was heard, and in the next minute the hustings swayed and came down with a crash, heaping together in a confused mass all the two or three hundreds of human beings who were on the huge platform. Some few were badly hurt. But my brother and I being young and active, and tolerably stout fellows, soon extricated ourselves, regained our legs, and found that we were none the worse. Then we began to look to our neighbours. And the first who came to hand was a priest, a little man, who was lying with two or three fellows on the top of him, horribly frightened and roaring piteously for help. So Anthony took hold of one of his arms and I of the other, and by main force dragged him from under the superincumbent mass of humanity. When we got him on his legs his gratitude was unbounded. "Tell me your names," he shouted, "that I'll pray for ye!" We told him laughingly that we were afraid it was no use, for we were heretics. "Tell me your names," he shouted again, "that I'll pray for ye all the more!"

I wonder whether he ever did! He certainly was very much in earnest while the fright was on him.

Not very long after my return from this Irish trip, we finally left Penrith on the 3rd of April, 1843; and I trust that the nymph of the holy well, whose spring we had disturbed, was appeased.

What we did in the first instance was to turn them to the house of our old and well-beloved cousin, Fanny Bent, at Exeter. There after a few days we persuaded her to accompany us to Ilfracombe, where we spent some very enjoyable summer weeks. What I remember chiefly in connection with that pleasant time, was idling rambles over the rocks and the Capstone Hill, in company with Mrs. Coker and her sister Miss Aubrey, the daughters of that Major A. who needs to the whist-playing world no further commemoration. The former of them was the wife and mother of Wykehamists , and both were very charming women. Ilfracombe was in those days an unpretending sort of fishing village. There was no huge "Ilfracombe Hotel," and the Capstone Hill was not strewed with whitey-brown biscuit bags and the fragments of bottles, nor continually vocal with nigger minstrels and ranting preachers. The "Royal Clarence" did exist in the little town, whether under that name or not, I forget. But I can testify from experience, acquired some forty years afterwards, that Mr. and Mrs. Clemow now keep there one of the best inns of its class, that I, no incompetent expert in such matters, know in all England.

As for my mother, it turned out that she was then selecting her last and final home--though the end was not, thank God, for many a long year yet. As for me, the decision arrived at during those walks on Exeter Northernhay, was more momentous still. For I was choosing the road that led not only to my home for the next half century nearly, but to two marriages, both of them so happy in all respects as rarely to have fallen to the lot of one and the same man!

Well, we thought that we were casting the die of fate on a very subordinate matter, while, lo! it was cast for us by the Supernal Powers after a more far-reaching and over-ruling fashion.

So on the 2nd of September, 1843, we turned our faces southwards and left London for Florence.

We became immediately on arriving in Firenze la gentile the guests of Lady Bulwer, who then inhabited in the Palazzo Passerini an apartment far larger than she needed, till we could find a lodging for ourselves.

We had become acquainted with Lady Bulwer in Paris, and a considerable intimacy arose between her and my mother, whose nature was especially calculated to sympathise with the good qualities which Lady Bulwer unquestionably possessed in a high degree. She was brilliant, witty, generous, kind, joyous, good-natured, and very handsome. But she was wholly governed by impulse and unreasoning prejudice; though good-natured, was not always good-humoured; was totally devoid of prudence or judgment, and absolutely incapable of estimating men aright. She used to think me, for instance, little short of an admirable Crichton!

Of course all the above rehearsed good qualities were, or were calculated to be, immediately perceived and appreciated, while the less pleasant specialties which accompanied them were of a kind to become more perceptible only in close intimacy. And while no intimacy ever lessened that regard of my mother and myself that had been won by the first, it was not long before we were both, my mother especially, vexed by exhibitions of the second.

The incident was entirely characteristic of her. She was furiously angry with all things in heaven above and on the earth below because she was at the moment inconvenienced.

Here is the beginning of a letter from her of a date some months anterior to the Boboli adventure:

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