Wilkie Collins in

All the Year Round

Wilkie Collins

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The original text is in the Public Domain. All additional material © Alex Bell, 2015.

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Contents

About this ebook

Sure to be Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

The Good Qualities of Gout

The Royal Academy in Bed

Pray Employ Major Namby!

Portrait of an Author

Painted by his Publisher

The Second Sitting

The Bachelor Bedroom

New View of Society

My Boys

My Girls

Vidocq, French Detective

Portion the first

Vidocq, French Detective

Portion the Second

Boxing Day

Memoirs of an Adopted Son

The Cauldron of Oil

A Night in the Jungle

A Trial at Toulouse

Notes of an Interrogation

Suggestions from a Maniac

The Deadlock in Italy

End note and annotations

Colophon

About this edition

Wilkie Collins lived in London from 1824 to 1889, a period in which ‘the inevitable self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous and the rich; [was] so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the poor.’

He was short, plump, and short sighted; despite his severe suffering from gout he was a traveller, bon vivant, journalist, satirist, essayist, novelist, dramatist and social activist; and friend, collaborator, and rival of Charles Dickens. He became addicted to laudanum, and several of his characters praise it.

Many of his works were first published as serials in Charles Dickens’ journals Household Words and All the Year Round. This ebook contains the twenty articles in All the Year Round attributed to Collins by the editors of the Dickens Journals Online site. They give a fascinating picture of the attitudes of his times.

The source was the text of the articles from that site, checked against the images of each page. I have silently corrected typos and inconsistencies, italicised book names, set off letters and documents as block quotes, made changes to spelling, punctuation and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com put a footnote as an endnote, and added two annotations. The cover was based on an image provided by the National Portrait Gallery.

Sure to be

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

All the Year Round, Volume 1, page 5

I have much pleasure in announcing myself as the happiest man alive. My character is, I have reason to believe, new to the world. Novelists, Dramatists, and Entertainers of an easily amused public have never yet, to my knowledge, laid hands on me. Society is obscurely aware of my existence; is frequently disposed to ask questions about me; is always wanting to get face to face with me, and see what I am like; and has never been fortunate enough yet to make the desired discovery. I come forward of my own accord, actuated by motives of the most purely amiable sort, to dispel the mists in which I have hitherto been hidden, and to gratify the public by disclosing myself. Behold me, then, self-confessed and self-announced – the long sought type, the representative Individual; the interesting Man who believes in Advertisements.

In using the word Advertisements, I mean to imply all those public announcements (made chiefly through the medium of the newspapers) which address personal interests, and which require an exercise of personal faith in the individual who reads them. Advertisements which divert an unthinking public, which excite contemptuous astonishment in superficial minds, which set flippant people asking each other, “Who believes in this? Where are the people who can possibly be taken in by it?” and so on, are precisely the Advertisements to which I now allude. To my wise belief in these beneficent public offers of assistance to humanity, I am indebted for the unruffled mental tranquillity in which my life – a model life, as I venture to think it – is now passed. I see my fellow creatures around me the dupes of their own fatal incredulity; worn by cares, which never trouble me; beset by doubts, from which I have escaped for ever – I see this spectacle of general anxiety and general wretchedness; and I find it invariably associated with a sarcastic suspicion, an irreverent disregard of those advertised roads to happiness and prosperity along which I have travelled, in my own personal case, with such undeniable and such astonishing results. My nature has been soft from infancy. My bosom is animated by a perpetual glow of philanthropy. I behold my species suffering, in all directions, through its own disastrous sharpness – and I compassionately come forward, in consequence, to persuade humanity that its business in this world is, not to make itself miserable by fighting with troubles, but to keep itself healthy, wealthy, and wise, by answering Advertisements.

I ask, believe me, very little. Faith and a few postage stamps – I want nothing more to regenerate the civilised world. With these treasures in ourselves; and with (to quote a few widely known advertisements) “Graphiology,” “Ten Pounds weekly realised by either Sex,” “Matrimony Made Easy,” and “The Future Foretold,” all gently illuminating our path through life, we may amble forward along our flowery ways, and never be jolted, never be driven back, never be puzzled about our right road, from the beginning of the journey to the end. Take my own case, as an instance; and hear me while I record the results of personal experience.

I shall abstain, at the outset, from quoting any examples to establish the connexion between advertisements and health; because I may fairly assume, from the notoriously large sale of advertised medicines, that the sick public is well aware of the inestimable benefit to be derived from an implicit confidence in quacks. The means, however, of becoming, not healthy only, but wise and wealthy as well, by dint of believing in advertisements, are far less generally known. To this branch of the subject I may, therefore, address myself, with the encouraging conviction that I am occupying comparatively new ground.

Allow me, to begin by laying down two first principles. No man can feel comfortably wise, until he is on good terms with himself; and no man can, rationally speaking, be on good terms with himself until he knows himself. And how is he to know himself? I may be asked. Quite easily, I answer, by accepting the means of information offered in the following terms, and in all the newspapers, by a benefactress of mankind:

Know Thyself! The Original Graphiologist, Miss Blank, continues her interesting and useful delineations of character, from examination of the handwriting, in a style peculiarly her own, and which can be but badly imitated by the ignorant pretenders and self-styled professors who have lately laid claim to a knowledge of this beautiful science. Persons desirous of knowing their own character, or that of any friend, must send a specimen of writing, stating sex and age, or supposed age, with fourteen uncut penny postage stamps, to Miss Blank, for which will be returned a detail of the gifts, defects, talents, tastes, affections, &c., of the writer, with other things previously unsuspected, calculated to guide in the everyday affairs of life, &c. &c.

This advertisement is no invention of my own. Excepting the lady’s name, it is a true copy of an original, which does really appear in all the newspapers.

Off went my handwriting, and my fourteen uncut stamps, by the next post. Back, in a day or two (for Graphiology takes its time), came that inestimable revelation of my character which will keep me to the last day of my life on the best and highest terms with myself. I incorporate my own notes with the letter, as an unquestionable guarantee of the truth of its assertions, and a pleasing evidence, likewise, of its effect upon my mind on a first reading:

“The handwriting of our correspondent is wanting in firmness and precision.” (Solely in consequence of my having a bad pen.) “There is apparent insincerity towards those who do not know you, but it is only putting a covering on your really warm heart.” (How true!) “Large-minded, and inclined to be very forgiving. Generous, but not very open.” (Well, if I must be one or the other, and not both together, I would rather be generous than open – for who can blame the closed heart when accompanied by the open hand?) “Of sterling integrity and inflexible perseverance.” (Just so!) “You are clever in whatever you undertake – kindly – original – vivacious – full of glee and spirit.” (Myself! I blush to own it, but this is myself, drawn to the life!) “You conceal your real nature not so much from hypocrisy as prudence – yet there is nothing sordid or mean about you.” (I should think not, indeed!) “You show least when you appear most open, and yet you are candid and artless.” (Too true – alas, too true!) “You are good-humoured, but it partakes more of volatile liveliness than wit.” (I do not envy the nature of the man who thinks this a defect.) “There is a melancholy tenderness pervades your manner” – (there is, indeed! ) – “ when succouring any one requiring your aid, which is at variance with your general tone. In disposition you are refined and sensitive.”

With this brief, gratifying, and neatly-expressed sentence, the estimate of my character ended. It has been as genuinely copied from a genuine original as the specimen which precedes it; and it was accompanied by a pamphlet presented gratis, on the “Management of the Human Hair.” Apparently, there had been peculiarities in my handwriting which had betrayed to the unerring eye of the Graphiologist, that my hair was not totally free from defects; and the pamphlet was a delicate way of hinting at the circumstance, and at the remedial agents to which I might look for relief. But this is a minor matter, and has nothing to do with the great triumph of Graphiology, which consists in introducing us to ourselves, on terms that make us inestimably precious to ourselves, for the trifling consideration of fourteenpenn’orth of postage stamps. To a perfectly unprejudiced – that is to say, to a wisely credulous mind – such a science as this carries its own recommendation along with it. Comment is superfluous – except in the form of stamps transmitted to the Graphiologist. I may continue the record of my personal experiences.

Having started, as it were, afresh in life, with a new and improved opinion of myself – having discovered that I am clever in whatever I undertake, kindly, original, vivacious, full of glee and spirit, and that my few faults are so essentially modest and becoming as to be more of the nature of second-rate merits than of positive defects – I am naturally in that bland and wisely contented frame of mind which peculiarly fits a man to undertake the choice of his vocation in life, with the certainty of doing the fullest justice to himself. At this new point in my career, I look around me once again among my sceptical and unhappy fellow mortals. What turbulence, what rivalry, what heartbreaking delays, disappointments, and discomfitures do I not behold among the disbelievers in advertisements – the dupes of incredulity, who are waiting for prizes in the lottery of professional existence! Here is a man vegetating despondingly in a wretched curacy; here is another, pining briefless at the unproductive Bar; here is a third, slaving away his youth at a desk, on the chance of getting a partnership, if he lives to be a middle-aged man. Inconceivable infatuation! Every one of these victims of prejudice and routine sees the advertisements – as I see them. Every one might answer the following announcement, issued by a disinterested lover of his species – as I answer it:

TEN POUNDS WEEKLY. – May be permanently realised by either sex, with each pound expended. Particulars clearly shown that these incomes are so well secured to those investing that to fail in realising them is impossible. Parties may commence with small investments, and by increasing them out of their profits, can, with unerring certainty, realise an enormous income. No partnership, risk, liability, or embarking in business. Incontestable authorities given in proof of these statements. Enclose a directed stamped envelope to, &c. &c.

All this information for a penny stamp! It is offered – really offered in the terms quoted above – in the advertising columns of half the newspapers in England; especially in the cheap newspapers, which have plenty of poor readers, hungry for any little addition to their scanty incomes. Would anybody believe that we persist in recognising the clerical profession, the medical profession, the legal profession, and that the Ten-Pounds-Weekly profession is, as yet, unacknowledged among us!

Well, I despatch my directed envelope. The reply is returned to me in the form of two documents, one lithographed and one printed, and both so long that they generously give me, at the outset, a good shilling’s worth of reading for my expenditure of a penny stamp. The commercial pivot on which the structure of my enormous future income revolves, I find, on perusal of the documents – the real documents, mind, not my imaginary substitutes for them – to be a “FABRIC” – described as somewhat similar in appearance to “printed velvet.” How simple and surprising! how comprehensive and satisfactory especially to a poor man, longing for that little addition to his meagre income! The Fabric is certain to make everybody’s fortune. And why? Because it is a patent Fabric, and because it can imitate everything, at an expense of half nothing. The Fabric can copy flowers, figures, landscapes, and historical pictures; paper hangings, dress pieces, shawls, scarfs, vests, trimmings, book covers, and “other manufactures too numerous to detail.” The Fabric can turn out “hundreds of thousands of articles at one operation.” By skilful manoeuvring of the Fabric “ninety per cent. of material is saved.” In the multitudinous manipulations of the Fabric – and this is a most cheering circumstance – “sixty veneers have been cut to the inch.” In the public disposal of the Fabric – and here is the most surprising discovery of all – the generous patentee (who answers my application) will distribute its advantages over the four quarters of the globe, in shares – five shilling shares – each one of which is “probably worth several hundred pounds.” But why talk of hundreds? Let clergymen, doctors, and barristers talk of hundreds. The Ten-Pounds-Weekly profession takes its stand on the Fabric, and counts by millions. We can prove this (I speak as a Fabricator) by explicit and incontrovertible reference to facts and figures.

How much (the following illustrations and arguments are not my own: they are derived entirely from the answer I receive to my application) – how much does it cost at present to dress a lady, shawl a lady, and bonnet a lady; to parasol and slipper a lady, and to make a lady quite happy after that, with a porte-monnaie, an album, and a book cover? Eight pounds – and dirt cheap, too. The Fabric will do the whole thing – now that “sixty veneers have been cut to the inch,” mind, but not before – for Two pounds. How much does it cost to carpet, rug, curtain, chair cover, decorate, table cover, and paper-hang a small house? Assume ruin to the manufacturer, and say, as a joke, Ten pounds. The Fabric, neatly cutting its sixty veneers to the inch, will furnish the house, as it furnishes the lady, for Two pounds. What follows?

Houses of small size and ladies of all sizes employ the Fabric. What returns pour in? Look at the population of houses and ladies, and say Seventy Millions Sterling per annum. Add foreign houses and foreign ladies, under the head of Exports, and say Thirty Millions per annum more. Is this too much for the ordinary mind to embrace? It is very good. The patentee is perfectly willing to descend the scale at a jump; to address the narrowest comprehension; and to knock off nine tenths. Remainder, Ten Millions. Say that “the royalty” will be thirty per cent., and “such profit would give three millions of pounds sterling to be divided among the shareholders.” Simple, as the simplest sum in the Multiplication Table: simple as two and two make four.

I am aware that the obstinate incredulity of the age will inquire why the fortunate Patentee does not keep these prodigious returns to himself. How base is Suspicion! How easily, in this instance, is it answered and rebuked! The Patentee refrains from keeping the returns to himself, because he doesn’t want money. His lithographed circular informs me – really and truly does inform me, and will inform you if you have to do with him – that he has had “a good fortune” left him, and that he is “heir to several thousand pounds a year.” With these means at his disposal, he might of course work his inestimable patent with his own resources. But no! – he will let the public in. What a man! How noble his handwriting must be, in a graphiological point of view! What phrases are grateful enough to acknowledge his personal kindness in issuing shares to me at “the totally inadequate sum” – to use his own modest words – of five shillings each? Happy, happy day, when I and the Fabric and the Patentee were all three introduced to one another!

When a man is so fortunate as to know himself, from the height of his “volatile liveliness” to the depth of his “melancholy tenderness” – as I know myself – when, elevated on a multiform Fabric, he looks down from the regions of perpetual wealth on the narrow necessities of the workaday world beneath him – but one other action is left for that man to perform, if he wishes to make the sum of his earthly felicity complete. The ladies will already have anticipated that the action which I now refer to as final may be comprehended in one word – Marriage.

The course of all disbelievers in advertisements, where they are brought face to face with this grand emergency, is more or less tortuous, troubled, lengthy, and uncertain. No man of this unhappy stamp can fall in love, bill and coo, and finally get himself married, without a considerable amount of doubt, vexation, and disappointment occurring at one period or other in the general transaction of his amatory affairs. Through want of faith and postage stamps, mankind have agreed to recognise these very disagreeable drawbacks as so many inevitable misfortunes: dozens of popular proverbs assert their necessary existence, and nine-tenths of our successful novels are filled with the sympathetic recital of them in successions of hysterical chapters. And yet, singular as it may appear, the most cursory reference to the advertising columns of the newspapers is sufficient to show the fallacy of this view, if readers would only exercise (as I do) their faculties of implicit belief. As there are infallible secrets for discovering character by handwriting, and making fortunes by Fabrics, so there are other infallible secrets for falling in love with the right woman, fascinating her in the right way, and proposing to her at the right time, which render doubt, disappointment, or hesitation, at any period of the business, so many absolute impossibilities. Once again, let me confute incredulous humanity, by quoting my own happy experience.

Now, mark. I think it desirable to settle in life. Good. Do I range over my whole acquaintance; do I frequent balls, concerts, and public promenades; do I spend long days in wearisome country-houses, and sun myself persistently at the watering places of England – all for the purpose of finding a woman to marry? I am too wise to give myself any such absurd amount of trouble. I simply start my preliminary operations by answering the following advertisement:

“To THE UNMARRIED. – If you wish to Marry, send a stamped addressed envelope to the Advertiser, who will put you in possession of a Secret by means of which you can win the affections of as many of the opposite sex as your heart may desire. This is suitable for either sex; for the old or young, rich or poor, whether of prepossessing appearance or otherwise. – Address, Mr Flam, London.

When the answer reaches me, I find Mr Flam – although undoubtedly a benefactor to mankind – to be scarcely so ready of access and so expansive in his nature as the Proprietor of the Fabric. Instead of sending me the Secret, he transmits a printed paper, informing me that he wants two shillings worth of postage stamps first. To my mind, it seems strange that he should have omitted to mention this in the Advertisement. But I send the stamps, nevertheless; and get the Secret back from Mr Flam, in the form of a printed paper. Half of this paper is addressed to the fair sex, and is therefore, I fear, of no use to me. The other half, however, addresses the lords of the creation; and I find the Secret summed up at the end, for their benefit, in these few but most remarkable words:

To THE MALE SEX. – If a woman is clean and neat in her dress, respects the Sabbath, and is dutiful towards her parents, happy will be the man who makes her his wife.

Most astonishing! All great discoveries are simple. Is it not amazing that nobody should have had the smallest suspicion of the sublime truth expressed above, until Mr Flam suddenly hit on it? How cheap, too – how scandalously cheap at two shillings! And this is the man whose generosity I doubted – the man who not only bursts on me with a new revelation, but adds to it a column of advice, every sentence of which is more than worth its tributary postage stamp. Assuming that I have fixed on my young woman, Mr Flam teaches me how to “circumvent” her, in the following artful and irresistible manner:

I must see her as often as possible. I must have something fresh to relate to her at every interview; and I must get that “something fresh” out of the newspapers. I must tell her where I have been, and where I am going to, and what I have seen, and what I expect to see; and if she wants to go with me, I must take her, and, what is more, I must be lively, and “come out with a few witty remarks, and be as amusing as possible” – for (and here is another Secret, another great discovery thrown in for nothing) I must recollect that “the funny man is always a favourite with the ladies.” Amazing insight! How does Mr Flam get down into these deep, these previously unsuspected wellsprings of female human nature? One would like a brief memoir of this remarkable person, accompanied by his portrait from a photograph, and enriched by a facsimile (for graphiological purposes) of his handwriting.

To return once more, and for the last time, to myself. It may be objected that, although Mr Flam has illuminated me with an inestimable secret, has fortified me with invaluable advice for making myself agreeable, and has assured me that if I attend to it, I may, “after a few weeks, boldly declare my love, and make certain of receiving a favourable answer,” he has, apparently, omitted, judging by my abstract of his reply, to inform me of the terms in which I am to make my offer, when I and my young woman are mutually ready for it. This is true. I am told to declare my love boldly; but I am not told how to do it, because Mr Flam, of London, is honourably unwilling to interfere with the province of a brother-benefactor, Mr Hum, of Hull, who for twenty-six postage stamps (see Advertisement) will continue the process of my enlightenment, from the point at which it left off, in “the most wonderful, astonishing, and curious work ever published in the English language, entitled Matrimony Made Easy; or, How to Win a Lover.” It is unnecessary to say that I send for this work, and two new discoveries flash upon me at the first perusal of it.

My first discovery is, that identically the same ideas on the subject of matrimony, and identically the same phrases in expressing them, appear to have occurred to Mr Flam, of London, and to Mr Hum, of Hull. The whole first part of Mr Hum’s pamphlet is, sentence for sentence, and word for word, an exact repetition of the printed paper previously forwarded to me by Mr Flam. To superficial minds this very remarkable coincidence might suggest that Mr Flam and Mr Hum, in spite of the difference in their respective names and addresses, were one and the same individual. To those who, like myself, look deeper, any such injurious theory as this is inadmissible, because it implies that a benefactor to mankind is capable of dividing himself in two for the sake of fraudulently procuring from the public a double allowance of postage stamps. This is, under the circumstances, manifestly impossible. Mr Flam, therefore, in my mind, remains a distinct and perfect Flam, and Mr Hum, a distinct and perfect Hum; and the similarity of their ideas and expressions is simply another confirmation of the well known adage which refers to the simultaneous jumping of two great wits to one conclusion. So much for my first discovery.

The second revelation bursts out on me from the second part of Mr Hum’s pamphlet, which I may remark, in parenthesis, is purely and entirely his own. I have been previously in the habit of believing that offers of marriage might extend themselves in the matter of verbal expression, to an almost infinite variety of forms. Mr Hum, however, taking me up at the point where Mr Flam has set me down, amazes and delights me by showing that the matrimonial advances of the whole population of bachelors may be confidently made to the whole population of spinsters, in one short and definitely stated form of words. Mr Flam has told me when to declare my love; and Mr Hum, in the following paragraph, goes a step further, and tells me how to do it:

When the gentleman has somewhat familiarised himself with the lady, and perceived that he is not, at all events, an object of aversion or ridicule, he should seek a favourable opportunity, and speak to this effect: – ‘I have come (miss, or madam, as the case may be) to take a probably final leave of you.’ The lady will naturally ask the reason; when the lover can add (and if he is a fellow of any feeling, the occasion may give a depth of tone and an effect to his eloquence, that may turn the beam in his favour, if it was an even balance before): – ‘Because, madam, I find your society has become so dear to me, that I fear I must fly to save myself, as I may not dare to hope that the suit of a stranger might be crowned with success.’

No more – we single men may think it short – but there is actually not a word more. Maid or widow, whichever she may be, “crowned with success,” is the last she will get out of us men. If she means to blush, hesitate, tremble, and sink on our bosoms, she had better be quick about it, on the utterance of the word “success.” Our carpet bag is in the hall, and we shall take that “final leave” of ours, to a dead certainty, unless she looks sharp. Mr Hum adds, that she probably will look sharp. Not a doubt of it. Thank you, Mr Hum; you have more than earned your postage stamps; we need trouble you no further.

I am now thoroughly prepared for my future transactions with the fair sex – but where, it may be objected, is the woman on whom I am to exercise my little arts? It is all very well for me to boast that I am above the necessity of toiling after her, here, there, and everywhere – toil for her, I must: nobody will spare me that trouble, at any rate. I beg pardon – Destiny (for a consideration of postage stamps) will willingly spare me the trouble. Destiny, if I will patiently bide my time (which I am only too willing to do), will hunt out a woman of the right complexion for me, and will bring her within easy hearing distance of the great Hum formula, at the proper moment. How can I possibly know this? Just as I know everything else, by putting my trust in advertisements, and not being stingy with my postage stamps. Here is the modest offer of service which Destiny, speaking through the newspapers, makes to mankind:

THE FUTURE FORETOLD. – Any persons wishing to have their future lives revealed to them correctly, should send their age, sex, and eighteen stamps, to Mr Nimbus (whose prophecies never fail).

I send my age, my sex, and my eighteen stamps; and Mr Nimbus, as the mouthpiece of Destiny, speaks thus encouragingly in return:

“PRIVATE. – I have carefully studied your destiny, and I find that you were born under the planet Mars. You have experienced in life some changes, and all has not been found to answer your expectations. There are brighter days and happier hours before you, and the present year will bring to you greater advantages than the past. You will marry a Female of Fair Complexion, most desirous of gaining your hand.” (That’s the woman! I am perfectly satisfied. Destiny will bring us together; the system of Mr Flam will endear us to each other; and the formula of Mr Hum will clench the tender business. All right, Mr Nimbus – what next?) “You will make a most fortunate speculation with a Male of whom you have some knowledge” – (evidently the proprietor of the Fabric) – “and, although there will be some difficulties arise for a time, they will again disappear, and your Star rises in the ascendant. You will be successful in your undertakings and pursuits, and you will attain to a position in life desirable to your future welfare.”

I have done. All the advertisements presented here, I must again repeat, are real advertisements. Nothing is changed in any of them but the names of the advertisers. The answers copied are genuine answers obtained, only a short time since, in the customary way, by formal applications. I need say no more. The lesson of wise credulity which I undertook to teach, from the record of my own experience, is now before the world, and I may withdraw again into the healthy, wealthy, and wise retirement from which I have emerged solely for the good of others.

Take a last fond look at me before I go. Behold me immovably fixed in my good opinion of myself, by the discriminating powers of Graphiology; prospectively enriched by the vast future proceeds of my Fabric; thoroughly well grounded in the infallible rules for Courtship and Matrimony, and confidently awaiting the Female of Fair Complexion, on whom I shall practise them. Favoured by these circumstances, lavishly provided for in every possible respect, free from everything in the shape of cares, doubts, and anxieties, who can say that I have not accurately described myself as “the happiest man alive;” and who can venture to dispute that this position of perfect bliss is the obvious and necessary consequence of a wise belief in Advertisements?

The Good Qualities

of Gout

All the Year Round, Volume 1, page 102

When I say gout, I don’t mean rheumatism. A variety of endeavours have been made to define the difference between gout and rheumatism. Thus: Gout is rich man’s rheumatism, and rheumatism is poor man’s gout; which is good only as a figure of speech. Another: Put your toe in a vice; turn the screw till you can bear the pain no longer; that’s rheumatism. Give the screw one turn more; that’s gout. In every respect, gout takes precedence. Just as, grammatically speaking, the masculine gender is “more worthy” than the feminine, and the feminine more worthy than the neuter (I should think so!) so is gout more worthy than rheumatism, and rheumatism more worthy than the low, vagabond pains and aches which John Kemble sought to dignify by calling them Hs.

Rheumatic gout may be assumed to be no real gout at all, but either pure rheumatism or rheumatic fever. There is no such thing as gouty rheumatism; which is simply a contradiction of terms. It is possible, however, for gout and rheumatism to be co-resident in the same patient, just as it is possible for a white man and a black man to be fellow lodgers in the same boarding house, on this side of the Atlantic. Gout is strictly confined to the joints; rheumatism has no objection to a sojourn amongst the muscles. For instance, it will play tricks with your intercostal (mid-rib) muscles, frightening you with false terrors of heart disease. Gout comes to a regular crisis: it has its rise, its culminating point, and its decline and fall: it is the barleycorn-note of the practised vocalist, swelling and then dying upon the sense. Rheumatism may oscillate up and down, backward or forward; may advance or retreat capriciously; but it has no critical point, no fortissimo, the arrival of which is a guarantee and preparation for a sure and certain diminuendo. Gout is a generous, warm-hearted fellow, who, if he quarrels now and then, has a good stand-up fight, and has done with it. Rheumatism does not fire up so easily; but, when once he has taken a grudge against you, he never forgets it; his malignant passions never cease to rankle; his memory is long, for evil. When you think you have shaken hands with him, he will undeceive you by some secret ill-natured pinch. He will stab you in the back at your own dinner table.

Gout is a summer interspersed with thunderstorms, which nevertheless can boast its genial days and weeks. Rheumatism is the settled bad weather, all the year round, enjoyed by the natives of the Hebrides, whose meteorological variety consists in the different blackness or whiteness of their squalls, and the angle of inclination (lying somewhere between ten and ninety degrees) at which their raindrops impinge on the ground. Rheumatism is the vile Old Man of the Sea, who insidiously instals himself upon your shoulder, and who never looses his hold entirely, although he may relax it from time to time. Gout is a mighty but irascible genius, who occasionally opens the floodgates of his wrath; but who, as soon as the tempest is over, descends with dignity to his retreat at the bottom of the sea.

When Xerxes offered a reward for a new pleasure, it is a pity he did not first think of asking his physicians to give him a taste of the gout. He would have found its departure – duly preceded by its arrival and its stay – the most agreeable sensation he ever felt in his life. For gout is a gentlemanly and accommodating visitor, not dangerous upon the whole: you may enjoy the advantage of his company often and often, without apprehension of any untoward result. It cannot be denied that unlooked-for accidents will now and then occur; but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. They are treacherous and shabby tricks which Death maliciously plays off on Gout to put him out of favour with the sons of men. Many and many people are in the habit of receiving Gout in their houses, all their lives long, till he becomes quite an old and respected acquaintance (to despise him is impossible), and yet receive their death stroke from some other enemy. They die, not of Gout’s ill treatment, but because Gout cannot come to their rescue and drive out the new intruder, who has broken into the premises with malice prepense. Count the total number of fits of the gout which come off in Europe in twenty-five years with the actual deaths with which Gout stands really and truly chargeable during the same period, and the proportion is reduced to an infinitesimal fraction: to all but snow-white innocence.

Gout introduces you to a variety of new sensations and new ideas which otherwise would be closed to you; and consequently enlarges your views of life. You have heard of the village stocks (once a national institution); but you have no notion what it is to be in the stocks. Gout will enlighten your ignorance, by laying you flat on your back so that you could not stir for your life if the house caught fire. He will then put your feet into his own private stocks (made of burning iron). As a further improvement, he will set on a few of his private pack of pitiless dogs with red-hot teeth, to gnaw at your toes till you exclaim, “Don’t talk to me of the village stocks as a punishment! They were nothing to this.”

You have heard of the torture-boots of the Inquisitors and others, but you have never seen nor felt one. Gout will bring his boot and draw it up tight as far as your knee; next, he will drive in some heated wedges, tapping them constantly with a nice little hammer, to prevent your forgetting they are there, till at last you lose your dignity, and shout aloud. When the performance is over, and Gout’s boot is taken off, your late experiment suggests the remark, “I could not have believed that such monsters as those Inquisitors ever existed on earth! This, which I have just suffered is horrible torture, certainly; but my poor knee, in the course of a week, will be supple and shapely as ever it was. If I hush up the fact of my punishment by Gout, no one will suspect it when they see me gaily strutting all right and tight. I have been thinking about making the ascent of Mont Blanc; yet, as the times are troubled in Savoy, perhaps it will be more prudent to ascend Primrose Hill instead. But the torture-boot of those despots and Inquisitors (while the pain it inflicts is even worse than Gout’s) crushes the limb, and leaves the patient maimed for life and all for the chance of obtaining a false confession, or a lying and treacherous denunciation of others! Thank Heaven I and mine have no worse tyrant than Gout to deal with!”

Your physiological studies will have made you acquainted with muscular fibre and its ultimate fibrillae you have peeped, through your two inch microscope, at an injected preparation of human muscle, looking like a wisp of bright yellow flax only waiting to be spun. What do you know about muscular fibre the more for that? Not much. Gout will give you a lesson, gratis. He wants to establish a communication through each separate station, or joint, of your leg; to effect his purpose, he will construct a novel sort of electric telegraph. He will endow every individual fibre in your leg with a separate consciousness and a separate will of its own. And then they will carry the news of their insubordination from hip to knee, and from knee to toes’ tip; they will crawl up and down, each his own way, twisting and writhing in select parties and clubs, agitating for fibre independence of the human will, and satisfied with nothing less than corporeal republicanism and universal fibre suffrage. When they are tired of their mutiny, and Gout has finally settled them with two or three discharges of his electric battery, you whisper to yourself, “I may be a little vain, but a thousand pounds to one penny I know more about muscular fibre than Dr Carpenter himself.”

You are versed in nursery literature; not thy “Royal Road to Learning” series, which so ably teaches children how to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs, but the literature in which are embalmed the King of the South, who burnt his mouth with eating o’ cold peas porridge; the man who jumped into the bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes, and then, as a safe ophthalmic remedy, returned to the same bush and scratched them in again; the poor wind rocked baby on the housetop, whose father’s a nobleman, mother’s a queen, sister’s a lady, and wears a gold ring, brother’s a drummer, and drums for the king –” and so “wider,” as our German friends have a habit of saying, instead of “and so forth.” There is a delicious baby lyric, which it is impossible to appreciate without the explanation afforded by Gout. You remember the dear little old woman who was coming home from market upon a market day, when she fell asleep on the king’s highway. Some one cut her petticoats above her knees, which made the dear old woman to shiver and to sneeze. Waking in a fright, she began to cry, “Gracious goodness on me, can this be I? If it be I, as I think it cannot be, I’ve a little dog at home, and he’ll know me.”

Commentary, Marginal Note, and Scholium. After an interesting but rather fatiguing day’s colloquy with Gout, in the course of which you have had several master strokes submitted to your consideration, you are lifted out of bed, at eight in the evening, to have it made, and immediately lifted in again; you fall into a sound and natural sleep, which lasts till somewhat o’clock in the morning – for it is dark; how can you tell how long it lasts? You wake; that is to say, something wakes, you don’t know what it is. At the foot of the bed there lie a couple of feet which a cruel person, during the night, has sealed together with burning sealing wax, so that they stick. No legs; instead of them, a packet belonging to unknown strangers. A body cut up into two or three pieces; part of a back; no arms; a couple of hands, and a head; all unconnected by the slightest bond of union. There they lie in the bed, like the disjointed members of a broken marionette. “Gracious goodness on me, can this be I?” The hands feel for the place where the hot sealing wax has been dropped on the feet. It is soon found. The “raw” or tender point of one foot had come in contact with the “raw” or tender point of the other. The hands separate them to a prudent distance, and gently rub the smarting burn. “Sure enough, this be I; but where is the rest of me? I will strike a lucifer and light the wax candle at my bedside, to see. It may be as well to search before it is too late. But never mind, I can’t be far off, for the moonbeams show me that this is really my bed, and that there is my shaving glass. Here, too, is the little cot pillow which I stuck behind my head last night. I will suck an orange, and so to sleep again (heartily glad and thankful, too). They’ll find my remains all right tomorrow morning; if tomorrow be not today.”

Again: You have an affectionate wife, good and dutiful children, and excellent servants.

“Well, what of that? Of course I have. That’s nothing so very extraordinary.”

Perhaps not. But, under the teachings of Gout, you will think the combination less ordinary than you esteem it now. You are as helpless as a baby, much more troublesome, and not half so pretty; and yet you are treated as tenderly as a baby. You are lame in both hands. You are lame in both feet, you can’t run away, they could throw you out of the window when you are cross; and they don’t. They could share your worldly goods amongst themselves, plunder your house, set fire to it, and leave you to disappear in the flames; and they don’t. They might simply neglect you, leaving you to hunger, thirst, and pine, for want of care and consolation; instead of that, they rise early, and late take rest; they deny themselves their habitual pleasures, amusements, and exercises; they cheerfully fulfil many little offices which it grieves you to see they should have to perform. “Gout’s observations are much to the purpose,” you confess at last. “An affectionate wife, good and dutiful children, and excellent servants are things not to be despised.”

Gout, therefore, sweetens the temper. Gouty people may be made hasty or passionate, but never wicked and malignant, by their morbific friend. They become spicy, or, as it were, gunpowdery and gun-cottonish, but never the workers out of any evil intention; they are much too impulsive for that. They are peppermint bull’s eyes, gingered barley stick, hot but sugary. Amongst all the gouty uncles in bygone farces, whose like we shall never see again, is there one who concludes his scenic career by disinheriting his niece, and sending off his scapegrace ward, her lover, to superintend his vast estates in Jamaica. Never would O’Keefe or Michael Kelly have dared to hold so distorted a mirror up to nature. There is scolding and melting into kiss and be friends, with a handsome provision for the lady’s maid and her facetious lover, Colin Carrots.

Gout also brightens the intellect, and sets light to the spirit lamp of the imagination. It will not be believed by the uninitiated, but a man never finds himself in better trim, more up to the mark, bodily and mentally, than when he is just on the eve of being laid up in dry dock. The list of celebrities whom Gout has favoured with his attentions is too long to recapitulate here; we may find room for Lord Chatham’s name. Of another nobleman, not very low in the world, it has often been asked whence he derived his splendid oratorical gifts, whether from study, practice, or hereditary talent. All those circumstances may have had something to do with it, but I say it is Gout who gives the inspiration.

People are apt to laugh when they hear that So-and-so of their acquaintance has got the gout. Why do they laugh? Where is the funny circumstance? Oh! the gout is a man’s own fault; it is the result of his gross indulgences, his intemperance, his sensuality, etcetera, etcetera; and when he is caught, and deservedly made to smart for it, people of course cannot help laughing.

Softly! I do not say that a man may not bring on gout, or something in its stead, by trying hard. Your worthy cousin, Doublemeel Fish, who besides his breakfast at nine a.m., and his supper at ten p.m., eats one dinner at one, and another dinner at six, and who never takes a morning drive in his gig without a bottle of champagne per head in the box to prevent fainting on the way – Doublemeel has gout, certainly, with himself probably to thank for it. He ought to be thankful, if it does not end in apoplexy. But men who have lived soberly and temperately all their lives have nevertheless had gout, from their goutage till the close of their allotted term. Two causes are nearly sure to bring on gout in persons constitutionally disposed to it; violent mental emotion, and abrupt exposure to low temperature There is nothing very ridiculous in either of those accidents. One of our most esteemed medical classics has written, that when once gout has hold of your system or your family, take all the precautionary measures you may, you will have gout now and then, especially towards the close of winter.

Gout has never enjoyed a high reputation for putting money into the pockets of medical men. Patent medicine vendors have made a better thing by it than regular practitioners. People who have once done business with gout, soon discover that (except in the case of unusually violent crises which must be met by unusual expedients) it is a mere matter of routine and long-suffering. A little domestic medicine, a little regimen, a good deal of patience, hot baths topical and general, hot diluent drinks, encouragements to action of the skin – that is all you can do, except going to bed and abiding your time. Order to be civilly shown to the door any counsellors who would advise you to put a sudden check on gout. It is far more dangerous than bridling or saddling the wildest horse of the steppes. “Tell your papa, my dear,” said a sage adviser to a listening child, “the next time he feels an attack coming on, to walk down to the seaside before breakfast, to pull off his shoes and stockings there, and to wade at the water’s edge for half an hour.” If the counsellor wished to see his patient thunderstricken with gout in the head, he could not have given more likely advice. “My dear sir,” said a Lady Benevolent, “I know a lotion that will cure you directly. I will undertake to set you on your legs by tomorrow morning.” The foolish man consented to the experiment. He was on his legs the next day morning. And all the rest of his life he was a martyr to the sufferings of latent, suppressed, and smouldering gout, which never could break out into one good honest blaze.

There are bearable fits of the gout, and there are unbearable ones; there are visits, and there are visitations; just as there are supportable and insupportable boon companions. We tolerate the former, protesting a little at the liberties they take, and hoping they will behave better next time; we cut with the others forthwith, at any price and at all hazards. We call in villainous Colchicum, who betrays us to our ruin with his smooth appearances; or we throw ourselves into the arms of Opium, who dries up and troubles our brain. But even when the torments of gout are insupportable, still bear them if you possibly can; the very act of bearing will alleviate them; the faintness and perspiration of extreme suffering will end in a salutary calm. If you really can bear no more and no longer, and are beginning to cry out for somebody to come and knock you on the head and put you out of your misery, call rather for your family physician and ask him to give you a discreet dose of some anodyne, such as Batley’s sedative, which he judges less noxious than the rest of its class; for they are all noxious more or less.

Be persuaded, then, of one invaluable truth; even if you begin to weary of Gout’s society, the only safe way of dismissing him is by allowing him to dismiss himself – by urging him to request himself to take himself off. Inscribe in letters of gold on the cornice of your chamber, “Gout is the only cure for Gout.” You may turn yourself inside out, like a glove, with purgatives; you may deaden your nerves with quack narcotics, without advancing a step in the right direction. You are only an ostrich hiding your head in a hole to prevent your seeing a certain ugly unwelcome horseman. When you take your head out of the hole, after a week or two’s time, the horseman is there all the same, ready to lay his fingers on you. With Gout, coaxing answers better than scratching; he is much more easily led than driven.

The wisest form of diplomacy is this: “My dear Gout, we are ancient allies, and I trust we shall remain so for many years to come; but there is a time for all things. There is a time for Gout, and there is a time to be rid – I mean, there is a time to deny ourselves the indulgences of Gout. Though I value you highly as my guest, still I am obliged to receive other friends in their turn. Just now, you are lodged (comfortably, I hope) in my hip; but that apartment is much too high and garret-like for you to occupy. Suppose you move a story lower, and come down, to my knee. You will be much better there; as it will be so much easier to supply you with the flannel and the hot water which you love so well.” Gout is persuaded, and allows his carpet bag to be brought down to the knee, where he takes up his quarters for a day or two.

You then observe, “My very dear Gout, variety is pleasing. Suppose you now try my foot for a change.” To which Gout replies, politely, “So I will. I have no objection at all to sleep on the ground floor. I have already tried it, and had no reason to complain of the accommodation. When you wake tomorrow morning you will find me installed in my new abode.”

Gout is as good as his word; he makes himself at home in your foot; he does just as he pleases with ankle, instep, heel, and toe joints. One day, when he has completely retreated into your great toe, as to a sort of outlying garden balcony, to look out of the window and enjoy the air, you insidiously suggest, “What a fine May morning! What beautiful weather for travelling! If I had any excuse for taking a jaunt, and were not detained at home by my respect for you, I should certainly be off for a week or two’s trip.”

“Oh!” says Gout, good-naturedly, “don’t let me detain you. There are some friends of mine who will be expecting me. It seems a long while since I have seen them; they will think it unkind if I do not pay them a visit.”

“Really!”

“That is, I feel a great inclination to take a short Italian tour. To tell the truth, I can hardly keep my fingers off the Austrian legislators who have published their rules and regulations for the whipping of Lombard ladies. I am tempted to give a good Cornish hug to certain peninsular dungeon-keepers of high rank and many years’ standing; and I long to bestow a fond embrace on sundry cardinals, who will not allow pestilential marshes to be drained, nor railroads to be made, nor agriculture to thrive, nor manufactures and commerce to develop themselves, because the result of such innovation would be the sure subversion of ecclesiastical tyranny. You’ll excuse me, therefore, if I leave you somewhat abruptly. Goodbye!” “Goodbye, then,” you say, “till next time.”

And you bow out Gout with every well bred mark of regret at parting.

The Royal Academy

in Bed

All the Year Round, Volume 1, page 105

The opening of The Royal Academy Exhibition of eighteen hundred and fifty-nine is the first opening that I have missed for something like a score of years past. Illness, which confines me to my bed, has been the sole cause of my absence when the rooms in Trafalgar Square were thrown open to an immense shilling public, for the present season. My admiration for modern Art almost amounts to fanaticism; and my disappointment at missing the first week of the Exhibition is not to be described in words or depicted on canvas.

My doctor informs me that I may hope to get out again before the doors of the elegant and commodious Palace of Art, which occupies the north side of Trafalgar Square, are closed at the end of July. While I am waiting for the happy period of my emancipation, I have been finding consolation and occupying the weary hours by a careful perusal of the Royal Academy Catalogue for the present year. Thanks to this invaluable document, I have found myself in a condition to plan out my future visit to the Exhibition, in its minutest details, beforehand, I have decided what pictures I shall see and what pictures I shall miss; I know where I shall want to look up and where I shall want to look down; I have even settled in my own mind when I shall tread on the toes of other people, and when other people will return the compliment by treading on mine – in short, I have excited my imagination to such a pitch of preternatural lucidity, that I have all but got the whole picture show at my fingers’ ends already, though I have not the slightest chance of paying a visit to it for at least six weeks to come.

Allow me to present my Private View of The Royal Academy Exhibition, taken from my bedroom at Peckham Rye, by the telescopic help of the Catalogue for the present year.

To begin (as the critics do) with general characteristics. I find the Exhibition to be, in two respects, negatively unlike its predecessors. The Vicar of Wakefield is, unless I mistake, at last used up; and there is no statue of Musidora (‘at the doubtful breeze alarmed”) in the Sculpture Room. In regard to positive changes, I observe a remarkable tendency in the artists, this year, to take each others’ likenesses; and (judging by certain quotations) to plunge into abstruse classical reading, through the medium of some highly unintelligible English translation.

In other respects, the Catalogue affords cheering evidences of strictly Conservative policy on the part of the Academy in particular, and of the Artists in general. There is still a strong infusion of the recently imported Spanish element. Certain painters still stagger and drop under the weight of the English grammar, in composing their titles, or offering their necessary explanations in small type. Certain subjects which have been perpetually repeated in countless numbers, are reiterated once again for the benefit of a public faithful to its darling conventionalities. Poor old Venice continues to be trotted out, and has no present prospect of retiring into private life. Our more juvenile, but still well known old friend, the transparent pool, with the wonderful reflexions, the pretty sky, and the unpronounceable Welsh name to distinguish it in the Catalogue, still courts the general admiration. So do the Campagna of Rome, the Festa Day at Naples, the Contadina, Rebecca, the Bride of Lammermoor, the portrait of a gentleman, and the portrait of a lady. As for Cordelia, Othello, Macbeth, Falstaff, and Ophelia, they all cry “Here we are again!” from their places on the walls, as regular to their time as so many Harlequins, Clowns, Pantaloons, and Columbines, in so many Christmas Pantomimes.

Thus much for the general character of the Exhibition. Descending next to details, I beg to communicate the following classification of the thirteen hundred and odd works of art, exhibited this year, as adapted to the necessities of my own Private View. I divide the Catalogue, then, for my own purposes, into–

1. The pictures that are vouched for by their artists’ names.

2. The pictures that are sure to be hung scandalously high, or scandalously low.

3. The pictures that I don’t think I shall look for.

4. The pictures that I shall be obliged to see, whether I like it or not.

5. The pictures that puzzle me.

6. The pictures that I am quite certain to come away without seeing.

Past experience, close study of titles, and a vivid imagination, enable me to distribute the whole of this year’s collection of works of art quite easily under the foregoing six heads. The first head, embracing the pictures that are vouched for by their artists’ names, naturally gives me no trouble whatever, beyond the exertion involved in a moderate exercise of memory. Here in my bed, I know what main features the new works of the famous painters will present, as well as if I was looking at them in the Academy Rooms. Mr Creswick again gives me his delicate, clear toned, cheerful transcripts of English scenery. Mr Leslie still stands alone, the one painter of ladies – as distinguished from many excellent painters of women – whom England has produced, since Gainsborough and Sir Joshua dropped their brushes for ever.[1]

Sir Edwin Landseer may be as eccentric in his titles as he pleases: I know very well that there are deer and dogs on the new canvases such as no other master, living or dead, native or foreign, has ever painted. Mr Stanfield may travel where he will; but I am glad to think that he cannot escape from that wonderful breezy dash of seawater which it will refresh me to look at the moment I can get to Trafalgar Square. Mr Ward has only to inform me (which he does by his title) that he has happily stripped off his late misfitting Court suit, and I see his old mastery of dramatic effect and his old force of expression on this year’s canvas as plainly as I see my own miserable bed curtains. Mr Roberts finds the most formidable intricacies of architecture as easy to master this season as at any former period of his life. Mr Danby is still writing poetry with his brush, as he alone can write it. Mr Stone has not lost that sense of beauty which is an artist’s most precious inheritance. Mr Egg is as manfully true to nature, as simply powerful in expression, and as admirably above all artifice and trickery of execution as ever. And Mr Millais – who must only come last to pay the enviable penalty due from the youngest man – has got pictures, this year, which will probably appeal to all spectators to empty their minds of conventionalities, and to remember that the new thing in Art is not necessarily the wrong thing because it is new.

It is time now to get to the second head – to the pictures that are sure to be hung scandalously high or scandalously low. How can I – in bed at Peckham Rye at this very moment – presume to say what pictures are under the ceiling, or what pictures are down on the floor, in Trafalgar Square? There is no presumption in the matter. I consult the Catalogue by the light of past experience, and certain disastrous titles immediately supply me with all the information of which I stand in need.

“Dead Game,” “A View near Dorking,” “A Brig signalising for a Pilot,” “A Madonna,”

“An Autumnal Evening,” “A Roman Peasant,” “The Caprices of Cupid,” “Fugitives escaped from the Massacre of Glencoe,” and “Preparing the Ark for the Infant Moses” – are nine specimens of pictures which, I am positively certain, before I see them, are all hung scandalously high or scandalously low. In the interests of these works, and of others too numerous to mention, I shall take with me, when I get to the Academy, at the end of July, a telescope for the high latitudes, and a soft kneeling-mat for the humble regions of the wainscot. In the mean time, I would privately suggest to the painters of this uniformly ill-treated class of works the propriety of changing their titles, in such a manner as to administer a few dexterous compliments, next time, to the Academy authorities. If the “Caprices of Cupid” had been called “Ideal View of a Member of the Hanging Committee;” or if “Preparing the Ark for the Infant Moses” had been altered to “Preparing a nice Place for a meritorious Outsider,” the destiny of these two pictures might have been happier. “Dead Game,” again, might have done better if the artist had added to the title, “not higher than you would like it at your own hospitable table, and not low, out of consideration for the landed aristocrat who once preserved it.” I throw out these slight hints on the assumption that even an Academician is a man, and that, as such, he is not inaccessible to flattery.

Head Number Three: The pictures that I don’t think I shall look for. Here, once more, I trust myself implicitly to the titles. They warn me, when I go to the Exhibition, to be on my guard (without intending any personal disrespect towards the artists) against the following works, among many others:

“Poeonian Woman. ‘When she came to the river, she watered her horse, filled her vase, and returned by the road, bearing the water on her head, leading the horse, and spinning from her distaff. – Herod. Terps. 12.’” No, no, madam; I know you, and your extract from “Herod. Terps. 12” has no effect upon me. I know your long leg that shows through your diaphanous robe, and your straight line from the top of your forehead to the tip of your nose, and your short upper lip and your fleshy chin, and your total want of all those embraceable qualities which form the most precious attribute of your sex in modern times. Unfascinating Poeonian woman, you can do three things at once, as I gather from your extract; but there is a fourth thing you can’t do – you can’t get me to look at you!

“Warrior-Poets of Europe contending in Song”? Well? I think not. What can Painting do with such a subject as this? It can open the warrior-poets’ mouths; but it cannot inform me of what I want to know next – which is, what they are singing? Will the artist kindly stand under his work (towards the end of July); and, when he sees a sickly-looking gentleman approach, with a white handkerchief in his left hand, will he complete his picture by humming a few of the warrior-poets’ songs? In that case, I will gladly look at it – in any other, No.

“So sleepy!” Dear, dear me! This is surely a chubby child, with swollen cheeks, and dropsical legs. I dislike cherubs in Nature (as my married friends know), because I object to corpulence on any scale, no matter how small, and I will not willingly approach a cherub, even when presented to me under the comparatively quiet form of Art. “Preparing for the Masquerade”? No; that is Costume, and I can see it on a larger scale in Mr Nathan’s shop. “Felice Ballarin reciting Tasso to the people of Chioggia”? No; I never heard of Felice Ballarin; and it does not reconcile me to his being painted, to know that he is reciting at Chioggia. “The Monk Felix”? Bah! a snuffy man with a beard; let him move on, with the Poeonian woman to keep him company. “Ideal Bust of a Warrior”? I fear the temptation to look at this will be too much for me; although I know, by experience, that ideal busts of warriors always overexcite my system even when I am in perfect health. It will be best, perhaps, not to venture into the sculpture room at all. “Unrequited Love”? “The Monastery of Smolnoi”? “Allsopp’s new Brewery”? No, no, no; I must even resist these, I must resist dozens more on my list – time and space fail me – let me abandon the fertile third head in my classification, and get on to my fourth: The pictures that I shall be obliged to see, whether I like it or not.

“Equestrian Portrait of His Grace the Duke of Bedford.” The horse will run me down here, to a dead certainty, the moment I get into the room. “Cordelia receives Intelligence how her Father had been ill-treated by her Sisters.” Cordelia had better have received intelligence first on the subject of English grammar – but, no matter; right or wrong in her construction, she has been from time immemorial the most forward young woman on the Academy walls, and she will insist, as usual, on my looking at her, whether I like it or not. “General Sir George Brown.” This case involves a scarlet coat and decorations – and whoever escaped them at an exhibition, I should like to know? “Dalilah asking Forgiveness of Samson.” When I venture to acknowledge that I am more unspeakably tired of these two characters (on canvas) than of any other two that ever entered a painter’s studio, all intelligent persons are sure to understand that Dalilah and Samson will be the very first picture I see when I look about me in the Academy. For much the same reason, “Portrait of a Lady,” and “Portrait of a Gentleman,” will of course lay hold of me in all directions. Are not pictures of this sort always numerous, always exactly alike, always a great deal too large, and always void of the slightest interest for any one, excepting the “ladies” and “gentlemen” themselves? And, granted this, what is the necessary and natural result? I must see them, whether I like it or not – and so must you.

Head Number Five: The pictures that puzzle me. These are so numerous, as judged by their titles, that I hardly know which to pick out, by way of example, first. Suppose I select the shortest – “Happy!” Not a word of quotation or explanation follows this. Who (I ask myself, tossing on my weary pillow) – who, or what is happy? Does this mysterious picture represent one of the Prime Minister’s recently made peers, or a publican at election time, or a gentleman who has just paid conscience money to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or a group of enraptured ladies at the period when watch-spring petticoats were first introduced, or boys at a Pantomime, or girls at a dance, or dogs in a cover, or cats in a dairy? Impossible to say: there are ten thousand things the picture might represent, and it probably depicts the ten thousand and first, of which I have no suspicion. Hardly less puzzling is “A Lesson on Infant Treatment.” What is infant treatment? In some families it means a smack on the head; in others, it means perpetual cuddling; in all it implies (for such is the lot of mortality) occasional rhubarb and magnesia. Is the lesson painted here a lesson on the administration of nauseous draughts, fond kisses, or corrective smacks? Do we read in this mysterious picture a warning against the general nursery error of pinning up a baby’s skin and a baby’s clothes both together? Or is the scene treated from a heartlessly-comic point of view; and does it represent a bedchamber by night – papa promenading forlorn with his screeching offspring in his arms, and mamma looking on sympathetically from her pillow? Who can say? It is a picture to give up in despair.

“Gretna Green. A runaway match; the postboy announcing pursuit; one of the last marriages previous to the alteration of the Scottish law, with portraits painted on the spot.” More and more puzzling! Portraits painted on the spot, when the bride and bridegroom are running away, and the postboy is announcing pursuit! Why, photography itself would be too slow for the purpose! Besides, how did the painter come there? Was he sent for on purpose beforehand, or did he take up his position on speculation? Or is the artist himself the bridegroom, and was the taking of his own likeness and his wife’s the first idea that occurred to him when he was married? Curious, if it was so. I am a single man myself, and have no right to an opinion; but I think, if I ran away with my young woman, that I should give up my profession for the day, at any rate.

No. 835 – No title; nothing but this quotation:

A guid New-year I wish thee, Maggie!

Hae, there’s a ripp to thy auld baggie, &c.

What can this be? a sonsie lass takes a walk on a New-year’s morning, with an old bag over her shoulder; a mischievous Scotchman rips it open most improperly; exclaims, “Hae!” for which he is little better than a brute; and abandons the poor girl in a situation which it rings the heart to think of. Is that the picture? I object to it as “painful” if it is.

“Deathbed of Lorenzo de Medici. Father-Confessor Girolamo Savonarola demands, as the condition of absolving Lorenzo de Medici of his sins, that he should restore liberty to Florence, refusing which, he abandons him to his fate.” How, in the name of wonder, can this be painted? Which of the two things is the father-confessor doing? Is he making his demand, or abandoning the unfortunate victim to his fate? If he is making the demand, he must be painted saying something, and how can that be done? If, on the other hand, he is abandoning the patient, the question arises whether he ought not to abandon the picture also, or at least be three parts out of it, so as to convey the two necessary ideas of rapidity of action and of personal absence from the bedroom. I don’t see my way to this work of art at all. Still less do I understand “Harvest,” the pervading sentiment of which is supposed to be expressed in this one alarming line of quotation:

When labour drinks, his boiling sweat to thrive.

CHAPMAN’s Hesiod.

Incredulous readers must be informed that the above is copied from the catalogue of the present year, at page twenty-seven. What on earth does the line mean, taken by itself? And how in the world do the resources of Art contrive to turn it to graphic account in a picture of a Harvest? Say that “When labour drinks” is personified, in the foreground of the scene, by Hodge, with a great mug in his hand, how, in that case, does the illustrative faculty of the artist grapple next with “his boiling sweat to thrive?” Is Hodge presented bubbling all over with beer, at a temperature of I don’t know how many hundred degrees Fahrenheit? And if he is, how does he “thrive” under those heated circumstances? Or is he hissing and steaming out of his own large bodily resources; and is he trying to condense his own vapour with successive jets of cold small beer? Nay, is he even one Hodge only, boiling, sweating, and thriving? May he not be possibly multiplied into all the Hodges in the neighbourhood, collected together in the harvest field, and obscuring the whole fertile prospect by scalding agricultural exudations? I protest I am almost in the condition of Hodge myself, only with thinking of this boiling perplexity – except, indeed, that I see no chance of thriving, unless I drop the subject forthwith to cool my heated fancy. When I have done this, all succeeding titles and quotations become mirrors of truth, that reflect the pictures unmistakably by comparison with such an inscrutable puzzle as a harvest field, painted through the medium of Chapman’s Hesiod. With that work my bewilderment ends, through my own sheer inability to become confused under any other circumstances whatever; and here, therefore, the list of the pictures that puzzle me may necessarily and appropriately come to an end also.

As to my final head, under which are grouped: The pictures that I am quite certain to come away without seeing, every reader, who has been to the Royal Academy Exhibition, can enlarge on this branch of the subject from his own experience, without help from me. Every reader knows that when he gets home again, and wearily reviews his well thumbed Catalogue, the first picture that attracts his attention is sure to be one among many other pictures which he especially wanted to see, and which he has accurately contrived to miss without suspecting it in the crowd. In the same way, the one favourite work which our enthusiastic friends will infallibly ask us if we admire is, in the vast majority of cases, provokingly certain to be also the one work which we have unconsciously omitted to notice. My own experience inclines me to predict, therefore, that when I come back from my first visit to the Academy, I shall find I have passed over in a general sense one full half of the whole exhibition, and in a particular sense, something not far short of one third of the pictures that I expressly intended to see. I shall go again and again and diminish these arrears, if the doors only keep open long enough; but I shall still have missed some especially interesting things when the show has closed and there is no further chance for me. The Academy is not to blame for that; it is only our mortal lot. In the greater Exhibition Room of Human Life, how often, in spite of all our care and trouble, we miss the one precious picture that we most wanted to see! Excuse a sick man’s moral. When he has closed his Catalogue, what has he left to do but to turn round in bed, and take his mental composing-draught in the form of sober reflection?

Pray Employ

Major Namby!

All the Year Round, Volume 1, page 136

I have such an extremely difficult subject to write about, that I really don’t know how to begin. The fact is, I am a single lady – single, you will please to understand, entirely because I have refused many excellent offers. Pray don’t imagine from this that I am old. Some women’s offers come at long intervals, and other women’s offers come close together. Mine came remarkably close together – so, of course, I cannot possibly be old. Not that I presume to describe myself as absolutely young, either; so much depends on people’s points of view. I have heard female children of the ages of eighteen or nineteen called young ladies. This seems to me to be ridiculous – and I have held that opinion, without once wavering from it, for more than ten years past. It is, after all, a question of feeling; and, shall I confess it? I feel so young!

Dear, dear me! this is dreadfully egotistical; and, besides, it is not in the least what I want. May I be kindly permitted to begin again?

The European war (now I have got the right end of the thread at last) alarms me inexpressibly, of course. And yet, strange as it may seem, it is not my alarm exactly that sets me writing at the present moment. I am urged, rather, by a feeling of curiosity to know if England is likely on some future day to join in the fighting. Some of the papers say one thing, and some say the other. If England is not likely to join in the fighting, then I have nothing more to write about. But, if the chances are all the other way, and if we catch the war fever in our turn, then what I want to know (with many apologies for asking the question) is, whether my next door neighbour, Major Namby, will be taken from his home by the Horse Guards, and presented with his fit post of command in the English army. It will come out, sooner or later; so there is no harm in my acknowledging at once, that it would add immeasurably to my comfort and happiness if the gallant major were ordered off on any service which, would take him away from his own house.

I am really very sorry, but I must leave off beginning already, and go back again to the part before the beginning (if there is such a thing), in order to explain the nature of my objection to Major Namby, and why it would be such a great relief to me (supposing we are unfortunate enough to be dragged into this dreadful war), if he happened to be one of the first officers called out for the service of his Queen and country.

I live in the suburbs, and I have bought my house. The major lives in the suburbs, next door to me, and he has bought his house. I don’t object to this, of course. I merely mention it to make things straight.

Major Namby has been twice married. His first wife – dear, dear! how can I express it? Shall I say, with vulgar abruptness, that his first wife had a family? And must I descend into particulars, and add that they are four in number, and that two of them are twins? Well, the words are written; and if they will do over again for the same purpose, I beg to repeat them in reference to the second Mrs Namby (still alive), who has also had a family, and is – no, I really cannot say, is likely to go on having one. There are certain limits, in a case of this kind, and I think I have reached them. Permit me simply to state that the second Mrs Namby has three children, at present. These, with the first Mrs Namby’s four, make a total of seven. The seven are composed of five girls and two boys. And the first Mrs Namby’s family all have one particular kind of constitution, and the second Mrs Namby’s family all have another particular kind of constitution. Let me explain once more that I merely mention these little matters, and that I don’t object to them.

Now pray be patient: I am coming fast to the point – I am indeed. But please let me say a little word or two about Major Namby himself. In the first place, I have looked out his name in the Army List, and I cannot find that he was ever engaged in battle anywhere. He appears to have entered the army, most unfortunately for his own renown, just after, instead of just before, the battle of Waterloo. He has been at all sorts of foreign stations, at the very time, in each case, when there was no military work to do – except once at some West Indian Island, where he seems to have assisted in putting down a few poor unfortunate negroes who tried to get up a riot. This is the only active service that he has ever performed: so I suppose it is all owing to his being well off and to those dreadful abuses of ours that he has been made a major for not having done a major’s work. So far as looks go, however, he is military enough in appearance to take the command of the British army at five minutes’ notice. He is very tall and upright, and carries a martial cane, and wears short martial whiskers, and has an awfully loud martial voice. His face is very pink, and his eyes are extremely round and staring, and he has that singularly disagreeable-looking roll of fat red flesh at the back of his neck, between the bottom of his short grey hair and the top of his stiff black stock, which seems to be peculiar to all hearty old officers who are remarkably well to do in the world. He is certainly not more than sixty years of age; and, if a lady may presume to judge of such a thing, I should say decidedly that he had an immense amount of undeveloped energy still left in him, at the service of the Horse Guards.

This undeveloped energy – and here, at length, I come to the point – not having any employment in the right direction, has run wild in the wrong direction, and has driven the major to devote the whole of his otherwise idle time to his domestic affairs. He manages his children instead of his regiment, and establishes discipline in the servants’ hall instead of in the barrack yard. Have I any right to object to this? None whatever, I readily admit. I may hear (most unwillingly) that Major Namby has upset the house by going into the kitchen and objecting to the smartness of the servants’ caps; but as I am not, thank Heaven, one of those unfortunate servants, I am not called on to express my opinion of such unmanly meddling, much as I scorn it. I may be informed (entirely against my own will) that Mrs Namby’s husband has dared to regulate, not only the size and substance, but even the number, of certain lower and inner articles of Mrs Namby’s dress, which no earthly consideration will induce me particularly to describe; but as I do not (I thank Heaven again) occupy the degraded position of the major’s wife, I am not justified in expressing my indignation at domestic prying and pettifogging, though I feel it all over me, at this very moment, from head to foot. What Major Namby does and says, inside his own house, is his business and not mine. But what he does and says outside his own house, on the gravel walk of his front garden, under my own eyes and close to my own ears, as I sit at work at the window is as much my affair as the major’s, and more, for it is I who suffer by it.

Pardon me a momentary pause for relief, a momentary thrill of self-congratulation. I have got to my grievance at last – I have taken the right literary turning at the end of the preceding paragraph; and the fair, straight high road of plain narrative now spreads engagingly before me.

My complaint against Major Namby is, in plain terms, that he transacts the whole of his domestic business in his front garden. Whether it arises from natural weakness of memory, from total want of a sense of propriety, or from a condition of mind which is closely allied to madness of the eccentric sort, I cannot say, but the major certainly does sometimes partially, and sometimes entirely, forget his private family matters, and the necessary directions connected with them, while he is inside the house, and does habitually remember them, and repair all omissions, by bawling through his windows, at the top of his voice, as soon as he gets outside the house. It never seems to occur to him that he might advantageously return indoors, and there mention what he has forgotten in a private and proper way. The instant the lost idea strikes him – which it invariably does, either in his front garden, or in the roadway outside his house – he roars for his wife, either from the gravel walk, or over the low wall – and (if I may use so strong an expression) empties his mind to her in public, without appearing to care whose ears he wearies, whose delicacy he shocks, or whose ridicule he invites. If the man is not mad, his own small family fusses have taken such complete possession of all his senses, that he is quite incapable of noticing anything else, and perfectly impenetrable to the opinions of his neighbours. Let me show that the grievance of which I complain is no slight one, by giving a few examples of the general persecution that I suffer, and the occasional shocks that are administered to my delicacy, at the coarse hands of Major Namby.

We will say it is a fine warm morning. I am sitting in my front room, with the window open, absorbed over a deeply interesting book. I hear the door of the next house bang; I look up, and see the major descending the steps into his front garden.

He walks – no, he marches – half way down the front garden path, with his head high in the air, and his chest stuck out, and his military cane fiercely flourished in his right hand. Suddenly, he stops, stamps with one foot, knocks up the hinder part of the brim of his extremely curly hat with his left hand, and begins to scratch at that singularly disagreeable-looking roll of fat red flesh in the back of his neck (which scratching, I may observe, in parenthesis, is always a sure sign, in the case of this horrid man, that a lost domestic idea has suddenly come back to him.) He waits a moment in the ridiculous position just described, then wheels round on his heel, looks up at the first floor window, and, instead of going back into the house to mention what he has forgotten, bawls out fiercely from the middle of the walk:

“Matilda!”

I hear his wife’s voice – a shockingly shrill one; but what can you expect of a woman who has been seen, over and over again, in a slatternly striped wrapper, as late as two o’clock in afternoon – I hear his wife’s voice answer from inside the house:

“Yes, dear.”

“I said it was a south wind.”

“Yes, dear.”

“It isn’t a south wind.”

“Lor’, dear!”

“It’s sou’-east. I won’t have Georgina taken out to-day.” (Georgina is one of the first Mrs Namby’s family, and they are all weak in the chest.) “Where’s nurse?”

“Here, sir!”

“Nurse, I won’t have Jack allowed to run. Whenever that boy perspires, he catches cold. Hang up his hoop. If he cries, take him into my dressing room, and show him the birch rod. Matilda!”

“Yes, dear.”

“What the devil do they mean by daubing all that grease over Mary’s hair? It’s beastly to see it – do you hear? – beastly! Where’s Pamby?” (Pamby is the unfortunate workwoman who makes and mends the family linen.)

“Here, sir.”

“Pamby, what are you about now?”

No answer. Pamby, or somebody else, giggles faintly. The major flourishes his cane in a fury.

“Why the devil don’t you answer me? I give you three seconds to answer me, or leave the house. One – two – three. Pamby! what are you about now?”

“If you please, sir, I’m doing something –”

“What?”

“Something particular for baby, sir?”

“Drop it directly, whatever it is. Matilda! how many pair of trousers has Katie got?”

“Only three, dear.”

“Pamby!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shorten all Miss Katie’s trousers directly, including the pair she’s got on. I’ve said, over and over again, that I won’t have those frills of hers any lower down than her knees. Don’t let me see them at the middle of her shins again. Nurse!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mind the crossings. Don’t let the children sit down if they’re hot. Don’t let them speak to other children. Don’t let them get playing with strange dogs. Don’t let them mess their things. And, above all, don’t bring Master Jack back in a perspiration. Is there anything more, before I go out?”

“No, sir.”

“Matilda! Is there anything more?”

“No, dear.”

“Pamby! Is there anything more?”

“No, sir.”

Here the domestic colloquy ends, for the time being. Will any sensitive person – especially a person of my own sex – please to imagine what I must suffer, as a delicate single lady, at having all these family details obtruded on my attention, whether I like it or not, in the major’s rasping, martial voice, and in the shrill answering screams of the women inside? It is bad enough to be submitted to this sort of persecution when one is alone; but it is far worse to be also exposed to it – as I am constantly – in the presence of visitors, whose conversation is necessarily interrupted, whose ears are necessarily shocked, whose very stay in my house is necessarily shortened, by Major Namby’s unendurably public way of managing his private concerns.

Only the other day, my old, dear, and most valued friend, Lady Malkinshaw, was sitting with me, and was entering at great length into the interesting story of her second daughter’s unhappy marriage engagement, and of the dignified manner in which the family ultimately broke it off. For a quarter of an hour or so our interview continued to be delightfully uninterrupted. At the end of that time, however, just as Lady Malkinshaw, with the tears in her eyes, was beginning to describe the effect of her daughter’s dreadful disappointment on the poor dear girl’s mind and looks, I heard the door of the major’s house bang as usual; and, looking out of the window in despair, saw the major himself strut half way down the walk, stop, scratch violently at his roll of red flesh, wheel round so as to face the house, consider a little, pull his tablets out of his waistcoat pocket, shake his head over them, and then look up at the front windows, preparatory to bawling as usual at the degraded female members of his household. Lady Malkinshaw, quite ignorant of what was coming, happened, at the same moment, to be proceeding with her pathetic story, in these terms:

“I do assure you, my poor dear girl behaved throughout with the heroism of a martyr. When I had told her of the vile wretch’s behaviour, breaking it to her as gently as I possibly could; and when she had a little recovered, I said to her –”

(“Matilda!”)

The major’s rasping voice sounded louder than ever, as he bawled out that dreadful name, just at the wrong moment. Lady Malkinshaw started as if she had been shot. I put down the window in despair; but the glass was no protection to our ears – Major Namby can roar through a brick wall. I apologised – I declared solemnly that my next door neighbour was mad – I entreated Lady Malkinshaw to take no notice, and to go on. That sweet woman immediately complied. I burn with indignation when I think of what followed. Every word from the Nambys’ garden (which I distinguish below by parentheses) came, very slightly muffled by the window, straight into my room, and mixed itself up with her ladyship’s story in this inexpressibly ridiculous and impertinent manner:

“Well,” my kind and valued friend proceeded, “as I was telling you, when the first natural burst of sorrow was over, I said to her –”

“Yes, dear Lady Malkinshaw?” I murmured, encouragingly.

“I said to her –”

(“By jingo, I’ve forgotten something! Matilda! when I made my memorandum of errands, how many had I to do?”)

“‘My dearest, darling child,’ I said –”

(“Pamby! how many errands did your mistress give me to do?”)

“I said, ‘my dearest, darling child –’”;

(“Nurse! how many errands did your mistress give me to do?”)

“‘My own love,’ I said –”

(“Pooh! pooh! I tell you, I had four errands to do, and I’ve only got three of ’em written down. Check me off, all of you – I’m going to read my errands.”)

“‘Your own proper pride, love,’ I said, ‘will suggest to you –’”

(“Grey powder for baby.”)

– “‘the necessity of making up your mind, my angel, to –’”

(“Row the plumber for infamous condition of back kitchen sink.”)

– “‘to return all the wretch’s letters, and –’”

(“Speak to the haberdasher about patching Jack’s shirts.”)

– “‘all his letters and presents, darling. You need only make them up into a parcel, and write inside –’”

(“Matilda! is that all?”)

– “‘and write inside –’”

(“Pamby! is that all?”)

– “‘and write inside –’”

(“Nurse! is that all?”)

“‘I have my mother’s sanction for making one last request to you. It is this –’”

(“What have the children got for dinner today?”)

– “‘it is this: Return me my letters, as I have returned yours. You will find inside –’”

(“A shoulder of mutton and onion sauce? And a devilish good dinner, too.”)

The coarse wretch roared out those last shocking words cheerfully, at the top of his voice. Hitherto, Lady Malkinshaw had preserved her temper with the patience of an angel; but she began – and who can wonder? – to lose it, at last.

“It is really impossible, my dear,” she said, rising from her chair, “to continue any conversation while that very intolerable person persists in talking to his family from his front garden. No! I really cannot go on – I cannot, indeed.”

Just as I was apologising to my sweet friend for the second time, I observed, to my great relief (having my eye still on the window), that the odious major had apparently come to the end of his domestic business for that morning, and had made up his mind at last to relieve us of his presence. I distinctly saw him put his tablets back in his pocket, wheel round again on his heel, and march straight to the garden gate. I waited until he had his hand on the lock to open it; and then, when I felt that we were quite safe, I informed dear Lady Malkinshaw that my detestable neighbour had at last taken himself off, and, throwing open the window again to get a little air, begged and entreated her to oblige me by resuming the charming conversation.

“Where was I?” inquired my distinguished friend.

“You were telling me what you recommended your poor darling to write inside her enclosure,” I answered.

“Ah, yes – so I was. Well, my dear, she controlled herself by an admirable effort, and wrote exactly what I told her. You will excuse a mother’s partiality, I am sure – but I think I never saw her look so lovely – so mournfully lovely, I should say – as when she was writing those last lines to the man who had so basely trifled with her. The tears came into my eyes as I looked at her sweet pale cheeks; and I thought to myself –”

(“Nurse! which of the children was sick, last time, after eating onion sauce?”)

He had come back again! – the monster had come back again, from the very threshold of the garden gate, to shout that unwarrantably atrocious question in at his nursery window!

Lady Malkinshaw bounced off her chair at the first note of his horrible voice, and changed towards me instantly – as if it had been my fault! – in the most alarming and unexpected manner. Her ladyship’s face became awfully red; her ladyship’s head trembled excessively; her ladyship’s eyes looked straight into mine with an indescribable fierceness.

“Why am I thus insulted?” inquired Lady Malkinshaw, with a slow and dignified sternness which froze the blood in my veins. “What do you mean by it?” continued her ladyship, with a sudden rapidity of utterance that quite took my breath away.

Before I could remonstrate with my friend for visiting her natural irritation on poor innocent me: before I could declare that I had seen the major actually open his garden gate to go away, the provoking brute’s voice burst in on us again.

“Ha! yes?” we heard him growl to himself, in a kind of shameless domestic soliloquy. “Yes, yes, yes – Sophy was sick, to be sure. Curious. All Mrs Namby’s step-children have weak chests and strong stomachs. All Mrs Namby’s own children have weak stomachs and strong chests. I have a strong stomach and a strong chest. – Pamby!”

“I consider this,” continued Lady Malkinshaw, literally glaring at me, in the fulness of her indiscriminate exasperation – “I consider this to be unwarrantable and unladylike. I beg to know –”

“Where’s Bill?” burst in the major, from below, before she could add another word. “Matilda! Nurse! Pamby! where’s Bill? I didn’t bid Bill goodbye – hold him up at the window, one of you!”

“My dear Lady Malkinshaw,” I remonstrated, “why blame me? What have I done?”

“Done!” repeated her ladyship. “ Done? – all that is most unfriendly, most unwarrantable, most unladylike, most –”

“Ha! ha! ha-a-a-a!” roared the major, shouting her ladyship down, and stamping about the garden in fits of fond paternal laughter. “Bill, my boy, how are you? There’s a young Turk for you! Pull up his frock – I want to see his jolly legs –”

Lady Malkinshaw screamed, and rushed to the door. I sank into a chair, and clasped my hands in despair.

“Ha! ha! ha-a-a-a! What calves the dog’s got! Pamby! look at his calves. Aha! bless his heart, his legs are the model of his father’s! The Namby build, Matilda: the Namby build, every inch of him. Kick again, Bill – kick out, like mad. I say, ma’am! I beg your pardon, ma’am! –”

Ma’am? I ran to the window. Was the major actually daring to address Lady Malkinshaw, as she passed, indignantly, on her way out, down my front garden? He was! The odious monster was pointing out his – his, what shall I say? – his undraped offspring to the notice of my outraged visitor.

“Look at him, ma’am. If you’re a judge of children, look at him. There’s a two-year-older for you! Ha! ha! ha-a-a-a! Show the lady your legs, Bill – kick out for the lady, you dog, kick out!”

I can write no more: I have done great violence to myself in writing so much. Further specimens of the daily outrages inflicted on me by my next door neighbour (though I could add them by dozens), could do but little more to illustrate the intolerable nature of the grievance of which I complain. Although Lady Malkinshaw’s naturally fine sense of justice suffered me to call and remonstrate the day after she left my house; although we are now faster friends than ever, how can I expect her ladyship to visit me again, after the reiterated insults to which she was exposed on the last occasion of her esteemed presence under my roof? How can I ask my niece – a young person who has been most carefully brought up – to come and stay with me, when I know that she will be taken into the major’s closest domestic confidence on the first morning of her arrival, whether she likes it or not?

There is something absolutely dreadful in reflecting on the daily recurrence of this entirely new species of nuisance, and on the utter hopelessness of finding any remedy against it. The law of the land contains no provision against the habitual management of a wife and family in a front garden. Private remonstrance addressed to a man so densely impenetrable to a sense of propriety as the major, would only expose me to ridicule, and perhaps to insult. I can’t leave my house, for it exactly suits me, and I have bought it. The major can’t leave his house, for it exactly suits him, and he has bought it. There is actually no remedy possible, but the forcible removal of my military neighbour from his home; and there is but one power in the country which is strong enough to accomplish that removal – the Horse Guards.

Portrait of an Author

Painted by his Publisher

In Two Sittings

All the Year Round, Volume 1, page 184

The Author was a Frenchman; and he has been dead nearly nine years. Over the whole continent of Europe, wherever the literature of France has penetrated, his readers are numbered by tens of thousands. Women of all ranks and orders have singled him out, long since, as the marked man, among modern writers of fiction, who most profoundly knows and most subtly appreciates their sex in its strength and in its weakness. Men whose critical judgement is widely and worthily respected, have declared that he is the deepest and truest observer of human nature whom France has produced since the time of Molière. Unquestionably, he ranks as one of the few great geniuses who appear by ones and twos, in century after century of authorship, and who leave their mark ineffaceably on the literature of their age. And yet, in spite of this widely extended continental fame, and this indisputable right and title to enjoy it, there is probably no civilised country in the Old World in which he is so little known as in England. Among all the readers – a large class in these islands – who are, from various causes, unaccustomed to study French literature in its native language, there are probably very many who have never even heard of the name of Honoré de Balzac!

Unaccountable as it may appear at first sight, the reason why the illustrious author of Eugénie Grandet, Le Père Goriot, and La Recherche de l’Absolu, happens to be so little known to the general public of England is, on the surface of it, easy enough to discover. Balzac is little known, because he has been little translated. An English version of Eugénie Grandet was advertised, lately, as one of a cheap series of novels.

And the present writer has some indistinct recollection of meeting, many years since, with a translation of La Peau de Chagrin. But so far as he knows, excepting the instances of these two books, not one other work, out of the whole number of ninety-seven fictions, long and short, which proceeded from the same fertile pen, has been offered to our own readers in our own language. Immense help has been given in this country to the reputations of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue: no help whatever, or next to none, has been given to Balzac – although he is regarded in France (and rightly regarded, in some respects) as a writer of fiction superior to all three.

Many causes, too numerous to be elaborately traced within the compass of a single article, have probably contributed to produce this singular instance of literary neglect. It is not to be denied, for example, that serious difficulties stand in the way of translating Balzac, which are caused by his own peculiarities of style and treatment. His French is not the clear, graceful, neatly-turned French of Voltaire and Rousseau. It is a strong, harsh, solidly vigorous language of his own; now flashing into the most exquisite felicities of expression, and now again involved in an obscurity which only the closest attention can hope to penetrate. A special man, not hurried for time, and not easily brought to the end of his patience, might give the English equivalent of Balzac with admirable effect. But ordinary translating of him by average workmen would only lead, through the means of feeble parody, to the result of utter failure.

The difficulties, again, caused by his style of treatment are not to be lightly estimated, in considering the question of presenting this author to our own general public. The peculiarity of Balzac’s literary execution is that he never compromises the subtleties and delicacies of Art for any consideration of temporary effect. The framework in which his idea is set is always wrought with a loving minuteness which leaves nothing out. Everything which, in this writer’s mind, can even remotely illustrate the characters that he depicts, must be elaborately conveyed to the minds of his readers before the characters themselves start into action. This quality of minute finish, of reiterated refining, which is one of Balzac’s great merits, so far as “foreign audiences” are concerned, is another of the hindrances, so far as an English audience is concerned, in the way of translating him.

Allowing all due weight to the force of these obstacles; and further admitting that Balzac lays himself open to grave objection (on the part of that unhappily large section of the English public which obstinately protests against the truth wherever the truth is painful), as a writer who sternly insists on presenting the dreary aspects of human life, literally, exactly, nakedly, as he finds them – making these allowances, and many more if more be needful – it is still impossible not to regret, for the sake of readers themselves, that worthy English versions of the best works of this great writer are not added to the national library of translated literature. Towards the latter part of his career, Balzac’s own taste in selection of subject seems to have become vitiated. His later novels, consummately excellent as some of them were in a literary sense, are assuredly, in a moral sense, not to be defended against the grave accusation of being needlessly and even horribly repulsive. But no objections of this sort apply to the majority of the works which he produced when he was in the prime of his life and his faculties. The conception of the character of Eugénie Grandet is one of the purest, tenderest, and most beautiful things in the whole range of fiction; and the execution of it is even worthy of the idea. If the translation already accomplished of this book be only creditably executed, it may be left to speak for itself. But there are other fictions of the writer which deserve the same privilege, and which have not yet obtained it, La Recherche de l’Absolu, – a family picture which, for truth, delicacy, and pathos, has been surpassed by no novelist of any nation or any time; a literary achievement in which a new and an imperishable character (the exquisitely-beautiful character of the wife) has been added to the great gallery of fiction – remains still unknown to the general public of England. Le Père Goriot – which, though it unveils some of the hidden corruptions of Parisian life, unveils them nobly in the interests of that highest morality belonging to no one nation and no one sect – Le Père Goriot, which stands first and foremost among all the writer’s works, which has drawn the tears of thousands from the purest sources, has its appeal still left to make to the sympathies of English readers. Other shorter stories, scattered about the Scènes de la Vie Privée, the Scènes de la Vie de Province, and the Scènes de la Vie Parisienne, are as completely unknown to a certain circle of readers in this country, and as unquestionably deserve careful and competent translation, as the longer and more elaborate productions of Balzac’s inexhaustible pen. Reckoning these shorter stories, there are at least a dozen of his highest achievements in fiction which might be safely rendered into English, which might form a series by themselves, and which no sensible Englishwoman could read and be, either intellectually or morally, the worse for them.

Thus much, in the way of necessary preliminary comment on the works of this author, and on their present position in reference to the English public. Readers who may be sufficiently interested in the subject to desire to know something next about the man himself, may now derive this information from a singular, and even from a unique source. The Life of Balzac has been lately written by his publisher, of all the people in the world! This is a phenomenon in itself; and the oddity of it is still further increased by the fact that the publisher was brought to the brink of ruin by the author, that he mentions this circumstance in writing his life, and that it does not detract one iota from his evidently sincere admiration for the great man with whom he was once so disastrously connected in business. Here is surely an original book, in an age when originality grows harder and harder to meet with – a book containing disclosures which will perplex and dismay every admirer of Balzac who cannot separate the man from his works – a book which presents one of the most singular records of human eccentricity, so far as the hero of it is concerned, and of human credulity so far as the biographer is concerned, which has probably ever been published for the amusement and bewilderment of the reading world.

The title of this singular work is, Portrait Intime De Balzac: sa Vie, son Humeur et son Caractère. Par Edmond Werdet, son ancien Libraire-Editeur. Before, however, we allow Monsieur Werdet to relate his own personal experience of the celebrated writer, it will be advisable to introduce the subject by giving an outline of the struggles, the privations, and the disappointments which marked the early life of Balzac, and which, doubtless, influenced for the worse his after-character. These particulars are given by Monsieur Werdet in the form of an episode, and are principally derived, on his part, from information afforded by the author’s sister.

Honoré de Balzac was born in the city of Tours, on the sixteenth of May, seventeen hundred and ninety-nine. His parents were people of rank and position in the world. His father held a legal appointment in the council chamber of Louis the Sixteenth. His mother was the daughter of one of the directors of the public hospitals of Paris. She was much younger than her husband, and brought him a rich dowry. Honoré was her firstborn; and he retained throughout life his first feeling of childish reverence for his mother. That mother suffered the unspeakable affliction of seeing her illustrious son taken from her by death at the age of fifty years. Balzac breathed his last in the kind arms which had first caressed him on the day of his birth.

His father, from whom he evidently inherited much of the eccentricity of his character, is described as a compound of Montaigne, Rabelais, and Uncle Toby – a man in manners, conversation, and disposition generally, of the quaintly original sort. On the breaking out of the Revolution he lost his court situation, and obtained a place in the commissariat department of the army of the North. This appointment he held for some years. It was of the greater importance to him, in consequence of the change for the worse produced in the pecuniary circumstances of the family by the convulsion of the Revolution.

At the age of seven years Balzac was sent to the college of Vendôme; and for seven years more there he remained. This period of his life was never a pleasant one in his remembrance. The reduced circumstances of his family exposed him to much sordid persecution and ridicule from the other boys; and he got on but little better with the masters. They reported him as idle and incapable – or, in other words, as ready enough to devour all sorts of books on his own desultory plan, but hopelessly obstinate in resisting the educational discipline of the school. This time of his life he has reproduced in one of the strangest and the most mystical of all his novels, La Vie Intellectuelle de Louis Lambert.

On reaching the critical age of fourteen, his intellect appears to have suffered under a species of eclipse, which occurred very suddenly and mysteriously, and the cause of which neither his masters nor the medical men were able to explain. He himself always declared in afterlife, with a touch of his father’s quaintness, that his brain had been attacked by “a congestion of ideas.” Whatever the cause might be, the effect was so serious that the progress of his education had to be stopped; and his removal from the college followed as a matter of course. Time, care, quiet, and breathing his native air, gradually restored him to himself; and he was ultimately enabled to complete his studies at two private schools. Here again, however, he did nothing to distinguish himself among his fellow pupils. He read incessantly, and preserved the fruits of his reading with marvellous power of memory; but the school teaching, which did well enough for ordinary boys, was exactly the species of teaching from which the essentially original mind of Balzac recoiled in disgust. All that he felt and did at this period has been carefully reproduced by his own pen in the earlier pages of Le Lys dans la Vallée.

Badly as he got on at school, he managed to imbibe a sufficient quantity of conventional learning to entitle him, at the age of eighteen, to his degree of Bachelor of Arts. He was destined for the law; and after attending the legal lectures in the various Institutions of Paris, he passed his examination by the time he was twenty, and then entered a notary’s office in the capacity of clerk. There were two other clerks to keep him company, who hated the drudgery of the law as heartily as he hated it himself. One of them was the future author of The Mysteries of Paris, Eugène Sue; the other was the famous critic, Jules Janin.

After he had been engaged in this office, and in another, for more than three years, a legal friend, who was under great obligations to Balzac the father, offered to give up his business as a notary to Balzac the son. To the great scandal of the family, Honoré resolutely refused the offer. His reason was that he had determined to be the greatest writer in France. His relations began by laughing at him, and ended by growing angry with him. But nothing moved Honoré. His vanity was of the calm, settled sort; and his own conviction that his business in life was simply to be a famous man proved too strong to be shaken by anybody.

While he and his family were at war on this point, a change for the worse occurred in the elder Balzac’s official circumstances. He was superannuated. The diminution of income thus produced was followed by a pecuniary catastrophe. He had embarked almost the whole of his own little remaining property and his wife’s in two speculations; and they both failed. No resource was now left him but to retire to a small country house in the neighbourhood of Paris, which he had purchased in his prosperous days, and to live there as well as might be on the wreck of his lost fortune. Honoré, sticking fast to that hopeless business of becoming a great man, was, by his own desire, left alone in a Paris garret, with an allowance of five pounds English a month, which was all the kind father could spare to feed, clothe, and lodge the wrong-headed son.

And now, without a literary friend to help him in all Paris, alone in his wretched attic, with his deal table and his truckle bed, his dog-eared books, his bescrawled papers, his wild vanity, and his ravenous hunger for fame, Balzac stripped resolutely for the great fight. He was then twenty-three years old – a sturdy fellow to look at, with a big, jovial face, and a strong square forehead, topped by a very untidy and superfluous allowance of long tangled hair. His only difficulty at starting was what to begin upon. After consuming many lonely months in sketching out comedies, operas, and novels, he finally obeyed the one disastrous rule which seems to admit of no exception in the early lives of men of letters, and fixed the whole bent of his industry and his genius on the production of a tragedy. After infinite pains and long labour, the great work was completed. The subject was Cromwell; and the treatment, in Balzac’s hands, appears to have been so inconceivably bad, that even his own family – to say nothing of other judicious friends – told him in the plainest terms, when he read it to them, that he had perpetrated a signal failure. Modest men might have been discouraged by this. Balzac took his manuscript back to his garret, standing higher in his own estimation than ever. “I will give up being a great dramatist,” he told his parents at parting, “and I will be a great novelist instead.” The vanity of the man expressed itself with this sublime disregard of ridicule all through his life. It was a precious quality to him – it is surely (however unquestionably offensive it may be to our friends) a precious quality to all of us. What man ever yet did anything great, without beginning with a profound belief in his own untried powers?

Confident as ever, therefore, in his own resources, Balzac now took up the pen once more – this time, in the character of novelist. But another and a serious check awaited him at the outset. Fifteen months of solitude, privation, and reckless hard writing – months which are recorded in the pages of La Peau de Chagrin with a fearful and pathetic truth drawn straight from the bitterest of all experiences, the experience of studious poverty – had reduced him to a condition of bodily weakness which made all present exertion of his mental powers simply hopeless, and which obliged him to take refuge – a worn out, wasted man, at the age of twenty-three – in his father’s quiet little country house. Here, under his mother’s care, his exhausted energies slowly revived; and here, in the first days of his convalescence, he returned, with the grim resolution of despair, to working out the old dream in the garret, to resuming the old hopeless, hapless business of making himself a great man. It was under his father’s roof, during the time of his slow recovery, that the youthful fictions of Balzac were produced. The strength of his belief in his own resources and his own future gave him also the strength, in relation to these first efforts, to rise above his own vanity, and to see plainly that he had not yet learnt to do himself full justice. His early novels bore on their title pages a variety of feigned names, for the starving, struggling author was too proud to acknowledge them, so long as they failed to satisfy his own conception of what his own powers could accomplish. These first efforts – now included in his collected works, and comprising among them two stories, Jane la Pâle and Le Vicaire des Ardennes, which show unquestionable dawnings of the genius of a great writer – were originally published by the lower and more rapacious order of booksellers, and did as little towards increasing his means as towards establishing his reputation. Still, he forced his way slowly and resolutely through poverty, obscurity, and disappointment, nearer and nearer to the promised land which no eye saw but his own – a greater man, by far, at this hard period of his adversity than at the more trying after-time of his prosperity and his fame. One by one, the heavy years, rolled on till he was a man of thirty; and then the great prize which he had so long toiled for, dropped within his reach at last. In the year eighteen hundred and twenty-nine, the famous Physiologie du Mariage was published; and the starveling of the Paris garret became a name and a power in French literature.

In England, this book would have been universally condemned as an unpardonable exposure of the most sacred secrets of domestic life. It unveils the whole social side of Marriage in its innermost recesses, and exhibits it alternately in its bright and dark aspects with a marvellous minuteness of observation, a profound knowledge of human nature, and a daring eccentricity of style and arrangement which amply justify the extraordinary success of the book on its first appearance in France. It may be more than questionable, judging from the English point of view, whether such a subject should ever have been selected for any other than the most serious, reverent, and forbearing treatment. Setting this objection aside, however, in consideration of the French point of view, it cannot be denied that the merits of the Physiologie of Marriage, as a piece of writing, were by no means overestimated by the public to which it was addressed. In a literary sense, the book would have done credit to a man in the maturity of his powers. As the work of a man whose intellectual life was only beginning, it was such an achievement as is not often recorded in the history of modern literature.

This first triumph of the future novelist – obtained, curiously enough, by a book which was not a novel – failed to smooth the way onward and upward for Balzac as speedily and pleasantly as might have been supposed. He had another stumble on that hard road of his, before he fairly started on the career of success. Soon after the publication of the Physiology of Marriage, an unlucky idea of strengthening his resources by trading in literature, as well as by writing books, seems to have occurred to him. He tried book selling and printing; proved himself to be, in both cases, probably the very worst man of business who ever lived and breathed in this world; failed in the most hopeless way, with the most extraordinary rapidity; and so learnt at last, by the cruel teaching of experience, that his one fair chance of getting money lay in sticking fast to his pen for the rest of his days. In the next ten years of his life that pen produced the noble series of fictions which influenced French literature far and wide, and which will last in public remembrance long after the miserable errors and inconsistencies of the writer’s personal character are forgotten. This was the period when Balzac was in the full enjoyment of his matured intellectual powers and his enviable public celebrity; and this was also the golden time when his publisher and biographer first became acquainted with him. Now, therefore, Monsieur Werdet may be encouraged to come forward and take the post of honour as narrator of the strange story that is still to be told; for now he is placed in the fit position to address himself intelligibly, as well as amusingly, to an English audience.

The story opens with the starting of Monsieur Werdet as a publisher in Paris, on his own account. The modest capital at his command amounted to just one hundred and twenty pounds English; and his leading idea, on beginning business, was to become the publisher of Balzac.

He had already entered into transactions, on a large scale, with his favourite author, in the character of agent for a publishing house of high standing. He had been very well received, on that first occasion, as a man representing undeniable capital and a great commercial position. On the second occasion, however, of his representing nobody but himself and nothing but the smallest of existing capitals, he very wisely secured the protection of an intimate friend of Balzac’s, to introduce him as favourably as might be, for the second time. Accompanied by this gentleman, whose name was Monsieur Barbier, and carrying his capital in his pocketbook, the embryo publisher nervously presented himself in the sanctum sanctorum of the great man.

Monsieur Barbier having carefully explained the business on which they came, Balzac addressed himself, with an indescribable suavity and grandeur of manner, to anxious Monsieur Werdet.

“Ha! just so,” said the eminent man. “You are doubtless possessed, sir, of considerable capital? You, are probably aware that no man can hope to publish for ME who is not prepared to assert himself magnificently in the matter of cash? I sell high – high – very high. And, not to deceive you – for I am incapable of suppressing the truth – I am a man who requires to be dealt with on the principle of considerable advances. Proceed, sir – I am prepared to listen to you.”

But Monsieur Werdet was too cautious to proceed without strengthening his position before starting. He entrenched himself instantly behind his pocketbook.

One by one, the notes of the Bank of France, which formed the poor publisher’s small capital, were drawn out of their snug hiding-place. Monsieur Werdet produced six of them, representing five hundred francs each (or, as before mentioned, a hundred and twenty pounds sterling), arranged them neatly and impressively in a circle on the table, and then cast himself on the author’s mercy in an agitated voice, and in these words:

“Sir! behold my capital. There lies my whole fortune. It is yours in exchange for any book you please to write for me – “

At that point, to the horror and astonishment of Monsieur Werdet, his further progress was cut short by roars of laughter – formidable roars, as he himself expressly states – bursting from the lungs of the highly diverted Balzac.

“What remarkable simplicity!” exclaimed the great man. “Sir! I really admire you. Sir! do you actually believe that I – I – De Balzac – can so entirely forget what is due to myself as to sell you any conceivable species of fiction which is the product of MY PEN, for the sum of three thousand francs? You have come here, sir, to address an offer to me, without preparing yourself by previous reflection. If I felt so disposed, I should have every right to consider your conduct as unbecoming in the highest degree. But I don’t feel so disposed. On the contrary, I can even allow your honest ignorance, your innocent confidence, to excuse you in my estimation – that is to say, to excuse you to a certain extent.”

Between disappointment, indignation, and astonishment, Monsieur Werdet was struck dumb. His friend, Monsieur Barbier, therefore spoke for him, urging every possible consideration; and finally proposing that Balzac, if he was determined not to write a new story for three thousand francs, should at least sell one edition of an old one for that sum. Monsieur Barbier’s arguments were admirably put: they lasted a long time; and when they had come to an end, they received this reply:

“Gentlemen!” cried Balzac, pushing back his long hair from his heated temples, and taking a fresh dip of ink, “you have wasted an hour of MY TIME in talking of trifles. I rate the pecuniary loss thus occasioned to me at two hundred francs. My time is my capital. I must work. Gentlemen! leave me.” Having expressed himself in these hospitable terms, the great man immediately resumed the process of composition.

Monsieur Werdet, naturally and properly indignant, immediately left the room. He was overtaken, after he had proceeded a little distance in the street, by his friend Barbier, who had remained behind to remonstrate.

“You have every reason to be offended,” said Barbier. “His conduct is inexcusable. But pray don’t suppose that your negotiation is broken off. I know him better than you do; and I tell you that you have nailed Balzac. He wants money, and before three days are over your head he will return your visit?”

“If he does,” replied Werdet, “I’ll pitch him out of the window.”

“No, you won’t,” said Barbier. “In the first place, it is an extremely uncivil proceeding to pitch a man out of the window; and, as a naturally polite gentleman, you are incapable of committing a breach of good manners. In the second place, rude as he has been to you, Balzac is not the less a man of genius; and, as such, he is just the man of whom you, as a publisher, stand in need. Wait patiently; and in a day or two you will see him, or hear from him again.”

Barbier was right. Three days afterwards, the following satisfactory communication was received by Monsieur Werdet:

My brain, sir, was so prodigiously preoccupied by work uncongenial to my fancy, when you visited me the other day, that I was incapable of comprehending otherwise than imperfectly what it was that you wanted of me.

Today, my brain is not preoccupied. Do me the favour to come and see me at four o’clock.

A thousand civilities.

de Balzac

Monsieur Werdet viewed this singular note in the light of a fresh impertinence. On consideration, however, he acknowledged it, and curtly added that important business would prevent his accepting the appointment proposed to him.

In two days more, friend Barbier came with a second invitation from the great man. But Monsieur Werdet steadily refused it. “Balzac has already been playing his game with me,” he said. “Now it is my turn to play my game with Balzac. I mean to keep him waiting four days longer.”

At the end of that time, Monsieur Werdet once more entered the sanctum sanctorum. On this second occasion, Balzac’s graceful politeness was indescribable. He deplored the rarity of intelligent publishers. He declared his deep sense of the importance of an intelligent publisher’s appearance in the literary horizon. He expressed himself as quite enchanted to be enabled to remark the said appearance, to welcome it, and even to deal with it. Polite as he was by nature. Monsieur Werdet had no chance this time against Monsieur de Balzac. In the race of civility the publisher was now nowhere, and the author made all the running.

The interview, thus happily begun, terminated in a most agreeable transaction on both sides. Balzac cheerfully locked up the six bank notes in his strongbox. Werdet, as cheerfully, retired with a written agreement in his empty pocketbook, authorising him to publish the second edition of Le Médecin de Campagne – by no means, it may be remarked in parenthesis, one of the best to select of the novels of Balzac.

Here, leaving him at the consummation of his hopes, started in business with an edition to sell of his favourite author, we must part with Monsieur Werdet, who has now arrived, in the course of his portrait-painting, at the end of the First Sitting. How he and the great man subsequently got on together, and what extraordinary revelations of Balzac’s character, mode of life, and habits of literary composition were subsequently vouchsafed to his long suffering publisher shall be recorded next week, as ingredients in those remaining portions of the Portrait which are left to be completed at the Second Sitting.

The Second Sitting

All the Year Round, Volume 1, page 205

We left [in the previous article] Monsieur Werdet successful, after some preliminary disappointment and humiliation, in his first literary treaty with Balzac. We left him, the happy proprietor and hopeful publisher of the second edition of Le Médecin de Campagne.

Once started, Monsieur Werdet was too wise a man not to avail himself of the only certain means of success in modern times. He puffed magnificently. Every newspaper in Paris was inundated with a deluge of advertisements, announcing the forthcoming work in terms of eulogy such as the wonderstruck reader had never met with before. The result, aided by Balzac’s celebrity, was a phenomenon in the commercial history of French literature, at that time. Every copy of the second edition of Le Médecin de Campagne was sold in eight days.

This success established Monsieur Werdet’s reputation. Young authors crowded to him with their manuscripts, all declaring piteously that they wrote in the style of Balzac. But Monsieur Werdet flew at higher game. He received the imitators politely, and even published for one or two of them; but the high business aspirations which now glowed within him were all concentrated on the great original. He had conceived the sublime idea of becoming Balzac’s sole publisher; of buying up all his copyrights held by other houses, and of issuing all his new works that were yet to be written. Balzac himself welcomed this proposal with superb indulgence. “Walter Scott,” he said, in his grandest way, “had only one publisher – Archibald Constable. Work out your idea. I authorise it; I support it. I will be Scott, and you shall be Constable!”

Fired by the prodigious future thus disclosed to him, Monsieur Werdet assumed forthwith the character of a French Constable; and opened negotiations with no less than six publishers who held among them the much desired copyrights. His own enthusiasm did something for him; his excellent previous character in the trade, and his remarkable success at starting, did much more. The houses he dealt with took his bills in all directions, without troubling him for security. After innumerable interviews and immense exercise of diplomacy, he raised himself at last to the pinnacle of his ambition – he became sole proprietor and publisher of the works of Balzac.

The next question – a sordid, but, unhappily, a necessary question also – was how to turn this precious acquisition to the best pecuniary account. Some of the works, such as La Physiologie du Mariage, and La Peau de Chagrin, had produced, and were still producing, large sums. Others, on the contrary, such as the Contes Philosophiques (which were a little too profound for the public) and Louis Lambert (which was intended to popularise the mysticism of Swedenborg), had not yet succeeded in paying their expenses. Estimating his speculation by what he had in hand, Monsieur Werdet had not much chance of seeing his way speedily to quick returns. Estimating it, however, by what was coming in the future, that is to say, by the promised privilege of issuing all the writer’s contemplated works, he had every reason to look happily and hopefully at his commercial prospects. At this crisis of the narrative, when the publisher’s credit and fortune depended wholly on the pen of one man, the history of that man’s habits of literary composition assumes a special interest and importance. Monsieur Werdet’s description of Balzac at his writing desk presents by no means the least extraordinary of the many singular revelations which compose the story of the author’s life.

When he had once made up his mind to produce a new book, Balzac’s first proceeding was to think it out thoroughly before he put pen to paper. He was not satisfied with possessing himself of the main idea only; he followed it mentally into its minutest ramifications, devoting to the process just that amount of patient hard labour and self-sacrifice which no inferior writer ever has the common sense or the courage to bestow on his work. With his notebook ready in his hand, Balzac studied his scenes and characters straight from life. General knowledge of what he wanted to describe was not enough for this determined realist. If he found himself in the least at fault, he would not hesitate to take a long journey merely to ensure truth to nature in describing the street of a country town, or in painting some minor peculiarity of rustic character. In Paris he was perpetually about the streets, perpetually penetrating into all classes of society, to study the human nature about him in its minutest varieties. Day by day, and week by week, his notebook and his brains were hard at work together, before he thought of sitting down to his desk to begin. When he had finally amassed his materials in this laborious manner, he at last retired to his study; and from that time, till his book had gone to press, society saw him no more.

His house door was now closed to everybody, except the publisher and the printer; and his costume was changed to a loose white robe, of the sort which is worn by the Dominican monks. This singular writing dress was fastened round the waist by a chain of Venetian gold, to which hung little pliers and scissors of the same precious metal. White Turkish trousers, and red morocco slippers, embroidered with gold, covered his legs and feet. On the day when he sat down to his desk, the light of heaven was shut out, and he worked by the light of candles in superb silver sconces. Even letters were not allowed to reach him. They were all thrown, as they came, into a japan vase, and not opened, no matter how important they might be, till his work was all over. He rose to begin writing at two in the morning, continued, with extraordinary rapidity, till six; then took his bath, and stopped in it, thinking, for an hour or more. At eight o’clock his servant brought him up a cup of coffee. Before nine his publisher was admitted to carry away what he had done. From nine till noon he wrote on again, always at the top of his speed. At noon he breakfasted on eggs, with a glass of water and a second cup of coffee. From one o’clock to six he returned to work. At six he dined lightly, only allowing himself one glass of wine. From seven to eight he received his publisher again: and at eight o’clock he went to bed. This life he led, while he was writing his books, for two months together, without intermission. Its effect on his health was such that, when he appeared once more among his friends, he looked, in the popular phrase, like his own ghost. Chance acquaintances would hardly have known him again.

It must not be supposed that this life of resolute seclusion and fierce hard toil ended with the completion of the first draught of his manuscript. At the point where, in the instances of most men, the serious part of the work would have come to an end, it had only begun for Balzac. In spite of all the preliminary studying and thinking, when his pen had scrambled its way straight through to the end of the book, the leaves were all turned back again, and the first manuscript was altered into a second with inconceivable patience and care. Innumerable corrections and interlinings, to begin with, led in the end to transpositions and expansions which metamorphosed the entire work. Happy thoughts were picked out of the beginning of the manuscript, and inserted where they might have a better effect at the end. Others at the end would be moved to the beginning, or the middle. In one place, chapters would be expanded to three or four times their original length; in another, abridged to a few paragraphs; in a third, taken out altogether, or shifted to new positions. With all this mass of alterations in every page, the manuscript was at last ready for the printer. Even to the sharp experienced eyes in the printing office, it was now all but illegible. The deciphering it, and setting it up in a moderately correct form, cost an amount of patience and pains which wearied out all the best men in the office, one after another, before the first series of proofs could be submitted to the author’s eye. When these were at last complete, they were sent in on large slips, and the indefatigable Balzac immediately set to work to rewrite the whole book for the third time!

He now covered with fresh corrections, fresh alterations, fresh expansions of this passage, and fresh abridgements of that, not only the margins of the proofs all round, but even the little intervals of white space between the paragraphs. Lines crossing each other in indescribable confusion were supposed to show the bewildered printer the various places at which the multitude of new insertions were to be slipped in. Illegible as Balzac’s original manuscripts were, his corrected proofs were more hopelessly puzzling still. The picked men in the office, to whom alone they could be entrusted, shuddered at the very name of Balzac, and relieved each other at intervals of an hour, beyond which time no one printer could be got to continue at work on the universally execrated and universally unintelligible proofs. The “revises” – that is to say, the proofs embodying the new alterations – were next pulled to pieces in their turn. Two, three, and sometimes four, separate sets of them were required before the author’s leave could be got to send the perpetually rewritten book to press at last, and so have done with it. He was literally the terror of all printers and editors; and he himself described his process of work as a misfortune, to be the more deplored, because it was, in his case, an intellectual necessity. “I toil sixteen hours out of the twenty-four,” he said, “ over the elaboration of my unhappy style; and I am never satisfied, myself, when all is done.”

Looking back to the schooldays of Balzac, when his mind suffered under the sudden and mysterious shock which has been described in its place; remembering that his father’s character was notorious for its eccentricity; observing the prodigious toil, the torture almost, of mind which the act of literary production seems to have cost him all through life, it is impossible not to arrive at the conclusion, that, in his case, there must have been a fatal incompleteness somewhere in the mysterious intellectual machine. Magnificently as it was endowed, the balance of faculties in his mind seems to have been even more than ordinarily imperfect. On this theory, his unparalleled difficulties in expressing himself, as a writer, and his errors, inconsistencies, and meannesses of character, as a man, become, at least, not wholly unintelligible. On any other theory, all explanation both of his personal life and his literary life appears to be simply impossible.

Such was the perilous pen on which Monsieur Werdet’s prospects in life all depended. If Balzac failed to perform his engagements punctually, or if his health broke down under his severe literary exertions, the commercial decease of his unfortunate publisher followed either disaster, purely as a matter of course.

At the outset, however, the posture of affairs looked encouragingly enough. On its completion in the Revue de Paris, Le Lys dans la Vallée was republished by Monsieur Werdet, who had secured his interest in the work by a timely advance of six thousand francs. Of this novel (the most highly valued in France of all the writer’s fictions), but two hundred copies of the first edition were left undisposed of within two hours after its publication. This unparalleled success kept Monsieur Werdet’s head above water, and encouraged him to hope great things from the next novel (Séraphita), which was also begun, periodically, in the Revue de Paris. Before it was finished, however, Balzac and his editor quarrelled, and the long-suffering publisher was obliged to step in and pay the author’s forfeit money, obtaining the incomplete novel in return, and with it Balzac’s promise to finish the work off-hand. Months passed, however, and not a page of manuscript was produced. One morning, at eight o’clock, to Monsieur Werdet’s horror and astonishment, Balzac burst in on him in a condition of sublime despair, to announce that he and his genius had to all appearance parted company for ever.

“My brain is empty!” cried the great man. “My imagination is dried up! Hundreds of cups of coffee and two baths a day have done nothing for me. Werdet, I am a lost man!”

The publisher thought of his empty cash box, and was petrified. The author proceeded:

“I must travel!” he exclaimed, wildly. “ My genius has run away from me – I must pursue it over mountains and valleys – Werdet! I must catch my genius up!”

Poor Monsieur Werdet faintly suggested a little turn in the immediate neighbourhood of Paris – something equivalent to a nice airy ride to Hampstead on the top of an omnibus. But Balzac’s runaway genius had, in the estimation of its bereaved proprietor, got as far as Vienna already; and he coolly announced his intention of travelling after it to the Austrian capital.

“And who is to finish Séraphita?” inquired the unhappy publisher. “ My illustrious friend, you are ruining me!”

“On the contrary,” remarked Balzac, persuasively, “I am making your fortune. At Vienna, I shall find my genius – at Vienna I shall finish Séraphita, and a new book besides at Vienna, I shall meet with an angelic woman who admires me – I call her ‘Carissima’ – she has written to invite me to Vienna – I ought, I must, I will, accept the invitation.”

Here an ordinary acquaintance would have had an excellent opportunity of saying something smart. But poor Monsieur Werdet was not in a position to be witty; and, moreover, he knew but too well what was coming next. All he ventured to say was:

“But I am afraid you have no money.”

“You can raise some,” replied his illustrious friend. “Borrow – deposit stock in trade – get me two thousand francs. Everything else I can do for myself. Werdet! I will hire a post-chaise – I will dine with my dear sister – I will set off after dinner – I will not be later than eight o’clock – click-clack!” And the great man executed an admirable imitation of the cracking of a postilion’s whip.

There was no resource for Monsieur Werdet but to throw the good money after the bad. He raised the two thousand francs; and away went Balzac to catch his runaway genius, to bask in the society of a female angel, and to coin money in the form of manuscripts.

Eighteen days afterwards a perfumed letter from the author reached the publisher. He had caught his genius at Vienna; he had been magnificently received by the aristocracy; he had finished Séraphita, and nearly completed the other book; his angelic friend, Carissima, already loved Werdet from Balzac’s description of him; Balzac himself was Werdet’s friend till death; Werdet was his Archibald Constable; Werdet should see him again in fifteen days; Werdet should ride in his carriage in the Bois de Boulogne, and meet Balzac riding in his carriage, and see the enemies of both parties looking on at the magnificent spectacle and bursting with spite. Finally, Werdet would have the goodness to remark (in a postscript) that Balzac had provided himself with another little advance of fifteen hundred francs, received from Rothschild in Vienna, and had given in exchange a bill at ten days’ sight on his excellent publisher, on his admirable and devoted Archibald Constable.

While Monsieur Werdet was still prostrate under the effect of this audacious postscript, a clerk entered his office with the identical bill. It was drawn at one day’s sight instead of ten; and the money was wanted immediately. The publisher was the most long-suffering of men; but there were limits even to his patient endurance. He took Balzac’s letter with him, and went at once to the office of the Parisian Rothschild. The great financier received him kindly; admitted that there must have been some mistake; granted the ten days’ grace; and dismissed his visitor with this excellent and sententious piece of advice:

“I recommend you to mind what you are about, sir, with Monsieur de Balzac. He is a highly inconsequent man.”

It was too late for Monsieur Werdet to mind what he was about. He had no choice but to lose his credit, or pay at the end of the ten days. He paid; and ten days later, Balzac returned, considerately bringing with him some charming little Viennese curiosities for his esteemed publisher. Monsieur Werdet expressed his acknowledgments; and then politely inquired for the conclusion of Séraphita, and the manuscript of the new novel.

Not a single line of either had been committed to paper.

The farce (undoubtedly a most disgraceful performance, so far as Balzac was concerned) was not played out even yet. The publisher’s reproaches seem at last to have awakened the author to something remotely resembling a sense of shame. He promised that Seraphita, which had been waiting at press a whole year, should be finished in one night. There were just two sheets of sixteen pages each to write. They might have been completed either at the author’s house or at the publisher’s, which was close to the printer’s. But, no – it was not in Balzac’s character to miss the smallest chance of producing a sensation anywhere. His last caprice was a determination to astonish the printers. Twenty-five compositors were called together at eleven at night, a truckle bed and table were set up for the author – or, to speak more correctly, for the literary mountebank – in the workshop; Balzac arrived, in a high state of inspiration, to stagger the sleepy journeymen by showing them how fast he could write; and the two sheets were completed magnificently on the spot. By way of fit and proper climax to this ridiculous exhibition of literary quackery, it is only necessary to add, that, on Balzac’s own confession, the two concluding sheets of Séraphita had been mentally composed, and carefully committed to memory, two years before he affected to write them impromptu in the printer’s office. It seems impossible to deny that the man who could act in this outrageously puerile manner must have been simply mad; but what becomes of the imputation when we remember that this very madman produced books which, for depth of thought and marvellous knowledge of human nature, are counted deservedly among the glories of French literature, and which were never more living and more lasting works than they are at this moment?

Séraphita was published three days after the author’s absurd exhibition of himself at the printer’s office. In this novel, as in its predecessor, Louis Lambert, Balzac left his own firm ground of reality, and soared, on the wings of Swedenborg, into an atmosphere of transcendental obscurity impervious to all ordinary eyes. What the book meant, the editor of the periodical in which part of it originally appeared never could explain. Monsieur Werdet, who published it, confessed that he was in the same mystified condition; and the present writer, who has vainly attempted to read it through, desires to add, in this place, his own modest acknowledgment of inability to enlighten English readers in the smallest degree on the subject of Séraphita. Luckily for Monsieur Werdet, the author’s reputation stood so high with the public, that the book sold prodigiously, merely because it was a book by Balzac. The proceeds of the sale, and the profits derived from new editions of the old novels, kept the sinking publisher from absolute submersion; and might even have brought him safely to land, but for the ever increasing dead weight of the author’s perpetual borrowings, on the security of forthcoming works which he never produced.

No commercial success, no generous self-sacrifice, could keep pace with the demands of Balzac’s insatiate vanity and love of show, at this period of his life. He had two establishments, to begin with; both splendidly furnished, and one adorned with a valuable gallery of pictures. He had his box at the French Opera, and his box at the Italian Opera. He had a chariot and horses, and an establishment of men servants. The panels of the carriage were decorated with the arms, and the bodies of the footmen were adorned with the liveries, of the noble family of D’Entragues, to which Balzac persisted in declaring that he was allied, although he never could produce the smallest proof in support of the statement. When he could add no more to the sumptuous magnificence of his houses, his dinners, his carriage, and his servants; when he had filled his rooms with every species of expensive knick-knack; when he had lavished money on all the known extravagances which extravagant Paris can supply to the spendthrift’s inventory, he hit on the entirely new idea of providing himself with such a walking stick as the world had never yet beheld. A splendid cane was first procured, was sent to the jeweller’s, and was grandly topped by a huge gold knob. The inside of the knob was occupied by a lock of hair presented to the author by an unknown lady admirer. The outside was studded with all the jewels he had bought, and with all the jewels he had received as presents. With this cane, nearly as big as a drum major’s staff, and all a-blaze at the top with rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires, Balzac exhibited himself, in a rapture of satisfied vanity, at the theatres and in the public promenades. The cane became as celebrated in Paris as the author. Madame de Girardin wrote a sparkling little book all about the wonderful walking stick. Balzac was in the seventh heaven of happiness; Balzac’s friends were either disgusted or diverted, according to their tempers. One unfortunate man alone suffered the inevitable penalty of this insane extravagance: need it be added that his name was Werdet?

The end of the connexion between the author and the publisher was now fast approaching. All entreaties or reproaches addressed to Balzac failed in producing the slightest result. Even confinement in a sponging-house, when creditors discovered, in course of time, that they could wait no longer, passed unheeded as a warning. Balzac only borrowed more money the moment the key was turned on him, gave a magnificent dinner in prison, and left the poor publisher, as usual, to pay the bill. He was extricated from the sponging-house before he had been there quite three days; and, at that time, he had spent over twenty guineas on luxuries which he had not a farthing of his own to purchase. It is useless, it is even exasperating, to go on accumulating instances of this sort of mad and cruel prodigality: let us advance rapidly to the end. One morning, Monsieur Werdet balanced accounts with his author, from the beginning, and found, in spite of the large profits produced by the majority of the works, that fifty-eight thousand francs were (to use his own expression) paralysed in his hands by the life Balzac persisted in leading; and that fifty-eight thousand more might soon be in the same condition, if he had possessed them to advance. A rich publisher might have contrived to keep his footing in such a crisis as this, and to deal, for the time to come, on purely commercial grounds. But Monsieur Werdet was a poor man; he had relied on Balzac’s verbal promises when he ought to have exacted his written engagements; and he had no means of appealing to the author’s love of money by dazzling prospects of banknotes awaiting him in the future, if he chose honestly to earn his right to them – in short, there was but one alternative left, the alternative of giving up the whole purpose and ambition of the bookseller’s life, and resolutely breaking off his ruinous connexion with Balzac.

Reduced to this situation, driven to bay by the prospect of engagements falling due which he had no apparent means of meeting, Monsieur Werdet answered the next application for an advance by a flat refusal, and followed up that unexampled act of self-defence by speaking his mind at last, in no measured terms, to his illustrious friend. Balzac turned crimson with suppressed anger, and left the room. A series of business formalities followed, initiated by Balzac, with the view of breaking off the connexion between his publisher and himself, now that he found there was no more money to be had. Monsieur Werdet, on his side, was perfectly ready to “sign, seal, and deliver,” and was most properly resolute in pressing his claims in due form of law. Balzac had but one means of meeting his liabilities. His personal reputation was gone; but his literary reputation remained as high as ever; and he soon found a publisher, with large capital at command, who was ready to treat for his copyrights. Monsieur Werdet had no resource but to sell, or be bankrupt. He parted with all the valuable copyrights for a sum of sixty thousand and odd francs, which sufficed to meet his most pressing engagements. Some of the less popular and less valuable books he kept, to help him, if possible, through his daily and personal liabilities. As for gaining any absolute profit, or even holding his position as a publisher, the bare idea of securing either advantage was dismissed as an idle dream. The purpose for which he had toiled so hard and suffered so patiently was sacrificed for ever, and he was reduced to beginning life again as a country traveller for a prosperous publishing house. So far as his main object in existence was concerned, Balzac had plainly and literally ruined him. It is impossible to part with Monsieur Werdet, imprudent and credulous as he appears to have been, without a strong feeling of sympathy, which becomes strengthened to something like positive admiration when we discover that he cherished, in after life, no unfriendly sentiments towards the man who had treated him so shamefully; and when we find him, in the Memoir now under notice, still trying hard to make the best of Balzac’s conduct, and still writing of him in terms of affection and esteem to the very end of the book.

The remainder of Balzac’s life was, in substance, merely the lamentable repetition of the personal faults and follies, and the literary merits and triumphs, which have already found their record in these pages. The extremes of idle vanity and unprincipled extravagance still alternated, to the last, with the extremes of hard mental labour and amazing mental productiveness. Though he found new victims among new men, he never again met with so generous and forbearing a friend as the poor publisher whose fortunes he had destroyed. The women, whose strange impulses in his favour were kept alive by their admiration of his books, clung to their spoilt darling to the last – one of their number even stepping forward to save him from a debtors’ prison, at the heavy sacrifice of paying the whole demand against him out of her own purse. In all cases of this sort, even where men were concerned as well as women, his personal means of attraction, when he chose to exert them, strengthened immensely his literary claims on the sympathy and goodwill of others. He appears to have possessed in the highest degree those powers of fascination which are quite independent of mere beauty of face and form, and which are perversely and inexplicably bestowed in the most lavish abundance on the most unprincipled of mankind. Poor Monsieur Werdet can only account for half his own acts of indiscretion by declaring that his eminent friend wheedled him into committing them. Other and wiser men kept out of Balzac’s way, through sheer distrust of themselves. Virtuous friends, who tried hard to reform him, retreated from his presence, declaring that the reprobate whom they had gone to convert had all but upset their moral balance in a morning’s conversation. An eminent literary gentleman, who went to spend the day with him to talk over a proposed work, rushed out of the house after a two hours’ interview, exclaiming piteously, “The man’s imagination is in a state of delirium – his talk has set my brain in a whirl – he would have driven me mad if I had spent the day with him!” If men were influenced in this way, it is not wonderful that women (whose self-esteem was delicately flattered by the prominent and fascinating position which they hold in all his books) should have worshipped a man who publicly and privately worshipped them.

His personal appearance would have recalled to English minds the popular idea of Friar Tuck – he was the very model of the conventional fat, sturdy, red-faced, jolly monk. But he had the eye of a man of genius, and the tongue of a certain infernal personage, who may be broadly hinted at, but who must on no account be plainly named. The Balzac candlestick might be clumsy enough; but when once the Balzac candle was lit, the moths flew into it, only too readily, from all points of the compass.

The last important act of his life was, in a worldly point of view, one of the wisest things he ever did. The lady who had invited him to Vienna, and whom he called Carissima, was the wife of a wealthy Russian nobleman. On the death of her husband, she practically asserted her admiration of her favourite author by offering him her hand and fortune. Balzac accepted both; and returned to Paris (from which respect for his creditors had latterly kept him absent) a married man, and an enviable member of the wealthy class of society. A splendid future now opened before him – but it opened too late. Arrived at the end of his old course, he just saw the new career beyond him, and dropped on the threshold of it. The strong constitution which he had remorselessly wasted for more than twenty years past, gave way at length, at the very time when his social chances looked most brightly. Three months after his marriage, Honoré de Balzac died, after unspeakable suffering, of disease of the heart. He was then but fifty years of age. His fond, proud, heartbroken old mother held him in her arms. On that loving bosom he had drawn his first breath – on that loving bosom the weary head sank to rest again, when the wild, wayward, miserable, glorious life was over.

The sensation produced in Paris by his death was something akin to the sensation produced in London by the death of Byron. Mr Carlyle has admirably said that there is something touching in the loyalty of men to their Sovereign Man! That loyalty most tenderly declared itself when Balzac was no more. Men of all ranks and parties, who had been shocked by his want of principle and disgusted by his inordinate vanity while he was alive, now accepted universally the atonement of his untimely death, and remembered nothing but the loss that had happened to the literature of France. A great writer was no more; and a great people rose with one accord to take him reverently and gloriously to his grave. The French Institute, the University, the scientific societies, the Association of Dramatic Authors, the Schools of Law and Medicine, sent their representatives to walk in the funeral procession. English readers, American readers, German readers, and Russian readers, swelled the immense assembly of Frenchmen that followed the coffin. Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas were among the mourners who supported the pall. The first of these two celebrated men pronounced the funeral oration over Balzac’s grave, and eloquently characterised the whole series of the dead writer’s works as forming, in truth, but one grand book, the textbook of contemporary civilisation. With that just and generous tribute to the genius of Balzac, offered by the most illustrious of his literary rivals, these few pages may fitly and gracefully come to an end. Of the miserable frailties of the man, enough has been recorded to serve the first of all interests, the interest of truth. The better and nobler part of him calls for no further comment at any writer’s hands. It remains to us in his works, and it speaks with deathless eloquence for itself.

The Bachelor Bedroom

All the Year Round, Volume 1, page 355

The great merit of this subject is that it starts itself. The Bachelor Bedroom is familiar to everybody who owns a country house, and to everybody who has stayed in a country house. It is the one especial sleeping apartment, in all civilised residences used for the reception of company, which preserves a character of its own. Married people and young ladies may be shifted about from bedroom to bedroom as their own caprice or the domestic convenience of the host may suggest. But the bachelor guest, when he has once had his room set apart for him, contrives to dedicate it to the perpetual occupation of single men from that moment. Who else is to have the room afterwards, when the very atmosphere of it is altered by tobacco smoke? Who can venture to throw it open to nervous spinsters, or respectable married couples, when the footman is certain, from mere force of habit, to make his appearance at the door, with contraband bottles and glasses, after the rest of the family have retired for the night? Where, even if these difficulties could be got over, is any second sleeping apartment to be found, in any house of ordinary construction, isolated enough to secure the soberly reposing portion of the guests from being disturbed by the regular midnight party which the bachelor persists in giving in his bedroom? Dining rooms and breakfast rooms may change places; double bedded rooms and single bedded rooms may shift their respective characters backwards and forwards amicably among each other – but the Bachelor Bedroom remains immovably in its own place; sticks immutably to its own bad character; stands out victoriously whether the house is full, or whether the house is empty, the one hospitable institution that no repentant afterthoughts of host or hostess can ever alter.

Such a social phenomenon as this, taken with its surrounding circumstances, deserves more notice than it has yet obtained. The bachelor has been profusely served up on all sorts of literary tables; but, the presentation of him has been hitherto remarkable for a singularly monotonous flavour of matrimonial sauce. We have heard of his loneliness, and its remedy; of his solitary position in illness, and its remedy; of the miserable neglect of his linen, and its remedy. But what have we heard of him in connexion with his remarkable bedroom, at those periods of his existence when he, like the rest of the world, is a visitor at his friend’s country house? Who has presented him, in his relation to married society, under those peculiar circumstances of his life, when he is away from his solitary chambers, and is thrown straight into the sacred centre of that home circle from which his ordinary habits are so universally supposed to exclude him? Here, surely, is a new aspect of the bachelor still left to be presented; and here is a new subject for worn out readers of the nineteenth century whose fountain of literary novelty has become exhausted at the source.

Let me sketch the history – in anticipation of a large and serious work which I intend to produce, one of these days, on the same subject – of the Bachelor Bedroom, in a certain comfortable country house, whose hospitable doors fly open to me with the beginning of summer, and close no more until the autumn is ended. I must beg permission to treat this interesting topic from the purely human point of view. In other words, I propose describing, not the Bedroom itself, but the succession of remarkable bachelors who have passed through it in my time.

The hospitable country seat to which I refer is Coolcup House, the residence of that enterprising gentleman farmer and respected chairman of Quarter Sessions, Sir John Giles. Sir John’s Bachelor Bedroom has been wisely fitted up on the ground floor. It is the one solitary sleeping apartment in that part of the house. Fidgety bachelors can jump out on to the lawn, at night, through the bow window, without troubling anybody to unlock the front door; and can communicate with the presiding genius of the cellar by merely crossing the hall. For the rest, the room is delightfully airy and spacious, and fitted up with all possible luxury. It started in life, under Sir John’s careful auspices, the perfection of neatness and tidiness. But the bachelors have corrupted it long since. However carefully the servants may clean, and alter, and arrange it, the room loses its respectability again, and gets slovenly and unpresentable the moment their backs are turned. Sir John himself, the tidiest man in existence, has given up all hope of reforming it. He peeps in occasionally, and sighs and shakes his head, and puts a chair in its place, and straightens a print on the wall, and looks about him at the general litter and confusion, and gives it up and goes out again. He is a rigid man and a resolute in the matter of order, and has his way all over the rest of the house – but the Bachelor Bedroom is too much for him.

The first bachelor who inhabited the room when I began to be a guest at Coolcup House, was Mr Bigg. Mr Bigg is, in the strictest sense of the word, what you call a fine man. He stands over six feet, is rather more than stout enough for his height, holds his head up nobly, and dresses in a style of mingled gaiety and grandeur which impresses everybody. The morning shirts of Mr Bigg are of so large a pattern that nobody but his haberdasher knows what that pattern really is. You see a bit of it on one side of his collar which looks square, and a bit of it on the other side which looks round. It goes up his arm on one of his wristbands, and down his arm on the other. Men who have seen his shirts off (if such a statement may be permitted), and scattered loosely, to Sir John’s horror, over all the chairs in the Bedroom, have been questioned, and have not been found able to state that their eyes ever followed out the patterns of any one of them fairly to the end. In the matter of beautiful and expensive clothing for the neck Mr Bigg is simply inexhaustible. Every morning he appears at breakfast in a fresh scarf, and taps his egg magnificently with a daily blaze of new colour glowing on his capacious chest to charm the eyes of the young ladies who sit opposite to him. All the other component parts of Mr Bigg’s costume are of an equally grand and attractive kind, and are set off by Mr Bigg’s enviable figure to equal advantage. Outside the Bachelor Bedroom he is altogether an irreproachable character in the article of dress. Outside the Bachelor Bedroom, he is essentially a man of the world, who can be thoroughly depended on to perform any part allotted to him in any society assembled at Coolcup House; who has lived among all ranks and sorts of people; who has filled a public situation with great breadth and dignity, and has sat at table with crowned heads, and played his part there with distinction; who can talk of these experiences, and of others akin to them, with curious fluency and ease, and can shift about to other subjects, and pass the bottle, and carve, and draw out modest people, and take all other social responsibilities on Ins own shoulders complacently, at the largest and dreariest county dinner party that Sir John, to his own great discomfiture, can be obliged to give. Such is Mr Bigg in the society of the house, when the door of the Bachelor Bedroom has closed behind him.

But what is Mr Bigg, when he has courteously wished the ladies good night, when he has secretly summoned the footman with the surreptitious tray, and when he has deluded the unprincipled married men of the party into having half an hour’s cozy chat with him before they go upstairs? Another being – a being unknown to the ladies, and unsuspected by the respectable guests. Inside the Bedroom, the outward aspect of Mr Bigg changes as if by magic; and a kind of gorgeous slovenliness pervades him from top to toe. Buttons which have rigidly restrained him within distinct physical boundaries, slip exhausted out of their buttonholes; and the figure of Mr Bigg suddenly expands and asserts itself for the first time as a protuberant fact. His neckcloth flies on to the nearest chair, his rigid shirt collar yawns open, his wiry under-whiskers ooze multitudinously into view, his coat, waistcoat, and braces drop off his shoulders. If the two young ladies who sleep in the room above, and who most unreasonably complain of the ceaseless nocturnal croaking and growling of voices in the Bachelor Bedroom, could look down through the ceiling now, they would not know Mr Bigg again, and would suspect that a dissipated artisan had intruded himself into Sir John’s house.

In the same way, the company who have sat in Mr Bigg’s neighbourhood at the dinner table at six o’clock, would find it impossible to recognise his conversation at midnight. Outside the Bachelor Bedroom, if his talk has shown him to be anything at all, it has shown him to be the exact reverse of an enthusiast. Inside the Bachelor Bedroom, after all due attention has been paid to the cigar box and the footman’s tray, it becomes unaccountably manifest to everybody that Mr Bigg is, after all, a fanatical character, a man possessed of one fixed idea. Then, and then only, does he mysteriously confide to his fellow revellers that he is the one remarkable man in Great Britain who has discovered the real authorship of Junius’s Letters. In the general society of the house, nobody ever hears him refer to the subject; nobody ever suspects that he takes more than the most ordinary interest in literary matters. In the select society of the Bedroom, inspired by the surreptitious tray and the midnight secrecy, wrapped in clouds of tobacco smoke, and freed from the restraint of his own magnificent garments, the truth flies out of Mr Bigg, and the authorship of Junius’s Letters becomes the one dreary subject which this otherwise variously gifted man persists in dilating on for hours together. But for the Bachelor Bedroom nobody alive would ever have discovered that the true key to unlock Mr Bigg’s character is Junius. If the subject is referred to the next day by his companions of the night, he declines to notice it; but, once in the Bedroom again, he takes it up briskly, as if the attempted reference to it had been made but the moment before. The last time I saw him was in the Bachelor Bedroom. It was three o’clock in the morning; two tumblers were broken; half a lemon was in the soap dish, and the soap itself was on the chimney piece; restless married rakes, who were desperately afraid of waking up their wives when they left us, were walking to and fro absently, and crunching knobs of loaf sugar under foot at every step; Mr Bigg was standing, with his fourth cigar in his mouth, before the fire; one of his hands was in the tumbled bosom of his shirt, the other was grasping mine, while he pathetically appointed me his literary executor, and generously bequeathed to me his great discovery of the authorship of Junius’s Letters. Upon the whole, Mr Bigg is the most incorrigible bachelor on record in the annals of the Bedroom; he has consumed more candles, ordered more footmen’s trays, seen more early daylight, and produced more pale faces among the gentlemen at breakfast time, than any other single visitor at Coolcup House.

The next bachelor in the order of succession, and the completest contrast conceivable to Mr Bigg, is Mr Jollins. He is, perhaps, the most miserable looking little man that ever tottered under the form of humanity. Wear what clothes he may, he invariably looks shabby in them. He is the victim of perpetual accidents and perpetual ill health; and the Bachelor Bedroom, when he inhabits it, is turned into a doctor’s shop, and bristles all over with bottles and pills. Mr Jollins’s personal tribute to the hospitalities of Coolcup House is always paid in the same singularly unsatisfactory manner to his host. On one day in the week, he gorges himself gaily with food and drink, and soars into the seventh heaven of convivial beatitude. On the other six, he is invariably ill in consequence, is reduced to the utmost rigours of starvation and physic, sinks into the lowest depths of depression, and takes the bitterest imaginable views of human life. Hardly a single accident has happened at Coolcup House in which he has not been personally and chiefly concerned; hardly a single malady can occur to the human frame the ravages of which he has not practically exemplified in his own person under Sir John’s roof. If any one guest, in the fruit season, terrifies the rest by writhing under the internal penalties in such cases made and provided by the laws of nature, it is Mr Jollins. If any one tumbles upstairs, or downstairs, or off a horse, or out of a dog cart, it is Mr Jollins. If you want a case of sprained ankle, a case of suppressed gout, a case of complicated earache, toothache, headache, and sore throat, all in one, a case of liver, a case of chest, a case of nerves, or a case of low fever, go to Coolcup House while Mr Jollins is staying there, and he will supply you, on demand, at the shortest notice and to any extent. It is conjectured by the intimate friends of this extremely wretched bachelor, that he has but two sources of consolation to draw on, as a set-off against his innumerable troubles. The first is the luxury of twisting his nose on one side, and stopping up his air passages and Eustachian tubes with inconceivably large quantities of strong snuff. The second is the oleaginous gratification of incessantly anointing his miserable little beard and mustachios with cheap bear grease, which always turns rancid on the premises before he has half done with it. When Mr Jollins gives a party in the Bachelor Bedroom, his guests have the unexpected pleasure of seeing him take his physic, and hearing him describe his maladies and recount his accidents. In other respects, the moral influence of the Bedroom over the characters of those who occupy it, which exhibits Mr Bigg in the unexpected literary aspect of a commentator on Junius, is found to tempt Mr Jollins into betraying a horrible triumph and interest in the maladies of others, of which nobody would suspect him in the general society of the house.

“I noticed you, after dinner to-day,” says this invalid bachelor, on such occasions, to any one of the Bedroom guests who may be rash enough to complain of the slightest uneasiness in his presence; “I saw the corners of your mouth get green, and the whites of your eyes look yellow. You have got a pain here,” says Mr Jollins, gaily indicating the place to which he refers on his own shattered frame, with an appearance of extreme relish – “a pain here, and a sensation like having a cannon ball inside you, there. You will be parched with thirst and racked with fidgets all tonight; and tomorrow morning you will get up with a splitting headache, and a dark brown tongue, and another cannon ball in your inside. My dear fellow, I’m a veteran at this sort of thing; and I know exactly the state you will be in next week, and the week after, and when you will have to try the seaside, and how many pounds’ weight you will lose, to a dead certainty, before you can expect to get over this attack. He’s congested, you know,” continues Mr Jollins, addressing himself confidentially to the company in general, “congested – I mean as to his poor unfortunate liver. A nasty thing, gentlemen – ah, yes, yes, yes, a long, tiresome, wearing, nasty thing, I can tell you.”

Thus, while Mr Bigg always astonishes the Bedroom guests on the subject of Junius, Mr Jollins always alarms them on the subject of themselves. Mr Smart, the next, and third bachelor, placed in a similar situation, displays himself under a more agreeable aspect, and makes the convivial society that surrounds him, for the night at least, supremely happy.

On the first day of his arrival at Coolcup House, Mr Smart deceived us all. When he was first presented to us, we were deeply impressed by the serene solemnity of this gentleman’s voice, look, manner, and costume. He was as carefully dressed as Mr Bigg himself, but on totally different principles. Mr Smart was fearfully and wonderfully gentlemanly in his avoidance of anything approaching to bright colour on any part of his body. Quakerish drabs and greys clothed him in the morning. Dismal black, unrelieved by an atom of jewellery, undisturbed even by so much as a flower in his buttonhole, encased him grimly in the evening. He moved about the room and the garden with a ghostly and solemn stalk. When the ladies got brilliant in their conversation he smiled upon them with a deferential modesty and polite Grandisonian admiration that froze the blood of “us youth” in our veins. When he spoke it was like reading a passage from an elegant moral writer – the words were so beautifully arranged, the sentences were turned so musically, the sentiment conveyed was so delightfully well regulated, so virtuously appropriate to nothing in particular. At such times he always spoke in a slow, deep, and gentle drawl, with a thrillingly clear emphasis on every individual syllable. His speech sounded occasionally like a kind of highly bred foreign English, spoken by a distinguished stranger who had mastered the language to such an extent that he had got beyond the natives altogether. We watched enviously all day for any signs of human infirmity in this surprising individual. The men detected him in nothing. Even the sharper eyes of the women only discovered that he was addicted to looking at himself affectionately in every glass in the house, when he thought that nobody was noticing him. At dinner time we all pinned our faith on Sir John’s excellent wine, and waited anxiously for its legitimate effect on the superb and icy stranger. Nothing came of it; Mr Smart was as carefully guarded with the bottle as he was with the English language. All through the evening, he behaved himself so dreadfully well that we quite began to hate him. When the company parted for the night, and when Mr Smart (who was just mortal enough to be a bachelor) invited us to a cigar in the Bedroom, his highly bred foreign English was still in full perfection; his drawl had reached its elocutionary climax of rich and gentle slowness; and his Grandisonian smile was more exasperatingly settled and composed than ever.

The Bedroom door closed on us. We took off our coats, tore open our waistcoats, rushed in a body on the new bachelor’s cigar box, and summoned the evil genius of the footman’s tray. At the first round of the tumblers, the false Mr Smart began to disappear, and the true Mr Smart approached, as it were, from a visionary distance, and took his place among us. He chuckled – Grandison chuckled – within the hearing of every man in the room! We were surprised at that, but what were our sensations when, in less than ten minutes afterwards, the highly bred English and the gentle drawl mysteriously disappeared, and there came bursting out upon us, from the ambush of Mr Smart’s previous elocution, the jolliest, broadest, and richest Irish brogue we had ever heard in our lives! The mystery was explained now. Mr Smart had a coat of the smoothest English varnish laid over him, for highly bred county society, which nothing mortal could peel off but bachelor company and whisky and water. He slipped out of his close-fitting English envelope, in the loose atmosphere of the Bachelor Bedroom, as glibly as a tightly-laced young lady slips out of her stays when the admiring eyes of the world are off her waist for the night. Never was man so changed as Mr Smart was now. His moral sentiments melted like the sugar in his grog; his grammar disappeared with his white cravat. Wild and lavish generosity suddenly became the leading characteristic of this once reticent man. We tried all sorts of subjects, and were obliged to drop every one of them, because Mr Smart would promise to make us a present of whatever we talked about. The family mansion in Ireland contained everything that this world can supply; and Mr Smart was resolved to dissipate that priceless store in gifts distributed to the much-esteemed company. He promised me a schooner yacht, and made a memorandum of the exact tonnage in his pocketbook. He promised my neighbour, on one side, a horse, and, on the other, a unique autograph letter of Shakespeare’s. We had all three been talking respectively of sailing, hunting, and the British Drama; and we now held our tongues for fear of getting new presents if we tried new subjects. Other members of the festive assembly took up the ball of conversation, and were prostrated forthwith by showers of presents for their pains. When we all parted in the dewy morning, we left Mr Smart with dishevelled hair, checking off his voluminous memoranda of gifts with an unsteady pencil, and piteously entreating us, in the richest Irish-English, to correct him instantly if we detected the slightest omission anywhere.

The next morning, at breakfast, we rather wondered which nation our friend would turn out to belong to. He set all doubts at rest the moment he opened the door, by entering the room with the old majestic stalk, saluting the ladies with the serene Grandison smile, trusting we had all rested well during the night, in a succession of elegantly-turned sentences, and enunciating the highly bred English with the imperturbably gentle drawl which we all imagined, the night before, that we had lost for ever. He stayed more than a fortnight at Coolcup House; and, in all that time, nobody ever knew the true Mr Smart except the guests in the Bachelor Bedroom.

The fourth Bachelor on the list deserves especial consideration and attention. In the first place, because he presents himself to the reader, in the character of a distinguished foreigner. In the second place, because he contrived, in the most amiable manner imaginable, to upset all the established arrangements of Coolcup House – inside the Bachelor Bedroom, as well as outside it – from the moment when he entered its doors, to the moment when he left them behind him on his auspicious return to his native country. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a rare, probably a unique, species of bachelor; and Mr Bigg, Mr Jollins, and Mr Smart have no claim whatever to stand in the faintest light of comparison with him.

When I mention that the distinguished guest now introduced to notice is Herr von Müffe, it will be unnecessary for me to add that I refer to the distinguished German poet, whose far famed Songs Without Sense have aided so immeasurably in thickening the lyric obscurities of his country’s Harp. On his arrival in London, Herr von Müffe forwarded his letter of introduction to Sir John by post, and immediately received, in return, the usual hospitable invitation to Coolcup House. The eminent poet arrived barely in time to dress for dinner; and made his first appearance in our circle while we were waiting in the drawing room for the welcome signal of the bell. He waddled in among us softly and suddenly, in the form of a very short, puffy, florid, roundabout old gentleman, with flowing grey hair and a pair of huge circular spectacles. The extreme shabbiness and dinginess of his costume was so singularly set off by the quantity of foreign orders of merit which he wore all over the upper part of it, that a sarcastic literary gentleman among the guests defined him to me, in a whisper, as a compound of “decorations and dirt.” Sir John advanced to greet his distinguished guest, with friendly right hand extended as usual. Herr von Müffe, without saying a word, took the hand carefully in both his own, and expressed affectionate recognition of English hospitality, by transferring it forthwith to that vacant space between his shirt and his waistcoat which extended over the region of the heart. Sir John turned scarlet, and tried vainly to extricate his hand from the poet’s too affectionate bosom. The dinner bell rang, but Herr von Müffe still held fast. The principal lady in the company half rose, and looked perplexedly at her host – Sir John made another and a desperate effort to escape – failed again – and was marched into the dining room, in full view of his servants and his guests, with his hand sentimentally imprisoned in his foreign visitor’s waistcoat.

After this romantic beginning, Herr von Müffe rather surprised us by showing that he was decidedly the reverse of a sentimentalist in the matter of eating and drinking. Neither dish nor bottle passed him, without paying heavy tribute, all through the repast. He mixed his liquors, especially, with the most sovereign contempt for all sanitary considerations; drinking champagne and beer, the sweetest Constantia and the tawniest port, all together, with every appearance of the extremest relish. Conversation with Herr von Müffe, both at dinner, and all through the evening, was found to be next to impossible, in consequence of his knowing all languages (his own included) equally incorrectly. His German was pronounced to be a dialect never heard before; his French was inscrutable; his English was a philological riddle which all of us guessed at and none of us found out. He talked, in spite of these difficulties, incessantly; and, seeing that he shed tears several times in the course of the evening, the ladies assumed that his topics were mostly of a pathetic nature, while the coarser men compared notes with each other, and all agreed that the poet was drunk. When the time came for retiring, we had to invite ourselves into the Bachelor Bedroom; Herr von Müffe having no suspicion of our customary midnight orgies, and apparently feeling no desire to entertain us, until we informed him of the institution of the footman’s tray, when he became hospitable on a sudden, and unreasonably fond of his gay young English friends.

While we were settling ourselves in our places round the bed, a member of the company kicked over one of the poet’s capacious Wellington boots. To the astonishment of every one, there instantly ensued a tinkling of coin, and some sovereigns and shillings rolled surprisingly out on the floor from the innermost recesses of the boot. On receiving his money back, Herr von Müffe informed us, without the slightest appearance of embarrassment, that he had not had time, before dinner, to take more than his watch, rings, and decorations, out of his boots. Seeing us all stare at this incomprehensible explanation, our distinguished friend kindly endeavoured to enlighten us further by a long personal statement in his own polyglot language. From what we could understand of this narrative (which was not much), we gathered that Herr von Müffe had started at noon, that day, as a total stranger in our metropolis, to reach the London Bridge station in a cab; and that the driver had taken him, as usual, across Waterloo Bridge. On going through the Borough, the narrow streets, miserable houses, and squalid population, had struck the lively imagination of Herr von Müffe, and had started in his mind a horrible suspicion that the cabman was driving him into a low neighbourhood, with the object of murdering a helpless foreign fare, in perfect security, for the sake of the valuables he carried on his person. Chilled to the very marrow of his bones by this idea, the poet raised the ends of his trousers stealthily in the cab, slipped his watch, rings, orders, and money into the legs of his Wellington boots, arrived at the station quaking with mortal terror, and screamed “Help!” at the top of his voice, when the railway policeman opened the cab door. The immediate starting of the train had left him no time to alter the singular travelling arrangements he had made in the Borough; and he arrived at Coolcup House, the only individual who had ever yet entered that mansion with his property in his boots.

Amusing as it was in itself, this anecdote failed a little in its effect on us at the time, in consequence of the stifling atmosphere in which we were condemned to hear it. Although it was then the sultry middle of summer, and we were all smoking, Herr von Müffe insisted on keeping the windows of the Bachelor Bedroom fast closed, because it was one of his peculiarities to distrust the cooling effect of the night air. We were more than half inclined to go, under these circumstances; and we were altogether determined to remove, when the tray came in, and when we found our German friend madly mixing his liquors again by pouring gin and sherry together into the same tumbler. We warned him, with a shuddering prevision of consequences, that he was mistaking gin for water; and he blandly assured us in return that he was doing nothing of the kind. “It is good for My –” said Herr von Müffe, supplying his ignorance of the word stomach by laying his chubby forefinger on the organ in question, with a sentimental smile. “It is bad for Our –” retorted the wag of the party, imitating the poet’s action, and turning quickly to the door. We all followed him – and, for the first time in the annals of Coolcup House, the Bachelor Bedroom was emptied of company before midnight.

Early the next morning, one of Sir John’s younger sons burst into my room in a state of violent excitement.

“I say, what’s to be done with Müffe?” inquired the young gentleman, with wildly staring eyes.

“Open his windows, and fetch the doctor,” I answered, inspired by the recollections of the past night.

“Doctor!” cried the boy; “the doctor won’t do – it’s the barber.”

“Barber?” I repeated.

“He’s been asking me to shave him!” roared my young friend, with vehement comic indignation. “He rang his bell, and asked for the “Son of the House” – and they made me go; and there he was, grinning in the big armchair, with his mangy little shaving brush in his hand, and a towel over his shoulder. ‘Good morning my dear. Can you shave My –’ says he, and taps his quivering old double chin with his infernal shaving brush. Curse his impudence! What’s to be done with him?”

I arranged to explain to Herr von Müffe, at the first convenient opportunity, that it was not the custom in England, whatever it might be in Germany, for “the Son of the House” to shave his father’s guests; and undertook, at the same time, to direct the poet to the residence of the village barber. When the German guest joined us at breakfast, his unshaven chin, and the external results of his mixed potations and his seclusion from fresh air, by no means tended to improve his personal appearance. In plain words, he looked the picture of dyspeptic wretchedness.

“I am afraid, sir, you are hardly so well this morning as we could all wish?” said Sir John kindly.

Herr von Müffe looked at his host affectionately, surveyed the company all round the table, smiled faintly, laid the chubby forefinger once more on the organ whose name he did not know, and answered with the most enchanting innocence and simplicity: “I am so sick!”

There was no harm – upon my word, there was no harm in Herr von Müffe. On the contrary there was a great deal of good-nature and genuine simplicity in his composition. But he was a man naturally destitute of all power of adapting himself to new persons and new circumstances; and he became amiably insupportible, in consequence, to everybody in the house, throughout the whole term of his visit. He could not join one of us in any country diverions. He hung about the house and garden in a weak, pottering, aimless manner, always turning up at the wrong moment, and always attaching himself to the wrong person. He was dexterous in a perfectly childish way at cutting out little figures of shepherds and shepherdesses in paper; and he was perpetually presenting these frail tributes of admiration to the ladies, who always tore them up and threw them away in secret the moment his back was turned. When he was not occupied with his paper figures, he was out in the garden, gathering countless little nosegays, and sentimentally presenting them to everybody; not to the ladies only, but to lusty agricultural gentlemen as well, who accepted them with blank amazement; and to schoolboys, home for the holidays, who took them, bursting with internal laughter at the “mollycoddle” gentleman from foreign parts. As for poor Sir John, he suffered more than any of us; for Herr von Müffe was always trying to kiss him. In short, with the best intentions in the world, this unhappy foreign bachelor wearied out the patience of everybody in the house; and, to our shame be it said, we celebrated his departure, when he left us at last, by a festival meeting in the Bachelor Bedroom, in honour of the welcome absence of Herr von Müffe. I cannot say in what spirit my fellow-revellers have reflected on our behaviour since that time; but I know; for my own part, that I now look back at my personal share in our proceedings with rather an uneasy conscience. I am afraid we were all of us a little hard on Herr von Müffe; and I hereby desire to offer him my own individual tribute of tardy atonement, by leaving him to figure as the last and crowning type of the Bachelor species presented in these pages. If he has produced anything approaching to a pleasing effect on the reader’s mind, that effect shall not be weakened by the appearance of any more single men, native or foreign. Let the door of the Bachelor Bedroom close with our final glimpse of the German guest; and permit the present chronicler to lay down the pen when it has traced penitently, for the last time, the name of Herr von Müffe.

New View of Society

All the Year Round, Volume 1, page 396

In these times, when a man sits down to write, it is considered necessary that he should have a purpose in view. To prevent any misapprehension on this point, so far as I am personally concerned, I beg to announce at once that I am provided with a purpose of an exceedingly serious kind. I want to know whether I am fit for Bedlam, or not?

This alarming subject of inquiry was started in my mind, about a week or ten days ago, by a select circle of kind friends, whose remarks on the condition of my brains have, since that period, proved to be not of the most complimentary nature. The circumstances under which I have lost caste, intellectually speaking, in the estimation of those around me, are of a singular kind. May I beg permission to relate them?

I must begin (if I can be allowed to do so without giving offence) in my own bedroom; and I must present myself, with many apologies, in rather less than a half dressed condition. To be plainer still, it was on one of the hottest days of this remarkably hot summer – the time was between six and seven o’clock in the evening – the thermometer had risen to eighty, in the house – I was sitting on a cane chair, without coat, waistcoat, cravat or collar, with my shirtsleeves rolled up to cool my arms, and my feet half in and half out of my largest pair of slippers – I was sitting, a moist and melancholy man, with my eyes fixed upon my own Dress Costume reposing on the bed, and my heart fainting within me at the prospect of going out to Dinner.

Yes: there it was – the prison of suffocating black broadcloth in which my hospitable friends required me to shut myself up – there were the coat, waistcoat, and trousers, the hideous habilimentary instruments of torture which Society actually expected me to put on in the scorching hot condition of the London atmosphere. All day long I had been rather less than half dressed, and had been fainting with the heat. At that very moment, alone in my spacious bedroom, with both the windows wide open, and with nothing but my shirt over my shoulders, I was in the condition of a man who is gradually melting away, who is consciously losing all sense of his own physical solidity.

How should I feel, in half an hour’s time, when I had enclosed myself in the conventional layers of black broadcloth? How should I feel, in an hour’s time, when I was shut into a dining room with fifteen of my melting fellow creatures, half of them, at least, slowly liquefying in garments as black, as heavy, as outrageously unsuited to the present weather as my own? How should I feel in three hours’ time, when the evening party, which was to follow the dinner, began, and when I and a hundred other polite propagators of animal heat were all smothering each other within the space of two drawing rooms, and under the encouraging superincumbent auspices of the gas chandeliers? Society would have been hot in January, under these after dinner circumstances – what would Society be in July?

While these serious questions were suggesting themselves to me, I took a turn backwards and forwards in my bedroom; and perspired; and sat down again in my cane chair. I got up once more, and approached the neighbourhood of my dress coat, and weighed it experimentally in my arms; and perspired; and sat down again in my cane chair. I got up for the third time, and tried a little eau de cologne on my forehead, and attempted to encourage myself by thinking of the ten thousand other men, in their bedrooms at that moment, patiently putting themselves into broadcloth prisons in all parts of London; and perspired; and sat down again in my cane chair. Heat, I believe, does not retard the progress of time. It was getting nearer and nearer to seven o’clock. I looked, interrogatively, from my dress trousers to my legs. On that occasion, only, my legs were eloquent, and they looked back at me, and said, No.

I rose, in a violent perspiration, and reviled myself bitterly, with my forlorn dress trousers grasped in my hand. Wretch (I said), you are unworthy of the kind attentions of your friends – you are a base renegade from your social duties – you are unnaturally insensible to those charms of society which your civilised fellow creatures universally acknowledge! It was all in vain. Common Sense – that low lived quality which has no veneration for appearances – Common Sense, which had not only suggested those terrible questions about what my sensations would be after I was dressed, but had even encouraged my own faithful legs to mutiny against me, now whispered persistently, My friend, if you make yourself at least ten degrees hotter than you are already, of your own accord, you are an Ass – Common Sense drew my trousers from my grasp, and left them in a dingy heap on the floor; led my tottering steps (to this day I don’t know how) down stairs to my writing table; and there suggested to me one of the most graceful epistolary compositions, of a brief kind, in the English language. It was addressed to my much injured hostess; it contained the words “sudden indisposition,” neatly placed in the centre of a surrounding network of polite phraseology; and when I had sealed it up, and sent it off upon the spot, I was, without any exception whatever, the happiest man, at that moment, in all London. This is a startling confession to make, in a moral point of view. But the interests of truth are paramount (except where one’s host and hostess are concerned); and there are unhappily crimes, in this wicked world, which not bring with them the slightest sense of misery to the perpetrator.

Of the means by which I contrived, after basely securing the privilege of staying at home, to get up a nice, cool, solitary, impromptu dinner in my own room, and of the dinner itself, no record shall appear in these pages. In my humble opinion, modern writers of comic literature have already gorged the English public to nausea with incessant eating and drinking in print. Nowadays, when a man has nothing whatever to say, he seems to me to write, in a kind of gluttonous despair, about his dinner. I, for one, am tired of literary gentlemen who unaccountably take it for granted that I am interested in knowing when they are hungry; who appear to think that there is something exquisitely new, humorous, and entertaining, in describing themselves as swallowing large quantities of beer; who can tell me nothing about their adventures at home and abroad, draw me no characters, and make me no remarks, without descending into the kitchen to fortify themselves and their paragraphs with perpetual victuals and drink. I am really and truly suffering so acutely from the mental dyspepsia consequent on my own inability to digest other people’s meals, as served up in modern literature, that the bare idea of ever writing about breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper, in my own proper person, has become absolutely revolting to me. Let my comic brethren of the pen feed in public as complacently and as copiously as they please. For myself, if I live a hundred years, and write a thousand volumes, no English reader – I solemnly declare it – shall ever know what I have had for dinner, in any part of the world, or under any stress of gastronomic circumstances. Dismissing my lonely meal, therefore, with the briefest possible reference to it, let me get on to the evening, and to the singular – or, as my friends consider it, to the crackbrained – occupation by which I contrived to enliven my self-imposed solitude.

It was approaching nine o’clock, and I was tasting the full luxury of my own cool seclusion, when the idea struck me that there was only one thing wanting to complete my sense of perfect happiness. I rose with a malicious joy in my heart; I threw my lightest paletot over my shoulders, put on a straw hat, pulled up my slippers at the heel, and directed my steps to the house of my friend and host, from whose dinner party “sudden indisposition” had compelled me to be absent. What was my object in taking this extraordinary course? The diabolical object – for surely it can be qualified by no other term – of gloating over the sufferings of my polite fellow creatures in the dining room, from the cool and secret vantage ground of the open street.

Nine o’clock had struck before I got to the house. A little crowd of street idlers – cool and comfortable vagabonds, happily placed out of the pale of Society – was assembled on the pavement, before the dining room windows. I joined them, in my airy and ungentlemanlike costume – I joined them, with the sensations of a man who is about to investigate the nature of some great danger from which he has just narrowly escaped. As I had foreseen, the suffocating male guests had drawn up the blinds on the departure of the ladies to the drawing room, so as to get every available breath of air into the dining room, reckless of all inquisitive observation on the part of the lower orders in the street outside. Between us – I willingly identify myself, on this occasion, with the mob – and the gorgeously appointed dessert service of my friend and host, nothing intervened but the area railings and the low, transparent, wire window blinds. We stood together sociably on the pavement and stared in. My brethren of the mob surveyed the magnificent epergne, the decanters glittering under the light of the chandelier, the fruit, flowers, and porcelain on the table; while I, on my side, occupied myself with the human interest of the scene, and looked with indescribable interest and relish at the guests.

There they were, all oozing away into silence and insensibility together; smothered in their heavy black coats, and strangled in their stiff white cravats! On one side of the table, Jenkins, Wapshare, and two strangers, all four equally speechless, all four equally gentlemanly, all four equally prostrated by the lights, the dinner, and the heat. I can see the two strangers feebly dabbing their foreheads with white pocket handkerchiefs; Jenkins is slyly looking at his watch; the head of Wapshare hangs helplessly over his finger glass. At the end of the table, I discern the back of my injured host – it leans feebly and crookedly against the chair – it is such a faint back to look at, on this melancholy occasion, that his own tailor would hardly know it again. On the other side of the table, there are three guests only: Soward, fast asleep, and steaming with the heat; Ripsher, wide awake, and glittering with the heat; and Pilkington – the execrable Pilkington, the scourge of society, the longest, loudest, cruellest, and densest bore in existence – Pilkington alone of all this miserable company still wags complacently his unresting tongue. There is a fourth place vacant by his side. My place, beyond a doubt. Horrible thought! I see my own ghost sitting there: the appearance of that perspiring spectre is too dreadful to be described. I shudder in my convenient front place against the area railings, as I survey my own full dressed Fetch at the dinner table – I turn away my face in terror, and look for comfort at my street companions, my worthy fellow outcasts, watching with me on either side. One of them catches my eye. “Ain’t it beautiful?” says my brother of the mob, pointing with a deeply curved thumb at the silver and glass on the table. “And sich lots to drink!” Artless street innocent! unsophisticated costermonger! he actually envies his suffering superiors inside!

The imaginary view of that ghost of myself sitting at the table has such a bewildering effect on my mind, that I find it necessary to walk away a little, and realise the gratifying certainty that I am really a free man, walking the streets in my airy paletot, and not the melting victim of Pilkington and Society. I retire gently over the pavement. How tenderly the kind night air toys with the tails of my gossamer garment, flutters about my bare neck, and lifts from time to time the ribbon ends on my cool straw hat! Oh, my much injured host, what would you not give to be leaning against a lamp post, in loose jean trousers (as I lean now), and meeting the breeze lazily as it wantons round the corner of the street! Oh, feverish sleeping Soward – oh, glittering Ripsher – oh, twin strangers among the guests, dabbing your damp foreheads with duplicate pocket handkerchiefs – oh, everybody but Pilkington (in whose sufferings I rejoice), are there any mortal blessings you all covet more dearly, at this moment, than my vagabond freedom of locomotion, and my disgracefully undressed condition of body! Oh, Society, when the mid-year has come, and the heavenly fires of Summer are all a-blaze, what unutterable oppressions are inflicted in thy white and pitiless name!

With this apostrophe (in the manner of Madame Roland) I saunter lazily back to my post of observation before the dining room windows. So! so! the wretched gentlemen are getting up – they can endure it no longer – they are going to change from a lower room that is hot to an upper room that is hotter. Alterations have taken place, since I saw them last, in the heart-rending pantomime of their looks and actions. The two strangers have given up dabbing their foreheads in despair, and are looking helplessly at the pictures – as if Art could make them cooler! Jenkins and Wapshare have shifted occupations. This time, it is Wapshare who is longingly looking at his watch, and Jenkins who is using his finger glass; into the depths of which I detect him yawning furtively, under cover of moistening his lips. Sleepy Soward has been woke up, and sits steaming and staring with protuberant eyes and swollen cheeks. The glittering face of Ripsher reflects the chandelier, as if his skin was made of glass. Execrable Pilkington continues to talk. My host of the feeble back is propped against the sideboard, and smiles piteously as he indicates to his miserable guests the way upstairs. They obey him, and retire from the room in slow funereal procession. How strangely well I feel; how unaccountably strong and cool and blandly composed in mind and body! – Hoi! hoi! hoi! out of the way there! Lord bless your honour! crash! bang! Here is the first carriage bursting in among us like a shell; here are the linkmen scattering us off the pavement, and receiving Society with all the honours of the street. The Soirée is beginning. The scorching hundreds are coming to squeeze the last faint relics of fresh air out at the drawing room windows. How strangely well I feel; how unaccountably strong and cool and blandly composed in mind and body!

I once more join my worthy mob brethren; I add one to the joyous human lane which watches the guests as they go in, and which has not got such a thing as a dress coat on either side of it. I am not in the least afraid of being recognised – for who would suppose it possible that I could conduct myself in this disgraceful manner? Ha! the first guests are well known to me. Sir Aubrey Yollop, Lady Yollop, the two Misses Yollop. “What time shall we order the carriage?” “Infernal nuisance coming at all this hot weather – get away as soon as we can – carriage wait.” – Crash! bang! More guests known to me. Doctor and Mrs Gripper, and Mr Julius Gripper. “What time shall we order the carriage?” “How the devil should I know?” (Heat has made the doctor irritable) “The carriages are ordered, sir, at one” “I can’t and won’t stand it, Mrs Gripper, till that time – cursed tomfoolery giving parties at all, this hot weather – carriage at twelve.” Crash! bang! Strangers to me, this time. A little dapper man, fanning himself with his hat; a colossal old woman, with a red-hot garnet tiara and a scorching scarlet scarf; a slim, cool, smiling, serenely stupid girl, in that sensible half naked costume which gives the ladies such an advantage over us at summer evening parties. More difficulty with these, and the next dozen arrivals, about ordering the carriage – more complaints of the misery of going out – nobody sharp enough to apply the obvious remedy of going home again – all equally ready to bemoan their hard fate and to rush on it voluntarily at the same time. I look up, as I make these reflections, to the drawing room story. Wherever the windows are open, they are stopped up by gowns; wherever the windows are shut, Society expresses itself on them in the form of steam. It is the Black Hole at Calcutta, ornamented and lit up. It is a refinement of slow torture unknown to the Inquisition and the North American savages. And the name of it in England is Pleasure – Pleasure when we offer it to others, which is not so very wonderful; Pleasure, equally, when we accept it ourselves, which is perfectly amazing.

While I am pondering over Pleasure, as Society understands it, I am suddenly confronted by Duty, also as Society understands it, in the shape of a policeman. He comes to clear the pavement, and he fixes me with his eye. I am the first and foremost vagabond whom he thinks it desirable to dismiss. To my delight, he singles me out, before my friend’s house, on the very threshold of the door, through which I have been invited to pass in the honourable capacity of guest, as the first obstruction to be removed. “Come, I say, you there – move on!” Yes, Mr Policeman, with pleasure. Other men, in my situation, might be a little irritated, and might astonish you by entering the house and revealing themselves indignantly to the footman. I am a philosopher; and I am grateful to you, Mr Policeman, for reminding me of my own liberty. Yes, official sir, I can move on; it is my pride and pleasure to move on; it is my great superiority over the unfortunate persons shut up in that drawing room, not one of whom can move on, or has so much as a prospect of moving on, for some time to come. Wish you good evening, Mr Policeman. In the course of a long experience of Society, I never enjoyed any party half as much as I have enjoyed this; and I hardly know any favour you could ask of me which I am so readily disposed to grant as the favour of moving on. Many, many thanks; and pray remember me kindly at Scotland Yard.

I leave the scene – or, rather, I am walked off the scene – in the sweetest possible temper. The carriages crash and bang past me by dozens; the victims pour into the already over-crammed house by twenties and thirties; Society’s gowns and Society’s steam are thicker than ever on the windows, as I see the last of them. Shocking! shocking! I am almost ashamed to feel so strangely well, so unaccountably strong and cool and blandly composed in mind and body.

On my airy way home (in excellent time) I endeavour – being naturally a serious and thoughtful man – to extract some useful result for others out of my own novel experience of Society. Animated by a loving and missionary spirit, I resolve to enlighten my ignorant fellow creatures, my dark surrounding circle of social heathen, by communicating to them my new discovery of the best way of attending London dinner parties and soirées in the fervid heat of July and August. In the course of the next few days I carry out my humane intention by relating the true narrative here set down to my most valued and intimate friends. I point out the immense sanitary advantages which are likely to accrue from the general adoption of such a sensible and original course of proceeding as mine has been. I show clearly that it must, as a matter of necessity, be followed by a wise change in the season of the year at which parties are authorised to be given. If we were all to go and look in at the windows in our cool morning costume, and then come away again, the masters and mistresses of houses would have no choice left but to adapt their hospitalities sensibly to atmospheric circumstances; summer would find us as summer ought to find us, in the fields; and winter would turn our collective animal heat to profitable and comfortable results.

I put these plain points unmistakably; but to my utter amazement nobody accepts my suggestions. My friends, who all groan over giving hot parties and going to hot parties, universally resent my ingeniously unconventional plan for making parties cool; and universally declare that no man in his right senses could have acted in such an outrageously uncustomary manner as the manner in which I represent myself to have acted on the memorable evening which these pages record. Apparently, the pleasure of grumbling is intimately connected, in the estimation of civilised humanity, with the pleasure of going into Society? Or, in other words, ladies and gentlemen particularly like their social amusements, as long as they can say that they don’t like them. And these are the people who indignantly tell me that I could hardly have been in my right senses to have acted as I did on the scorching July evening of my friend’s dinner. The rest who went into the house, to half suffocate each other, at the very hottest period of the year, are all sensible persons; and I, who remained outside in the cool, and looked at them comfortably, am fit for Bedlam? Am I?

My Boys

All the Year Round, Volume 2, page 326

I am in the awful position of being the father of a large family of boys. If I were asked of how many, I should not be able to answer. I only know that they are all home for the holidays at once, at this present writing, that they are visited by “fellows” of their own age, and that with feelings of the strongest affection for my own offspring and of general philanthropy for the “fellows” before spoken of, I yet find myself occasionally referring to the almanack to see how many days longer it will be before “the boys” go back again to school.

“And why,” asks some celibate, who reads these words – “why wish the holidays at an end?” My answer is simple; my boys are good boys enough, they are respectful and obedient, but I don’t know what to do with them, and they, for their part, have not the remotest notion what to do with themselves. There is something in this one respect radically wrong about the boys of this generation. They want purpose. They don’t play at anything. The younger ones even, have not imagination enough to carry out a self-delusion through half a day together, as I used to do. I have all my life been fond of horses; but I can solemnly declare that I have, in early youth, enjoyed a ride upon a harnessed chair, elaborately prepared with stirrups and bridle of my own construction, and with spurs which derived their existence from the same source, with my cloak rolled up in front of me – it was unfurled and put on, though, when that fearful storm came on which overtook me on the heath – with stoppages to bait and easily achieved payments of ostlers, consisting in the insertion of a finger and thumb into an imaginary waistcoat pocket and the depositing of a shilling, bright from Imagination’s mint, on that particular portion of that particular piece of furniture which did duty for the official’s hand – rides such as these, I say, diversified by that fearful night encounter with highwaymen, and rescue of the distressed lady in the wood, I have enjoyed a million times more than the excursions of after life, when I have sat upon a real saddle, have had my feet in real stirrups, and have had a real quadruped between them. Playing at horses has declined, perhaps, with the decay of stagecoaches.

Why don’t my boys – the bigger ones – scoop out ships, as I used, and go thoroughly into the question of rigs? Why don’t they make little blocks, as I used, out of firewood – the honourable penknife scars are on my fingers yet. If they want a cutter or a schooner now, they must go and buy it at a shop, and get an uninteresting toy of a thing, which they have no vital interest in as a work of their own construction, and which they pay an enormous sum of money for, into the bargain. And this brings me, by the by, to another characteristic of my boys. Money – they are always wanting money, and in such vast amounts. I don’t think they would take a sixpence. I once had a sixpence as a child, and was kept awake two nights following, thinking how I should invest it; my boys, I solemnly believe, would not fall heavily to the ground in a vertigo of surprise and awe if I were to give them a golden sovereign apiece.

Why don’t my boys get “characters” and go mad with joy in colouring and tinselling them? The planting of golden greaves upon the legs of Mr. Osbaldiston as Hotspur, is a pleasure of a kind unknown to this generation, and the want of which is no light or trifling loss. Why don’t they make theatres and enact dramas, and push the military on in strips, and work the curtain with a tackle of their own inventing, and stage-manage, and prompt, and speak the dialogue all at once, as boys ought?

Why, last summer, when my old friend Hearty was staying with me in the country, at the time of the Midsummer holidays, we set to work one day to make a kite for the boys! Bless my life and soul, but Hearty and I were eager and excited men that day, and were to be found rushing about the house, and even all over the village, in search of laths, paper, paste, string, and all the other necessary ingredients of a kite. You would have thought that Hearty, who is a distinguished lawyer, had been making kites all his life, and that he had never heard in the whole course of his career of such a thing as a “rule-nisi,” or the proving of domicile; the only thing in which his professional qualities came out at all, being in a brisk and somewhat fierce argument with me on the relative merits of the diamondshaped kite, and the kite with a curved top: about which we almost quarrelled. Here was this eminent (and elderly) man entangling himself in furlongs of string, sticking himself to sheets of newspaper with accidental paste, cutting his fingers in notching his laths, and generally in such a state of eagerness about the kite as it would have refreshed any person of well regulated mind to observe!

And what were my boys about, all this time? Were they eager? Were they excited? Hang it, were they even interested? Not a bit. They deserted us. They actually deserted us. They went and yawned about the stable. They read the advertisements in Bradshaw’s Guide. After the first few minutes they ceased to take any share in the undertaking which had been got up solely with a view to their amusement.

Then, when the kite was at last completed, when it proved lopsided, and had to be weighted with cunningly devised wings; when, this being set right, it manifested a suicidal desire to “pitch” coming headforemost to the earth with a mighty crash just at the hopeful moment of its flight; when this tendency was remedied by the tying of a rich India silk handkerchief of Hearty’s to the end of the tail; and when, the kite (there was a high wind), now without a fault, sprang into the sky, without warning, and snapping the string flew straight over the top of the house and lodged in the tallest tree in the shrubbery at the back, who was it at these times that manifested emotion? Who was it that was alternately hopeful and despairing, triumphant and cast down? Who was it that devised and executed the different remedies for the different disasters as soon as they occurred? Was it any of my boys? Was it one of the “fellows” who were staying with them? No, it was Hearty and I who did all these things, and finally, when the kite had to be recovered from unheard of altitudes in the shrubbery, it was Hearty who mounted the tree, and it was I (the father of the family) who gave him a leg up.

And now, having shown what my boys will not do, suppose we inquire for a moment what they will do. Will they sit about upon easychairs? Oh yes. Will they haunt landing places, and halls, and passages, and reply, when asked if they are going out, that they don’t know? Oh yes. Will they disport themselves vaguely upon staircases? Oh yes. Will they charge up and down the same, will they bluntly bump against my study door (I am a studious man), and bulge with crashes against the wooden banisters? Oh yes. Will they do this when the weather is fine and they might be out of doors, but prefer remaining in; and will they in the same state of the temperature read (evidently without knowing or caring what) throughout a whole day, and look swollen, pale, sleepy, and stupified thereafter? Yes, good sir, they will do all these tilings, and many more.

They will go to the play with Hearty and myself, and while we are convulsed with mirth at Mr. Buckstone’s acting, they will not move a muscle. Say, that the performance of the consummate artist just named, may be over their heads; well, sir, we take them to see a Pantomime. Are they astounded at the transformation scene? Are the extraordinary resources of Mr. Sketcherby, which seem to know no limit, a subject of astonishment to them? Is the Harlequin a marvel of agility, the Columbine a vision of loveliness, are the Clown and Pantaloon embodiments of the humorous to my boys? Oh dear no! They slept peacefully on the night preceding this visit to the play, they were able to eat their dinners, and to discuss other subjects than pantomimic subjects on the day of the treat (?) itself, whilst, on their return home, the performance was severely reviewed by these youngsters as they sat at supper, and was treated not only critically but contemptuously. When I think of my own boyhood, and remember my introduction to theatrical amusements, when I remember a fevered infant who was unable to sleep, and who refused nourishment from the moment that the play-going project was first discussed; when I remember these things, I lay my hand upon my breast, and bless my stars that I was born before the present cent –

Suppose we change the subject.

Another thing that my boys will do, deserves attention. They will answer advertisements which appear in the newspapers, and by which they are informed that for eighteenpence (in stamps) they can have forwarded to them, by post, Herr Schvindle’s celebrated wedding ring trick, and they will summon their friends to witness the performance of the same. It is then that the following phenomena are observed. My boy Thomas shows me a small brass curtain ring, and asks me if it is all right? I mercifully assent at once, upon which, emboldened by my leniency, he begs the loan of my silk pocket handkerchief. On my falling into his views in this respect also, he ties up the curtain ring in the end of the pocket handkerchief. He then asks an assistant to procure him a cap. This cap (the spectators are all breathless with excitement) he holds with his teeth over his hands, and very slowly, and with much effort, unties the handkerchief again, drops the cap, and with much triumph shows us the ring in one hand, and the handkerchief in the other. This is all. This is the wedding ring trick as performed by my son. He ties up a brass ring in a pocket handkerchief before the world, and unties it again behind a cap. (The discomfiture of the boy was so tremendous at our disappointment, that Hearty gave him one and sixpence on the spot, with a friendly caution to be wiser next time.)

Now, I want some system devised which shall occupy my boys’ holiday time with wholesomer and better pastime than answering Herr Schvindle’s advertisements. I want some scheme to be hit upon, which shall keep them alive and spry at their amusements, and give them a keen relish for the pleasures which I am willing to afford them. I ask again, then, what is to be done with my boys during the holidays? They get on well enough at school; I have the most satisfactory accounts of them from their masters; They know a great many things which I don’t know. But there is one thing they do not know, and that is what to do with themselves in the holidays. The question is, whether we, the united parents of Great Britain, might not concoct some arrangement which should get them out of this difficulty, and off our staircases, at one and the same moment?

Suppose – I am speaking now, only to those parents and guardians who live in London, and whose boys come home for the holidays to the metropolis – suppose we were to organise some establishment supported by subscriptions, which would provide these youngsters with some regular and definite holiday occupation. I am not speaking of lessons. I am not such a bloodthirsty wretch as to suggest so cruel a proceeding as the infliction of holiday tasks. No; what I want, is some sort of institution to which boys should go, during the holidays, for a certain number of hours every day, and where they should spend a certain amount of time in bodily exercise and sports, but be obliged to carry out what they begin fully, and never be allowed to indulge in listlessness or inaction.

The boy’s mind is sent to school during the greater part of the year; let his body be sent to school during the holidays. Let us have in every district of London, large buildings or enclosures, set apart for the use of boys who are home for the holidays. Let the workshop, the playground, the gymnasium, and the dining hall, be found within its walls. Let active superintendents be present: not to bother the boys, but to keep them going – to keep them engaged in every kind of exercise, sport, and pastime, likely to tend to their bodily development, and to lead them on to small undertakings in the carpentering or mechanical line for which they may seem to manifest any inclination. How good it would be for these boys, to have such works in progress, and to have to return to them day after day till they were completed. For, everything once begun should perforce be finished, and not so much as a wooden sword left without its hilt. Then, again, is not this an age of great military fervour, and are not civilians of all kinds for ever thinking of their drills and their rifle practice? The rifle dress is seen in our streets; the glare of the bayonet tip is to be observed peeping from under the Inverness cape of the Volunteer as he returns from drill; the Six feet Volunteer Guards are rearing their lofty and intellectual heads in the air; and even the insults of the insurance offices, whose secretaries advertise that no additional premium will be required from members of Rifle Corps, as it is not thought that the risk of a gentleman’s life is materially increased by his joining one of these warlike combinations – even such insults as these, are insufficient to check the bellicose spirit of the age. Nay, why should I attempt to conceal the fact that I, who write these pages, am myself a member of a Rifle Club; that I spend two hours a day (in company with several other gentlemen) in standing on one leg, and swinging the other backward and forward without letting it touch the ground; in making quarter turns to the right, and half turns to the left; in learning to clasp my hands in the exact manner considered right for standing at ease; and, in a word, in generally preparing myself, as well as a man can, for firing from behind ambushes, from immense distances, and for engaging in a perfectly irregular style of warfare.

Now, why should my boys be left out of all this? What a good thing it would be for them to be drilled during the holidays. What a capital and profitable occupation for their spare time. If we are all expected to be soldiers when we grow up, surely we cannot begin too soon.

But, this establishment, which I am so desirous of organising, might comprise other branches of instruction. Why not have a class for riding, class for public speaking (limited), a class for carving, and a French conversation, or moral cowardice eradication class? These two last branches of this very important institution would be quite invaluable. What is a man who cannot carve, but a burden to himself, a delusion to the hostess at whose right hand he sits, and a disfigurement of the foot of his own table?

How can he entertain his guests with conversation? How can he enliven the lady next him with light badinage, when the separating process needed for a quarter of lamb, is passing heavily on his mind, and vague speculations as to the exact nature of the anatomy of the wild duck are looming upon him in the distance? Now, this carving class would render such distressing situations impossible. Of course it would be necessary to the carrying out of this part of my project, that the boys should dine on the premises. I have not a word to say to the contrary. The trouble of getting up that early meal is very great, and the unhallowed smells of noontide cookery in the house, and the large dishes set down outside my study door, are a great annoyance to me, as I not unfrequently step into the gravy as I come out, and invariably lose my appetite for the late dinner, from being tempted to take a “cut off the joint” in the middle of the day. By all means let them dine at the “Institute,” and as Bacon relates that they who would learn to dance well are used to practise in thick shoes, but to perform in thin ones, so let blunt knives be provided for our young friends in the case under consideration, and let tough joints and birds advanced in years be advertised for in the different public prints.

And if a man is in a pickle who cannot carve (as he certainly is), what shall we say of him who is unable to discourse in the French language? I see him when a French joke is related in society, sitting by in hopeless ignorance, or hypocritically pretending to enjoy it with an excess of laughter which is perhaps given way to before the crisis comes, lest he should be too late, and which at all events takes nobody in but himself. Or, take him into a room where, a foreigner being present, the conversation is carried on in French, and let us see how he looks. Put him, again, on the other side of the Channel; see him cheated, deceived, despised, and unable to defend his rights by a word; and say whether the spluttering, gesticulating, and generally trampled upon wretch, with Télémaque at his fingers’ ends, but not a word of the language in which that exciting romance is written, at the end of his tongue; say whether he is not an object of pity for all nations, and a standing illustration of the im- portance of that French conversation class whose merits I am advocating. It must not be forgotten, too, that the eradication of moral cowardice – the most disastrous of stumbling blocks to boy or man, and one peculiarly active towards the ruin of the inhabitants of this island – would also be materially assisted by this French conversation class; and surely that, alone, would be no small object gained.

I am far – very far – from wishing that this Holiday Occupation Institute should be a work-a-day affair. There should, on the contrary, be every facility for play, but none for idleness. There should be every inducement to amateur carpentering, boat scooping, ship building, and cardboard carriage manufacturing, that could stimulate the adolescents who should frequent the place to amuse themselves only they should always have a purpose, always be doing something, and, even if only playing a game at rounders, should be made to finish it.

My Girls

All the Year Round, Volume 2, page 370

An article which has recently appeared in this periodical under the title, “My Boys,” has induced the writer – a single lady, somewhat advanced in years – to venture on a few remarks under the heading My Girls, in which it will be shown what are the principal faults and tendencies of the young ladies of this age, and in which one or two suggestions will be thrown out, as to the best means of dealing with them.

My Girls – I will speak in the first person, if I may, as I shall then be less likely to make mistakes – my girls are not exactly my girls; that is to say, I stand towards them only in the relation of an old maiden aunt, with whom they spend their holidays. They have done so, ever since the death of their parents, which occurred when they were quite in their infancy. My girls are four in number; the youngest is eleven years old, and the eldest eighteen; the other two are somewhere between these ages. The education of my three youngest darlings is still in progress, that of my eldest is supposed to be complete. Now – to burst into the subject at once – to what has that education tended? What are they educated for? With a view to whose gratification have they been taught as they have been taught? With a view to whose torment have they been left untaught as they have been? What object do my girls set before them; what object has been set before them by those who have had the charge of their education?

In this world of uncertainty it is a great thing to be quite sure of anything, and there is one thing that is unmistakably certain, which is, that my girls will either marry or remain single. Now the qualities required of a single woman and a married woman are much more identical than is generally supposed. There are few women who are unmarried who are not required, sooner or later to work. If poor, they will have to work for their bread; if well off, they will generally – supposing they follow the path of duty – have to keep home for some brother, to look after some relative’s children who have a claim on their regard, or else to bestow their attention on the wants of those only bound to them by the ties of a common humanity. The single woman, who has none of these things to do, is a very exceptional person.

The house duties of a married woman are too well known, and have been too often dilated upon to need, or even to bear, enforcing here, There is, however, no virtue – if one may use a positive term for a negative quality – which she will need more constantly and more imperatively than unselfishness. Now, thank Heaven, women are naturally unselfish. Selfishness is a male vice, par excellence, and is in some remote degree with men excusable. They have to hew their way to every achievement by mowing down so many obstacles, that they are obliged to think of themselves, or they would never get on. Women have, or should have, no identity wholly their own, no separate existence in themselves – this is treating of women in their natural state of alliance with men. If a woman (speaking generally) so allied, has any thought at all, except for her husband and children, she is nothing.

This is a strong assertion, but I cannot swerve from it. I cannot advance a single step without it. I cannot say how sure I am that it is so, and that the acceptation of the truth is at the root of all real happiness for women.

Now, the whole tendency of a girl’s education, as at present conducted, is to eradicate this natural self-abandonment, and to cultivate that quality of selfishness which, barely, and only in the slightest degree, excusable in men, is, in women, not only a hideous, but an inconceivably dangerous disfigurement.

I observe in my girls a gradually developing audacity and independence which augurs ill for their future. Their looks and carriage are defiant and wholly wanting in humility. They march along with their military heels, their shortened petticoats abruptly terminating like the edge of a diving-bell, and the whole ridiculous mass swaying from side to side as each foot is placed on the ground; they march along as if they were the most important part of creation, and as if the men whom they meet, with the stoop of labour and a weight of care upon their shoulders, were barely good enough to wait upon them. The men do not like this, I suspect. There is no man who, as long as a woman fights with her own arms, and uses the mighty strength of her own most beautiful weakness, but will gladly give way, and yield, if need be, a menial service to women; but it must be accepted as a concession; not demanded as a right.

Men will pay every kind of attention to women, and bestow all sorts of worship and tenderness upon them; but we women should admit that it is not our right, and then that right will never be questioned.

It is not my intention, any more than it was that of the gentleman who recently made some complaints about his boys, to say much about the school education of my girls, or to depreciate the course of instruction through which they are put, while under the care of the excellent Mrs Primways. I am not going to indulge in commonplace diatribes against the too great attention bestowed on accomplishments at that lady’s establishment. Accomplishments are very good things in their place, and we all know that there is no gentleman (worthy of the name) who would not prefer a brilliantly executed piece of Chopin’s to a well-served little dinner, and who would not find consolation for every deficiency in his table and household arrangements, in a watercolour drawing of a rustic cottage, with blue smoke coming out of its chimney, a poplar or two, a half-dozen of spruce firs emerging from its roof, and clean agricultural children playing before its door.

There is, then, no gentleman, worthy of the name, who would not prefer accomplishments to housewifery – that is an established fact. But then there is, most unfortunately, a very large class of gentlemen who, in this respect, are unworthy of the name. There is – I say it with sorrow – a very large class of men who, coming home after a hard day’s work, would prefer finding a bright little woman waiting for them with a smiling face and a neat and supervised (if I may be allowed the expression) dinner, to a greeting of the most triumphant kind on the piano, followed by a meal which gave tokens of having been handed over to the exclusive care of the servants. There are also certain abject men who would hardly be consoled for a series of mistakes in the weekly bills, by the best watercolour drawing – as above described – ever executed by amateur fingers; and, worst of all, there are – I know it for a fact – some men extant who, belonging to professions which tax the head throughout the day to an excess, and in which a day of great effort is not uncommonly bestowed in vain, the work turning out a failure after all; these men, liable, from the tension of the brain, to occasional attacks of irritability, and finding that such irritability is dispersed very rapidly by a few soft and sympathetic words uttered in a woman’s gentlest tones – these persons, I say, will hold that, when this fit is on them, it is hardly right or kind of their better halves to take that opportunity to give way to temper, to answer unsympathetically or unkindly, or even to keep a sullen silence, to retire to the sofa and to a study of the Reverend Puncheon Head’s last volume of Sermons.

Such men as I have hinted at above exist, and, what is more dreadful still, they are by no means uncommon. Uncommon? I am not sure but that they preponderate. In fact, if the truth must out, I know that they do preponderate.

But it will be said that a wife is not to do the work of servants. No, she is not. But she is to do the work that servants will not or cannot do. No household left to servants will prosper. That supervision spoken of above, is indispensable. Depend upon it the household arrangements will never go on without it. The dinners will fail, and the bills – It is one of the most remarkable things connected with psychological studies to observe the tendency of the human mind, as it is exhibited in the British tradesman, to inaccuracy in his accounts. It is wholly impossible to explain this phenomenon by any other means than by attributing it to his excessive and morbid philanthropy. He is for ever in the most delicate manner suggesting to you that you are too self-denying in your diet. He is always giving you credit, in his little account, for supplementary sweetbreads, chops which are the children of his imagination, half-pounds of beef-suet which were left at the door of your next-door neighbour. His mistakes always take this form; he never by any chance attributes to you a sparer diet than you have indulged in, or omits to post to your discredit a single ounce of that thin end of the neck which was really the joint handed last Wednesday over your area railings. Now, all these things require to be vigilantly looked after, and the wretches of men have a notion that to attend to such matters is part of woman’s mission!

Are my girls thus educated, with a view to the cultivation of those qualities which I have shown will be expected of them? Are they taught that one day they will have practical duties to perform – that they will probably have to make the most, for some years at any rate, of a small income? It is astonishing what a “most” may be made of it, by a little thought and good taste. Are they taught that one day they will have to merge their own identity in some one else’s identity? Are they initiated in the mysteries of cooking, in the arcana of butchers’ bills? I think not.

Now, I have to propose an Institution for girls, for their occupation during the holidays, and at the conclusion of their education, which shall be somewhat analogous (the difference of sex being taken into consideration) to that suggested for boys in the article to which I have already alluded, as appearing a short time ago in the pages of this journal.

My institution is, in one or two respects, to resemble that just spoken of. A considerable degree of attention is to be bestowed on the bodily structure of those who should frequent it, on its growth, its strength, its due development. My girls don’t get up early enough in the morning, they don’t take exercise enough, they don’t eat enough. They are inclined to dawdle, to feel relieved when luncheon time comes, and the morning is proclaimed by that fact to have passed away. They shall never be allowed to dawdle, or be idle, or listless, in my institution on any pretence whatsoever.

In developing my notion of the “GIRLS’ HOLIDAY OCCUPATION INSTITUTE,” I propose that there shall be the following classes: A Physical Education Class; a Cookery Class; a Household Bill Auditing Class; a Shirt Button Supervision Class; and a Mangy Gossip Suppression Class. These are to begin with; many more would suggest themselves as the project advanced.

Some of these classes almost speak for themselves and require but little description of the manner in which they should be worked. The Physical Education Class, for instance, proclaims by its name that every kind of drill and calisthenic exercise, and (for the younger members of the institution) every description of game adapted to feminine habits, should be practised by those who attended it. This is a most important class. The development of bodily strength having much to do with health in women as in men. There is no particular harm either in a woman being able to take a walk with her husband. It will be a good thing for both, and such exercise taken together by two persons who are fond of each other is one of the most rational and pleasant of amusements.

In the Cookery Class the very desirable achievement of killing two birds with one stone is attainable. It is important that in this class there should be a high development of the critical faculty contemplated. It will be necessary that mistakes should be made, in order that the future matron may be taught to find them out, and may learn the best means of preventing them. Let there be, then – since the young ladies who form this class are not to cook themselves, but are only to superintend the cookery of others – let there be a class of girls of inferior rank admitted here to do the cooking, and while their mistakes will serve to develop the critical faculty of the students in this class, they (the nascent cooks) will gradually learn to avoid these mistakes more and more themselves, until they are at last dismissed as perfect. Other ignorant girls would succeed these, and so we should not only have our young ladies taught to be good judges of all matters connected with the cuisine, but we should have besides, what is much wanted: a constant issue of trained cooks.

It is quite certain that the successful action of this Cookery Class would be materially aided by there being a dining hall, where the young ladies should partake of the viands whose preparation they had superintended, or neglected. They would then reap the reward of their vigilance, or the punishment of their indifference, in the success or failure of the dinner, which, good or bad, they must eat. It is impossible that such misfortunes as the appearance of a soup ornamented with oily circles on its surface, or a fish which should disclose certain pink revelations when cut, and whose flesh should declare a fixed determination to adhere to the bones, – it is impossible, I say, that such accidents as these could be of frequent occurrence, when so hideous a retribution was inseparable from them.

Intimately connected with the Cookery Class would be the Household Bill Auditing Class. It would come under the duties of its members to decipher the hieroglyphics of which a butcher’s bill is invariably composed, to test the accuracy of the weekly accounts by reference to a daily record of all the articles supplied by each tradesman, and to examine into the grounds for the imputation of any item charged. The pupils should in that case take it by turns, every week, to provide the dinner and other necessaries connected with the establishment, and they would then be enabled with certainty to judge of the truth or falseness of the accounts rendered – accounts, let it be remembered, which should from time to time be purposely sent in wrong, to elicit the vigilance of the pupil in its fullest force.

Among the “things not generally known” to which attention has never been sufficiently directed must be ranked the enormous influence of shirt buttons on home peace; and I consider that the Shirt Button Supervision Class is among the most important of the different branches of my contemplated Institution. It would require to be very artfully and dexterously managed. The pupils should never know when they were to be called upon to attend this class, and I would take care that such calls were always made at the most infelicitous moments. A pupil should be thoroughly tired out, and should, late in the day, be encouraged, after passing through a perfect curriculum of the previous studies, to cast herself down in an easy chair cunningly placed in her way, and should be even encouraged to solace herself with the most interesting reading procurable – in other words, a number of this periodical should be placed in her hands. At this moment another pupil, supposed to represent a housemaid, should enter the room, and should utter the awful words, “If you please, mum, the things is come home from the wash; would you please to step upstairs, and look them over?” To jump up, to cast down the interesting reading, and to “step” upstairs as requested, would be, with the advanced pupil of my establishment, the work of a moment: while with those who are but newly admitted it would be preceded by much yawning, long delays, and many other recalcitrant strugglings. Nor would the secret wiles connected with the due and proper working of the machinery of this very important class stop when the young lady had “stepped” upstairs. It would then be necessary that all the imperfect and defective shirts (contributions of which should be invited) should be placed in drawers underneath the linen of a more sound and unimpaired kind; that the attendant handmaid should say, “There’s no call to look at them, mum, any ways;” to which the beginner would probably respond, “Very well, Jane;” while the more initiated pupil would, on the other hand, insist on seeing them immediately. There should be provided every delusion and snare known in the annals of laundry that can delude the eye and bewilder the judgment of our young friend. Buttonholes slightly enlarged by long use, presenting no longer their usual form of a narrow and constricted slit, but wrought into an abnormal rotundity of orifice, should be there. Casts of buttons left in the linen by mangling, the button itself being absent, should be there; and there, too, should be the button undecided – most dangerous deception of all – which, held on by one, two, or three threads, and stiffened into its place with starch, feels as if it would do, and pleads hard to be left alone till next wash. The pupil who resists this test, and who finds out the button which is split across the middle without showing it, shall be a prize pupil, shall be considered perfect in this department of the institution, and shall pass on to the higher branches of the Mangy Gossip Suppression Class, and the Dress Resignation Class.

If the different departments already enlarged upon are important, in what words shall I speak of the necessity there is for the prompt organisation of my establishment, in order that the Mangy Gossip Suppression Class may be instantly brought into action? Its working should be of this sort. Talking of the freest kind should be promoted among the pupils for a certain length of time, after which they should go through an examination in connexion with it, and the students who were swiftest to detect at what particular points the recent conversation had degenerated into gossip should be promoted to high places in the establishment, and should be exonerated for a certain number of days from attendance in the Household Bill Auditing and Shirt Button Supervision Classes – a reward which should likewise be conferred upon all pupils who had declined to listen to stories seasoned with that most piquante of all sauces, the disparagement of a dear and intimate friend. The students in this department should also go through a course of instruction, in which they should be taught to look with suspicion upon all such members of the Institution as should come into the room in a hurried, breathless, and fussy state of importance, saying, “I’ve come, at great personal inconvenience, to tell you something which I think you ought to know;” or, “I have just heard a report about Miss Lamb, in connexion with last week’s bill auditing, and as to the truth of which Miss Wolf, who is well informed on the subject, is ready to pledge herself at any moment.”

Great pains should be taken with the Mangy Gossip Suppression Class. The elder pupils should be instructed to enter into plots with each other for the concoction of some very intricate story, and the junior members of the class should be lured in all conceivable ways to listen to accounts of the same, furnished by all sorts of persons, who should be especially qualified for purveying the exact truth of the matter by knowing nothing whatever about it. Then, in reference to this very question of the rights and the wrongs of the dispute between Mesdemoiselles Wolf and Lamb, who is there who could approach the new pupil, little Credula Swallow, with such certain information as to all the particulars of the question in dispute as Miss Chink, who had it from Miss Keyhole, who, in her turn, heard all about it from the next door but five neighbours of the Peep o’ day boys, whose estates in Ireland are in immediate contact with the bog country, which belongs to the Irish branch (non-resident) of the Fox family, who are related, as everybody knows, by the mother’s side, to this very Miss Wolf herself, about whom the story is circulated! Of course, the new pupil falls into the trap, and listens to all this, and being punished by a week’s auditing of the most intricate (and greasy) butchers’ bills procurable from the London shambles, never listens to any such narratives any more.

The instances of departments quoted above will be sufficient to furnish some idea of the establishment which I propose should be started with as little delay as possible. Many more examples might be given, as, for instance, the Dress Resignation Class, in which young ladies should be induced to set their hearts on some new-fashioned garment, and should resign it at the request of other pupils, who should be supposed to personate husbands unconvinced of the beauty, and quite convinced, of the expense, of the article of costume in question. A consideration of this branch of my subject suggests to me at once the inquiry: Whom do my girls dress for? Does my eldest girl, for instance, who is engaged to young Mr Judex, the barrister, dress to please that discriminating personage? Is it to please him that she wears a bonnet with a great, hard, empty crown sticking out behind, which is (or was five minutes ago) the fashion in Paris, and with a blazing ribbon and rosette appended to it? Is it to gratify his taste that she puts on a red petticoat with a steel cage underneath it, which renders it impossible for that young man to give her his arm when they walk out, and which swept the cloth and the lamp clean off my worktable only last night? Is it to please Mr Judex that she does all this? Not a bit of it. I think I have heard that gentleman express, more than once, views on all these matters diametrically opposed to the adoption of the fashions just spoken of. The young ladies dress for themselves, and at each other.

The details of my Institution grow under my hands, and I find it difficult to abstain from a still more lengthened development of its intention and the manner of its working, than even this into which I have entered. The combination of public nurseries with the establishment, for instance, is a thing that suggests itself at once as desirable. All young girls are fond of nursing, and the advantages that would accrue to my pupils from an occasional superintendence of temporary homes for children whose mothers are employed at work, would be very great indeed.

But whither, some one asks, is all this tending? You are training up these young ladies to be upper-nurses and upper-housekeepers. Not so. I am training them up to be wives and mothers. It must not be forgotten for a moment that my Institution is only supposed to be supplementary to those establishments where the accomplishments and studies of which an ordinary education consists are done ample justice to. What I ask is this: is equal justice done to those accomplishments the importance of which I am venturing to urge?

At my time of life I seldom or never go to parties, but last summer I was persuaded, when at Cheltenham, to attend one of these festivities at the house of a very old and dear friend. At the conclusion of the party, as I was coming away, I happened to look into a back drawing room which I thought was empty, and there I saw a figure which I shall never forget. It was that of an “old young lady,” on whom some fifty winters had cast their blighting influence, but who, nevertheless, maintained a youthful style in her dress and general appearance which was very dreadful to behold, and to support which the resources of art had been had recourse to in a very unmistakable manner. She was sitting in an empty room, with the lights flaring and the daylight streaming in upon her, and was playing at patience at a deserted card table. It was a celebrated beauty who was thus occupied, and as I looked and remembered what she was once, and what she might have been, I asked myself whether this was a brilliant termination to a career?

There is no dress in the warehouse of Messrs Howell and James which will so set off and decorate a woman’s charms, believe me, as that garb which she weaves about her by her own good deeds. There is no splendour of decoration which will win for her the admiration – to put it on no higher ground – which the reputation that she has ordered her household well, will gain for her from all the world. There is no wreath of flowers, no coronet of jewels, which will surround her head with such a blaze of glory, as this report – that, as a wife and as a mother, she lived without a fault. Let my girls once get this into their heads. Let them once feel assured that they come out to more advantage – a million-fold – occupied in their home duties, than in the gayest ball dresses that modern ingenuity can devise; once let these things be thoroughly recognised, and I think I may answer for it that the Registrar General will not have to complain of a decline in the number of marriages, and that Sir Creswell Creswell will have an easier time of it than he has had of late.

Vidocq, French Detective

In two portions:

Portion the first

All the Year Round, Volume 3, page 331

Vidocq, who was gifted with sound reasoning powers, quick intelligence, clear and ready speech, and who talked better and more to the purpose than three fourths of the advocates of high repute, was no writer, and never knew the most elementary rules of grammar and orthography. His well known Memoirs, therefore, were edited from his notes, not by himself, but by a couple of literary gentlemen. This dressed-up and unoriginal autobiography has lately been analysed and completed in an interesting volume, Vidocq; Vie et Aventures, by M. Barthélemy Maurice, who has the double merit of industry in the collection of authentic facts, and spirit in weaving them into a narrative.

François Eugène Vidocq was born at Arras, on the 23rd of July, 1775, in a house close to that in which Robespierre first saw the light sixteen years before him. His father, who was a baker by trade, intended that his son should succeed to the business, and employed him at an early age to carry the bread to the customers’ houses; of which heavy charge, in consequence of his unusually robust, constitution, he was capable at an earlier age than other lads. Like many celebrated robbers, François opened his apprenticeship by stealing from the paternal till. At first, he only abused the confidence with which it was left open to his attacks; when it was kept locked, he stormed it with the help of a false key, which at last compromised him. When there was no cash, he laid hands upon the loaves and the household chattels, and sold them for what he could get, to whomsoever would buy. One day, he pledged the family plate at the Mont-de-Pieté for a hundred and fifty francs, by which he earned the honour of his first detention at The Baudets, or The Donkeys – the town prison, where he had ten days of dungeon by way of a fatherly correction. He left so well corrected that he broke open his parent’s cash box, took the whole of its contents, about two thousand francs, and escaped to Ostend, with the intention of embarking for America.

How he was plundered of his plunder, how he joined a company of acrobats and dancing dogs, how he enlisted, fought, deserted, enlisted again into another regiment, deserted again to the Austrians, got flogged or caned, deserted back again, and got wounded in the leg, were long to tell though it was short to do. For, having received his discharge, in consequence of fresh wounds, he married, at the age of eighteen, a lean and ugly woman much older than himself, but who was the sister of one Chevalier, an aide-de-camp of that monster of the Revolution, Joseph Lebon. Having met with what he deserved from this amiable female, after disgraceful wanderings in Belgium he moved to Lille, where he lived by acting as the accomplice of swindlers. A violent assault committed on an officer procured him three months’ imprisonment in the Tour Saint-Pierre; but, as he did not want for money, he secured therein a private chamber called the Oeil-de-Boeuf, or the Bull’s Eye.

There were in this prison, at the same time with himself, two ex-sergeant majors of his acquaintance, who were awaiting the departure of a gang of galley slaves, and a husbandman condemned to six years of reclusion, who did nothing but lament his fate, and continually repeat that he would give this and that sum of money to regain his liberty. As his position was really pitiable (he had a wife and seven children, and when the scarcity was at its worst had stolen a few pecks of wheat to keep them from starving), and as the offers which he made were not to be despised, the two sergeant majors at first undertook to draw up in his favour a petition for a free pardon; but they afterwards thought it an easier and a quicker plan to fabricate an order for his discharge, which the gaoler, conniving at the scheme, received as good and available, and immediately put into execution. This document, soon discovered to be false, was concocted in Vidocq’s chamber, if not with his collaboration. He was found guilty of forgery and the employment of forged papers purporting to be public and authentic writings. Years afterwards, to justify himself against an accusation that he had been often condemned – once to death – he took care to publish in his Memoirs the text of the judgment pronounced against him, the 7th Nivose, an V (27th of December, 1796), by the criminal tribunal of the Département du Nord, sitting at Douai, a judgment which condemns him to eight years in irons, and six hours of public exposure. It is a singular position for a man to be in, to be obliged to make use of such a document as a sort of certificate of comparative respectability. Vidocq, it seems, never underwent any other condemnation than this.

This is the proper place to mention, once for all, two extraordinary faculties which Vidocq possessed: the first, was the power of adapting his physiognomy to circumstances; the second, of doing whatever he would with his stomach, either in the way of abstinence or of absorption. A first-rate actor will mould his features to represent those of a youth, or of a man a hundred years old; and this, no doubt, is a wonderful feat; but, after all, it is performed in a theatre, by lamplight, and at a certain distance from the nearest spectator; whereas it was by broad daylight, in immediate contact with former accomplices, with professional thieves, in the presence of turnkeys, gendarmes, and commissaries of police, that Vidocq assumed whatever stature, gait, physiognomy, age, and accent, best suited his purpose. He was tall, and of athletic build; and yet, when he was more than sixty years of age, his favourite disguise was to dress himself in female attire! The peculiar disposition of his stomach was still more remarkable. We find him, in his moments of distress, going without food two or three whole days; and afterwards, when he kept one of the best tables in Paris, quitting it to go and devour in a filthy den, with every appearance of gluttonous appetite, boiled potatoes, lumps of bacon, and even those shapeless remnants of food left on people’s plates in restaurants, which the poor wretches reduced to feed on them style “un arlequin” – a harlequin. We find him drinking, with equal gaiety and in equal quantities, iced champagne and the cheap “vin-bleu,” or blue wine, which was consumed outside the barriers of Paris; and swallowing from morning till night, and from night till morning, half-pints and pints of that corrosive poison which is retailed, under the name of eau-de-vie, in the taverns and “souricières,” or mousetraps, which surround the halles or markets. His other personal appetites were equally under the command of his intellect and his will. Be it remembered that the leading points of this wonderful individual’s character may legitimately be the object of public curiosity, not because he lived the life of a convict for several years, but because for twenty years he was the chief of the Police of Surety, a service which he created, and at the head of which he cleared Paris of more than twenty thousand malefactors of the worst description.

After the turning period of Vidocq’s condemnation for forgery, his life was a series of escapes from prison, each more impudent, ingenious, and daring than the other. On one occasion, in the Rue Equermoise, the principal street of Lille, he stumbled on a police agent, face to face, and pretended to surrender, but got away from his captor by throwing cinder ashes in his eyes. Another time, the Commissary Jacquard got information that he was going to dine in the Rue Notre Dame, at a house where meals were served to small parties of people. The commissary proceeded there, accompanied by four attendants, whom he left on the ground floor, and went upstairs himself to the very room where Vidocq was seated at table with a couple of ladies. The fourth guest, a recruiting sergeant, had not yet arrived. Vidocq recognised the commissary, who, never having seen the object of his search, had not the same advantage; his disguise, moreover, would have thrown out all the written descriptions in the world. Without being disconcerted in the least, Vidocq accosted the intruder, in an easy tone of voice, and requested him to step into a side room, which had a glass door opening into the large dining room, on pretence that he had something of importance to communicate.

“You are looking out for Vidocq? If you will only wait ten minutes, I will point him out to you. This is his knife and fork and his plate; he cannot be long. When he comes in, I will make signs to you; but, if you are alone, I doubt whether you will be able to take him, because he is armed, and is resolved to defend himself.”

“My men are on the staircase; and if he gets away from me, they –”

“Do not leave them there on any account. If Vidocq only catch sight of them, he will suspect there is something in the wind, and your bird will soon be flown.”

“But where can I put them?”

“Eh! Mon Dieu, in this little room. But, above all, take care not to make any noise: that would spoil everything. I have quite as much interest as you can have, in getting him out of the way.”

The commissary and his agents retired, therefore, into the little room. The door was strong, and was soon double-locked. Their unknown friend, sure of making his escape, shouted to them, “You are looking out for Vidocq? Well; it is Vidocq who has caught and caged you. Goodbye, till next time.”

Two other performances in the same style of acting answered his purpose equally well, but he was arrested at last, and brought back to the Tour Saint-Pierre, where, for greater safety, he was put into a dungeon, with criminals condemned to death. His arrival could not have been more opportune; his new companions had long been preparing for a flight, in which he was invited to take part, and which was put in practice the third night afterwards. Eight of the condemned men passed through a hole perforated in the wall, within three paces of a sentinel, who had not the slightest suspicion of what was going on.

Seven prisoners still remained. According to custom on such occasions, they drew straws to decide who was to follow the first of the seven. The lot fell to Vidocq, who undressed himself in order to slip more easily through the opening, which was very narrow; but, to everybody’s disappointment, he stuck fast, unable to move either backwards or forwards. In vain his companions endeavoured to pull him out by main strength; he was caught and nipped as it were in a vice, and his sufferings became so intolerable, that, despairing of any aid from within, he called the sentinel, to beg for help from without. The soldier approached with the utmost precaution. At his shouts, the guard seized their arms, the turnkeys hastened to the spot with lighted torches, and Vidocq was dragged out of the hole in the masonry, leaving strips of skin behind him. Wounded as he was, he was immediately transferred to the prison called the Petit-Hôtel, where he was thrust into a dungeon and loaded with irons, hand and foot.

This severe lesson did not deter him from again attempting to escape. One day he was brought up for examination, together with seventeen other prisoners. Two gendarmes guarded them in the magistrate’s antechamber, whilst a picket of the line kept watch outside. One of the gendarmes laid down his hat and cloak to go into the magistrate’s presence. A bell rang to summon his comrade. In an instant, Vidocq threw the cloak over his shoulders, stuck the cocked hat on his head, took one of the prisoners by the arm, as if leading him out for a breath of air, knocked at the door, which was speedily opened by a corporal, and next moment was in the street.

As a change, he joined a company of mountebanks who were performing pantomimes at Courtrai and Ghent. He lived very comfortably on the share of the receipts allotted to him. But one evening, just as he was about to make his appearance before the admiring spectators, he was arrested on the information of the clown, who was furious at being outshone by a brighter star. The consequence was a dungeon at Douai, irons hand and foot, and the society of a couple of finished scoundrels. At Toulon, he managed to pass out of the town, through the gates, acting on the bright idea – suggested by a female friend – of joining the followers of a funeral. He employed the freedom so obtained, to enlist in a band of highway robbers, who turned him out, a fortnight afterwards, on discovering, by the mark on his shirt, that he came from the galleys.

After numberless similar re-imprisonments and re-escapes, he tried hard to lead a comparatively quiet and regular life, in the Faubourg St Denis, Paris, where he was not known. He set up as a tailor, entered into the semblance of domestic arrangements (his mother living with him, together with a husbandless lady called Annette), found his affairs prospering, and saw rising before his eyes the vision of a happy life, when he was recognised, and consequently laid under contribution, by two former comrades from the galleys of Brest, who at first mulcted him to the amount of forty or fifty francs, and afterwards wanted to live entirely at his expense. It requires no very vivid imagination to compose the sequel of the romance; the tyranny of these undesirable acquaintances became at length unbearable. They brought him stolen goods, and compelled him to turn receiver, whether he would or no. He was obliged to burn his carriole, or covered cart, because he had lent it to these very dear friends, who had made use of it for the commission of a murder in the banlieue. A third man, presented by the two Arcadians, insisted on having impressions of the keys of all the drapers with whom Vidocq was in the habit of doing business.

Vidocq was conscious, now that henceforth he must either be the tool and the slave of thieves and murderers, or must be their master and their scourge. In this dilemma, he offered his services to M. Henry, Chief of the Second Division of Police, on the sole condition that he should not be sent back to the galleys, but that he should finish the remaining term of his sentence in any prison they liked to appoint. His first overture was coldly received and not accepted; his name was not even asked; and he was obliged to hide himself disguised as an “Invalide” who had lost his left arm. Unfortunately, he took refuge with a couple of coiners, with whom he ventured to remonstrate on their dangerous and illegal trade. They, fearing some indiscretion on his part, thought it best to forestal him by calling the attention of the authorities to their scrupulous lodger. He was arrested in his shirt on the top of a roof, and brought before M. Henry, who remembered the advances he had lately made, and promised to interest himself in his welfare. Three months afterwards, due inquiry having been made, it was decided to accept the bargain. What Vidocq undertook to do, he did, thoroughly, efficiently, and unflinchingly. He gloried in the name of spy; treachery brought no shame to his cheek: he summed up all with the satanic exclamation, “Evil, be thou my good!” The way in which he set about his task shows the style of his abilities.

It would not do to let the criminal work have the slightest inkling of the understanding that had been come to; and therefore, when the arrangement was concluded, he was transferred as a convict to the prison of La Force. On arriving at his new residence, he took great care, in concert with the police, to spread the report that he was implicated in a most serious affair, for which evidence was then being sought. M. Henry, the person by whom the bargain was made, spoke of his protégé’s sagacity in such high terms to the Préfet of Police, that it was agreed to put an end to his captivity at once. But every precaution was taken to avoid any suspicion that the prisoner had been purposely set at liberty. When he was fetched away from La Force, the strictest formalities were observed; he was handcuffed and put into the prisoners’ van; but it was agreed that he should break out of it on the road, which he did. That same evening, the whole staff of the police were hunting after him. The escape made a great noise, especially at La Force, where his friends celebrated it by drinking his health, wishing him a pleasant journey! He continued to be admitted, not only without mistrust, but with open arms and a hearty welcome, into the society and the intimate confidence of the ruffians whom he was henceforward charged, not merely to bring to condemnation, but to arrest by force in case of need. It is evident that his new speciality was not a bed of roses. Perhaps he had even more to fear from the jealousy of his new colleagues than from the resentment of the associates whom he had deserted. If his life were in danger every day, every day also was he the object of false reports and calumnious denunciations. M. Henry, satisfied with his zeal and address, promised to communicate such disparagement to him, in order that he might answer in writing; and, the better to testify his confidence, he entrusted him with the most difficult missions, in which other agents had completely failed.

Vidocq’s enemies, and he had plenty of them – first, every criminal, and, secondly, every policeman – asserted that if he effected such numerous arrests, it was only by preparing for them by the odious means of provocation of crime. He denied it stoutly; but he confessed that he was often obliged, not to make criminal propositions, but to pretend to accept those that were made to him. Nor was this all; a heap of reports, some signed, some anonymous, accused him of taking advantage of his position to carry on robbery on a gigantic scale. The Chief of the Second Division replied, “If Vidocq commits such important thefts as you say, you must be very clumsy hands at your business not to have caught him in the fact. Have I ever told you not to watch his movements, exactly as other police agents are watched?”

When these enemies found that personal attacks were a waste of time, they directed their hostilities against the men belonging to his brigade, whom they affected to call “Vidocq’s gang,” as if they were a gang of robbers, or a gang of murderers. It is certain that nine tenths of them came from the galleys and the central prisons. This formed part of Vidocq’s system, for he was convinced that, in order to make war effectually on the criminal portion of society, you must be acquainted with their language, their manners, and their habits. Naturally enough, the more respectable peace officers felt both dislike and jealousy of the Brigade of Surety, who usurped their most important functions. According to them, the Brigade was the secret cause of every robbery committed in Paris. Vidocq was in a rage. He tried hard to discover some method of putting the honour of his agents beyond suspicion. The speciality of their service prevented their being dressed in uniform; he therefore compelled them to wear gloves. Henceforward, no one could reproach his men with “doing business” in the crowd. The most practised hand, unless completely naked, is powerless to prig.

The agents of the Brigade of Surety were no sinecurists. On ordinary occasions they were on duty eighteen hours out of the twenty-four; but when they were out on “an expedition,” it might be three or four days before they got back to their lodgings. As for their chief, it was a problem for them, as for everybody else, to know where and when he slept. At whatever hour they wanted him, they always found him dressed, always ready, always close shaved, like an actor – in order to be able to put on wigs, whiskers, and moustaches, of all ages and all colours. It was nothing uncommon to see him disguised in ten different costumes in the course of one day.

Of Vidocq’s address and powers of endurance in tracking out and capturing his human game, the two following anecdotes exhibit a slight sample.

It is the custom in France for persons employed in an official capacity to pay their respects to the head of their department on New Year’s Day, often accompanying their compliments with a trifling gift, such as a flower or a fruit. There was a redoubtable robber, named Delvèze the Younger, once a hackney-coachman, who had defied the police to arrest him, for two years and a half. On the 1st of January, 1813, Vidocq went to pay his court to M. Henry, and addressed him thus: “I have the honour to wish you a happy new year, accompanied by the famous Delvèze.”

“That is what I call something like a New Year’s gift,” said M. Henry, when he saw the prisoner. “I should be very glad if each of you gentlemen now present, could offer me the like!”

New Year’s gifts are offered in the first place according to the ability of the giver; and, secondly, according to the taste of the person to whom they are offered. Vidocq was delighted to find the arrest of Delvèze so thoroughly appreciated by his superiors, although it increased the hatred and jealousy of the peace officers and their agents. Consequently, on the 1st of January, 1814, he brought another present of the same nature, but of much greater importance, in the person of Fossard, an escaped galley slave, already celebrated, but who was destined subsequently to immortalise himself by the medal robbery at the Bibliothèque. Fossard was a man of fifty years of age, of herculean stature, and endowed with long-tried strength and courage. It was known that he had made up his mind to do anything rather than return to the galleys; it was known, moreover, that he was armed at all points; that he even carried pistols concealed in the fine lawn pocket handkerchief which always dangled in his hand, perfectly determined to blow out the brains of the first man who should attempt to arrest him. Therefore, ever since his return to Paris (whither had come without asking leave of the authorities at Brest, where quarters had been assigned to him at the government expense), the police agents were more afraid of him than he was of them.

When, on the 15th of December, M. Henry entrusted Vidocq with the dangerous mission of arresting Fossard, the only information he could give him was this: “Fossard is living in Paris, in some street which leads from the Halle to the Boulevard; it is not known on what story he lodges, but the windows of his apartment are hung with yellow silk and embroidered muslin curtains. In the same house there lives a humpbacked young woman, a dressmaker by trade, who is on friendly terms with Fossard’s female companion.”

These indications were vague enough. A deformed girl is no rarity in any house in Paris which contains a multitude of families; and there are yellow curtains in at least one house in twenty. Never mind; Vidocq set to work, made up and disguised to represent a gentleman sixty years of age, in easy circumstances, and in sufficient preservation to attract the favourable notice of a crook-backed lady, who had left her minority at several years’ distance. After twelve days of fruitless research, he discovered his charmer in the third story of a house in the Rue du Petit Carreau. Presenting himself as the unfortunate husband of the woman with whom Fossard was living, he learned that the latter person had changed his lodgings, that he styled himself Monsieur Hazard, and that he resided in a smart house at the corner of the streets Duphot and St Honoré.

Vidocq then disguised himself as a coal heaver, and did it so well, that his mother and his subordinates conversed with him for some time without recognising him. In this costume, he ascertained that the pretended M. Hazard never went out without being armed to the teeth, and that his elegant white handkerchief always contained a brace of pistols. He came to the conclusion that he had to deal with a man who could only be arrested in bed, and he set about considering the means of success. It appeared to him that the best thing he could do was to inspire the master of the wine shop, in whose house Fossard lodged, with fears respecting his property, and even for his life. To this effect, after resuming his ordinary dress and mien, he presented himself to the worthy citizen; begging in solemn tones the favour of a little private conversation, he addressed him to the following purport:

“I am commissioned to warn you, on the part of the police, that you are about to be robbed. The robber who has projected the crime, and who perhaps will execute it himself, lodges in your house. The woman who is with him, sometimes comes and seats herself behind your counter, by the side of your wife. While thus engaged in conversation, she has managed to obtain an impression of the key which opens the door by which the thieves are to enter. Every precaution has been taken; the spring of the bell on the door, is to be cut with a pair of shears, so that you will have no notice of its opening. Once inside, they will rush up to your chamber; and, if they observe the slightest symptom of your awakening – as you have to do with a consummate villain, I have no occasion to explain the rest”

“They will cut our throats!” said the terrified wine seller, immediately calling his wife to communicate to her this agreeable piece of news. “What will this world come to! Would you believe it, my dear? That Madame Hazard, so smooth and saintly, that the curé would give her absolution without hearing her confession, has been trying to work our ruin. This very night, they are coming to murder us.”

“No, no,” interrupted Vidocq; “make your minds easy. It is not to come off tonight; the till won’t be heavy enough. They are waiting till Twelfth Day is over; but, if you are discreet, and will agree to second me, we will set all that to rights.”

The wine merchant and his wife entreated Monsieur le Chef de la Police de Sûreté to ease them, as soon as possible, of so disagreeable a tenant, and not to leave them in a state of apprehension until Twelfth Night was over. Vidocq at first pretended that that would not suit his plans; then, he affected to yield, solely on account of the lively interest with which these worthy people inspired him. The married pair undertook to watch Fossard’s movements, and to keep up a constant communication with Vidocq, who had established his quarter-general at the neighbouring guard house, in which a commissaire of gendarmes installed himself in permanence, awaiting the moment of action. At eleven o’clock of the night of the 31st of December, Fossard came home without suspicion, humming a tune as he walked upstairs. Twenty minutes afterwards, the disappearance of the light indicated that he had gone to bed. Vidocq and all his companions were quietly let in by the wine seller. A fresh consultation was held at once as to the means of seizing Fossard without running too great risks.

Vidocq’s first idea was to do nothing before morning. He was informed that Fossard’s lady companion came down stairs very early to fetch milk. The object was to seize this woman, take possession of the key, and so to enter her friend’s bedroom unannounced; but might it not happen that, contrary to custom, he might come down stairs first? This reflection led to the adoption of another expedient. The mistress of the wine shop, to whom M. Hazard always behaved with great politeness, had one of her nephews staying with her. He was tolerably intelligent for a child of ten years of age, and as precociously anxious to earn money as any little Norman need be. He was promised a reward if, under the pretext of his aunt’s being indisposed, he would go and beg Madame Hazard to give him some eau de cologne. The young gentleman was exercised in the piteous tone adapted to the pretended circumstances and, as soon as he was perfect, the play was played. The other actors took off their shoes, in order to get upstairs unheard. The lad had nothing on but his shirt; he rang the bell. No answer; he rang again.

“Who is there?”

“’Tis I, Madame Hazard; ’tis Louis. My aunt is suddenly taken very ill, and she begs you to give her a little eau de cologne. She says she is dying. I have brought a light.”

The door opened; but scarcely could the lady show herself before she was dragged away by a couple of powerful gendarmes, who clapped a cloth on her mouth to prevent her from screaming. Vidocq threw himself upon Fossard. Stupified by the suddenness of the event, and already handcuffed and bound in his bed, he was taken prisoner before he had time to make a single movement or to utter a single word. His astonishment was so great, that he was nearly an hour before he recovered his speech. When lights were brought in, and he saw his enemy’s coal heaver’s dress and blackened face, he was seized with redoubled terror.

Search was made in the dwelling of this brigand, who had acquired a redoubtable reputation. A great quantity of jewellery, diamonds, and a sum of eight or ten thousand francs were found. While this investigation was going on, Fossard, who had recovered his presence of mind, confided to Vidocq that beneath the marble top of the side table there were still ten notes of a thousand francs each. “Take them,” he said; “we will share them between us; or, rather, you shall keep what you please, for yourself.” Vidocq in fact did take the notes as he was requested. They got into a hackney coach and drove to M. Henry’s office, where the articles found in Fossard’s apartments were deposited. An inventory was made of them. When they came to the last item, the Commissary who had accompanied the expedition for formality’s sake, observed, “We have now only to close the procès-verbal.” “Wait an instant,” cried Vidocq. “Here are ten thousand francs besides, which the prisoner gave me.” So saying, he displayed the notes – to Fossard’s great indignation. He darted one of those glances whose interpretation is, “This trick I will never forgive you!”

Vidocq, French Detective

In two portions:

Portion the second

All the Year Round, Volume 3, page 355

The second anecdote illustrative of the great French detective’s cleverness, runs as follows:

At the time of the first invasion of France by the Allies, as the disinterested conduct of the enemy was not a perfectly established fact, everybody set to work to invent hiding places for valuables, out of the reach of Cossack rapacity. A Monsieur Sénard, a jeweller in the Palais Royal, on going to visit one of his friends, the Curé of Livry, near Pontoise, found him busily employed in having a hole dug in which he might temporarily bury, in the first place, the church plate, and, secondly, his own little property. The man who was digging the hole had enjoyed the curé’s confidence for thirty years; he was a cooper by trade; he was also churchwarden, sacristan, bell-ringer, and factotum. Never during the whole course of his life had old Moiselet given the slightest ground for suspicion, either with respect to his devotion or his morality.

M. Sénard conceived the idea of taking advantage of the good curé’s hiding place to ensure the safety of three hundred thousand francs’ worth (£12,000) of diamonds, which he brought the next morning in a little box. The joint treasure was deposited in the ground six feet deep, covered and concealed in such a way as to throw any curious inquirer off the scent. The Cossacks did not fail to pay a visit to Livry and its environs, where they made a few discoveries; but, thanks to old Moiselet’s ingenuity, the precious deposit escaped their cupidity.

The good curé rubbed his hands, and congratulated himself on his innocent trick, when one fine day – it ought to have been a Friday – Moiselet rushed in more dead than alive, and announced that the treasure had been abstracted. Both rushed to the spot. All they gained from their inspection of it was the wretched certainty that the robbery was complete; the rascally Cossacks had not done things by halves; the heretics, the pagans! They had carried off all, even the sacred vessels. The poor curé nearly fell backwards when he beheld the full extent of his loss; Moiselet, for his part, was frightful to look at; he sighed and groaned as if he were giving up the ghost. This dreadful misfortune could not have afflicted him more keenly had it been his own personal loss. The violence of his grief prevented his accompanying Monsieur le Curé, who took the first vehicle to acquaint his friend Sénard with the terrible news.

Sénard cleared the distance between the Palais Royal and the Préfecture of Police at a single bound. He did not scruple to lay the theft of the treasure on the shoulders of the very person who had hidden it: on the smooth spoken, the pious, the afflicted old Moiselet. M. Henry was of the same opinion, in spite of all the curé could say to testify to his sacristan’s honour; also was it Vidocq’s opinion, at the first word he heard about the business; but mentioned that the affair was beset with thorns. Yet, he would undertake it, and did not despair of coming off with flying colours.

“Incur,” said M. Sénard, “whatever expense you think necessary. My purse is at your disposal, and I am ready to make any sacrifice. Only find me my box of diamonds, and there are ten thousand francs for you.”

In spite of M. Sénard’s successive abatements in proportion as the discovery seemed more probable, Vidocq promised to do everything in his power. M. Sénard and the curé returned to Pontoise, and the result of their depositions was the arrest and examination of Moiselet. They tried him in all ways to get him to confess his guilt, but he persisted in declaring his innocence; and the accusation was on the point of melting into air, when Vidocq set one of his cleverest agents to work. This person, wearing a military uniform and with his left arm in a sling, presented himself to Moiselet’s wife, with a billet for lodgings. He was supposed to be just discharged from the hospital, and that it had been his intention to remain at Livry only eight-and-forty hours; but a few minutes after his arrival, he had a fall, and an artificial sprain, which prevented the possibility of his continuing his journey. The mayor, therefore, decided that he should be the cooperess’s guest till further orders.

Madame Moiselet was one of those hearty jovial bodies who have no scruple about living under the same roof with a wounded conscript; and she was not yet thirty-six. Moreover, evil tongues reproached her with a weakness for a cheerful glass. The pretended soldier did not fail to flatter every foible through which she was accessible, even opening his purse to pay for her bottles of wine. He acted as her secretary, and wrote letters at her dictation to her husband in prison. He practised on her vanity and love of show, by sending a female pedlar to tempt her with gaudy goods, which might perhaps draw some of the curé’s cash out of its hidden retreat, or bring forward some of the church plate by way of exchange; but all in vain. Madame Moiselet was discretion itself; she was a phoenix, of prudence. Her guarded resistance put Vidocq on his mettle; he ordered the agent to cure his sprain and come back immediately, and resolved to experimentalise in person on the husband.

Disguised as a sort of German manservant, and without having given the least previous notice to the local authorities, Vidocq began prowling about the environs of Pontoise, with the intention of getting himself taken up. Nothing in the world was more easy for him to manage; he had so often given gendarmes the dodge that he knew perfectly well how to fall into their clutches. As he had no papers or passport to show, and as the commissary of police could not understand a word of his gibberish, the prison doors opened to receive him, almost of their own accord. As soon as he was introduced into the prison yard, he recognised Moiselet. Feigning to find his countenance more agreeable and engaging than the faces of the other prisoners, he made him understand, rather by gestures than by words, that he wished to treat him to a bottle of wine, by way of paying his footing. Moiselet conducted him to his chamber, and the bottles were emptied one after the other. Vidocq pretended to be dead drunk; so that the gaoler, who took part in the libations, very naturally set up a bed for him in his new friend’s room. It was all he wanted, for the present. Moiselet was delighted; besides the slight gratification of personal pride which a professed drinker feels when he has put a rival under the table, he found Vidocq an amiable and a generous companion.

When the two first bottles were paid for, Vidocq, unstitching a button off his coat, had extracted from it a Napoleon. Next morning Moiselet inquired if he bad any more? Vidocq made him understand that every one of his buttons was garnished with the same lining, with the exception that the large buttons contained double Napoleons, while the small buttons had only single ones. The old sacristan jumped for joy; he had no money, or, if he had, it did not suit his purpose to show it. He was charmed at finding a comrade who prodigally met their common expenses, without asking for anything in return beyond the pleasure of his company. In the impossibility of persuading his amiable guest to speak French, Moiselet attempted to speak what, on the stage, passes by courtesy for broken German. It was in this frightful jargon, enough to disconcert a Frankfort Jew, that Vidocq, without a great deal of persuasion, related his story, framed for the circumstances.

Although the narrative did not sin by excess of lucidity, Moiselet easily comprehended that his new friend had, at the battle of Montereau, stolen his master’s portmanteau and concealed it in the Forest of Bondy; and as the confession did not appear either to astonish him or to shock his feelings, Vidocq came to the conclusion that his friend’s conscience was tolerably lax and wide, and no longer doubted that he knew better than anybody else what had become of the curé’s little property, the sacred vessels, and M. Sénard’s diamonds. He began to vaunt the pleasant life that was led on the other side of the Rhine, the beauty of the women, and the excellence of the wines. He got him to express the desire he felt of going to Germany, as soon as he had recovered his liberty.

Persuaded from that moment that his companion, at his time of life, would not entertain such a project unless he knew where to procure money, Vidocq wrote to the Procureur du Roi, made himself known as the Head of the Police de Sûreté and begged him to order that he should be removed with Moiselet under the pretence of being transferred, the one to Livry, the other to Paris. As may be supposed, the order had not long to be waited for.

They were bound with only a very thin rope; on the road Moiselet made signs that it would be easy to break it. The further they travelled, the more he gave Vidocq to understand that in him lay his only hope of safety; every minute he repeated his earnest entreaty not to be left behind, while Vidocq reassured him, by answering ambiguously, “Ja, friend Frenchman. Ja, I not leave you; I not let you go alone.”

At last, the decisive moment arrived; the rope was broken, and Vidocq cleared the ditch which separated the road from the underwood of the forest. Moiselet, who had recovered the legs of his youth, rushed after him. One of the gendarmes dismounted to pursue them; but how was it possible, even with all the good will in the world, to run, and above all to jump, in jackboots and with a heavy sabre? Whilst the gendarme made a circuit to intercept his prisoners, they disappeared in the thicket and were soon out of reach.

They followed a path which led them to the wood of Vanjours. There, Moiselet halted; and after looking carefully around, directed his steps towards a thicket of bushes. He then stooped, thrust his arm into one of the densest tufts, and drew out of it a spade. He rose abruptly, advanced several paces without uttering a word, and when they came to a birch tree, several twigs of which had been snapped short, he took off his hat and coat, and set to work to dig with all his might and main. He laboured with such hearty good will that his task progressed rapidly. All of a sudden he threw himself back, uttering a long-drawn sigh of satisfaction, which told his companion that, without the aid of the diviner’s wand, he had succeeded in discovering a treasure. The cooper seemed on the point of fainting from excess of joy; but he speedily recovered himself. The removal of two or three more shovelfuls of earth exposed the box to view; he laid hold of it and pulled it out. While so doing, Vidocq seized the instrument of discovery, and, suddenly changing his tone, declared that the emigrant to Germany was his prisoner.

“If you make the slightest resistance,” he said, “I will dash your brains out.”

At this threat, Moiselet thought he was dreaming; but when he felt himself in the grasp of that iron hand which had grappled with the most desperate ruffians, he must have been convinced that it was no dream, but a terrible reality. He became as gentle as a lamb; Vidocq had promised not to desert him, and he kept his word. During his walk to the gendarmes’ station house, he kept exclaiming, over and over again, “I am a ruined man! Who would have thought it? He seemed such a harmless sort of fellow! “Who would have thought it?”

Moiselet vas tried at the Versailles Assizes, and was condemned to six years’ reclusion.

M. Sénard was delighted beyond measure at the recovery of his three hundred thousand francs’ worth of diamonds; but, faithful to his downward sliding scale, he cut down the reward to one half, and even then Vidocq had a hard task to get him to pay in cash the five thousand francs, out of which he had expended more than two. At one time, he was afraid that he would have to suffer the loss for his pains.

Note here, that Vidocq never attempted to conceal this trifling perquisite of three thousand francs, any more than he did other extra gratuities. Similar additions to his income were by no means rare, and they serve to explain quite satisfactorily, how, with a fixed salary of only five thousand francs a year, he quitted office, after having held it for eighteen years, with something like a little fortune.

Such was Vidocq’s activity, that the numerous operations of the Brigade of Safety were for him insufficient occupation. Towards the close of the Empire, he opened in the Place de Grève, near Saint-Jean’s turnstile, a distillery, or gin shop, where his faithful Annette was enthroned, and where lie himself did not disdain to take his seat occasionally. It was an excellent post for observation. What is curious, is, that professional thieves frequented his establishment in preference to others. They thought it a good joke to go and take a dram at Vidocq’s, and with him, whenever he happened to be there. For three or four years, under the Restoration, he set up a regular office for providing military substitutes in the Petite Rue Sainte-Anne, which is said to have brought him in fifty or sixty thousand francs. He had already placed his talents at the service of private individuals whilst he was supposed to be devoting the whole of his time to the public administration. Inquiries touching the interests of families; hunting up debtors; the surveillance of married and unmarried women, sometimes also the surveillance of husbands; operations more or less avowable, but assuredly quite foreign to his duties; he undertook everything which, if it did not concern his office, had any remotely apparent connexion with it. The reputation for intelligence and activity which he had deservedly acquired at the head of his brigade, caused the highest families unhesitatingly to apply to him under the most delicate circumstances, and most frequently left him at liberty to fix the price of his services. If, therefore, according to his enemies’ account, he left the Prefecture of Police with sixteen or twenty thousand pounds sterling in his pocket, we have no right to shout after him “Stop thief!”

Vidocq’s men, as well as himself, were continually subject to be snubbed by the respectable public. One of his subordinates, who had long been on the alert after a couple of adroit female thieves, at last saw them accost an elderly gentleman, whom they relieved of his purse after a few minutes’ conversation. When the theft had been committed, the agent contrived to learn from the women (who were not aware of his quality) what were the contents of the purse, and appointed a rendezvous to meet them again, without losing sight of their victim, whom he followed into a café in the Rue Saint-Honoré.

“Monsieur,” he said to the old gentleman, “when you left home, you had a green silk purse?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Which contained fifty Napoleons?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“You have just been robbed of it.”

“That, is only too true, monsieur,” replied the old gentleman, after having felt in all his pockets.

“Well, monsieur, if you will follow me, you shall regain your purse, and the two women who robbed you shall be arrested.”

“You are a spy, it would seem,” the old man observed.

“I am an agent of the Police of Surety.”

“Well, Monsieur Spy, I don’t choose to go with you. For my own part, I prefer to be robbed; it suits my taste. What have you to say to that?”

The agent, who did not expect an answer of that kind, retreated from the café as cowed as a fox that had been caught by a goose.

Vidocq’s maxim was, that to keep an eye on robbers to any good purpose, it was necessary to frequent their society. Even when his position as Chief of the Police of Surety was no longer a secret, he was not the worse received by his former fellow convicts and fellow prisoners. They believed that he had entered the service of the state against his will, simply to avoid being sent to Brest or Toulon; he had the art to persuade them that if he were a spy by trade, he was still a thief by inclination. Moreover, at that epoch, the limit which separated the two professions was excessively narrow and undefined; many individuals migrated alternately from one to the other, or exercised both simultaneously. Almost all the members composing the Brigade of Surety, beginning with their chief, had resided in the hulks for a longer or shorter period. On the other hand, the thieves no longer formed, as of old, a society apart, in the midst of society. As soon as the attempt was made to drive them in a body out of Paris, they were not scrupulous about the means of procuring the favour of remaining there. Now, the surest way, evidently, was to keep on good terms with the police – to render it service – in a word, to denounce one another. Among professional thieves there were very few who did not regard it as a piece of good fortune to be consulted by the police, or employed on a job; almost all would have strained every sinew to give proofs of their zeal, in the hope of persuasion of its procuring, if not complete immunity, at least a certain degree of forbearance. The men who had the greatest reason to be afraid of the police were almost always the readiest to act at its bidding.

When other eminent functionaries retire from office, they ordinarily receive a vote of thanks, or an honorary title, or promotion in the Order of the Legion of Honour, or letters of nobility. Vidocq received what he had long ardently longed for, letters of pardon. The cause of his retirement from the Brigade of Surety in the full vigour of life, remains obscure. He was careful to repeat that he sent in his resignation; but from the bitter and disdainful tone in which he always spoke of his successor, it was easy to see that his resignation was not absolutely voluntary. Like all great artists, Vidocq estimated himself at his full value; he seemed to think that no Préfet of Police could ever be so stupid as to think of dispensing with his assistance; consequently, at the slightest interference with his department, he was constantly threatening to send in his resignation. He played the trick so frequently that, one fine day, he was quite astonished to find his resignation accepted.

Probably the real cause of  Vidocq’s disgrace was his want of religious principles, or rather his constant refusal to make any religious profession. At a time when they gave three francs each to soldiers of the line, and five francs to those of the guard, for consenting to take the communion, the Préfet of Police, who was a warm partisan of the Jesuits, would not have been sorry to see the Brigade of Surety, headed by its chief, likewise approach the Holy Table, keep the Jubilee, and follow the discipline of the missionaries. Several attempts at converting Vidocq completely failed. He had had too close a view of false devotees in prison – the worst class of prisoners – to wish to have any of them in his brigade; and he made a point, besides, of reserving the right of admitting and expelling whomsoever he pleased.

On leaving the police, he was to have had a pension for life, of twenty pounds a month. It was paid for six months only, and then suddenly stopped. At that period, everything was arbitrary in the administration of the police. To obtain an income, or rather, perhaps, to satisfy his inexhaustible activity, he set up a paper, card, and pasteboard manufactory, in which all the workpeople were liberated criminals of either sex. The police greatly encouraged the idea at the outset, and made large promises of pecuniary assistance. His first attempts, though beset with difficulties, were fairly successful. He demonstrated by experiment, still more forcibly than by reasoning, that all liberated criminals are not incorrigible, and that with a little perseverance about a third of their number may be reformed. But the police did not help him with a sou; the paper merchants wanted to have the goods at half or quarter price, because they were the produce of criminal hands; the neighbours made an outcry against an establishment where so many persons of ill repute were at work together. The speculation failed, with loss.

Other of his inventions were, a door that could not be broken open, and paper that could not be forged or imitated, for banknotes and suchlike purposes. But police matters were Vidocq’s second nature; secret investigations, researches after people and things, were what he craved for as a necessity of existence. To gratify this, he set up his famous Bureau de Renseignements, or Information Office, which has since been imitated in London; the prospectus of it appeared in all the Parisian journals for June, 1833. Of this, we have only space to say that while it brought him in both credit and money, it eventually brought him into trouble, lawsuits, and difficulties’ with the authorities, which emptied his cash box faster than it had been replenished.

To repair his losses, and still perhaps also to exercise his untiring energy, Vidocq, truly believing that his celebrity extended beyond the limits of France, resolved to exhibit himself in London. His first essay, during the season of 1845, succeeded so well, that he repeated it in 1846. For his theatre, he selected the Cosmorama in Regent Street. The performance, which was repeated several times in the course of the same day, was this: He addressed his audience, in French, in a short speech which was translated by an interpreter. He gave, after his own fashion a summary of his adventurous life. He put on his galley slave’s dress and the irons with which he had been laden, including the double chain he had worn at Brest, as well as in the different prisons of Douai, Lille, and Paris.

He related stratagems to which he had recourse, to take the most formidable criminals; and each time he put on the costume and made up his face as he had been obliged to do under the actual circumstances. Next, he displayed a sort of museum which might have passed for a wardrobe picked up at the Morgue – Paparoine’s hat, Lacenaire’s pantaloons, Fieschi’s frock coat, and so forth. Whatever might be the authenticity of these relics, our countrymen were never tired of admiring them. Finally, by way of anticlimax, he exhibited a collection of artificial tropical fruits, and of pictures professing to be originals of the Italian and the Flemish schools, a few of which he sold at high prices, because they had been his property. Those which remained on his hands barely fetched, after his death, the value of the frames.

Vidocq was sought after, and his abilities appreciated, by persons above the vulgar. M. Charles Ledru, the eminent advocate, used not unfrequently to invite him to a restaurant, to meet a party of twenty, or five-and-twenty guests, who listened breathlessly to his exciting stories, and drank to the health of “the old lion.”

“My defective education,” he used to say, “left me unprovided with any check to curb so imperious a nature as mine.” (At the age of fourteen, he killed a fencing master in a duel.) “If, instead of rushing, like a fiery horse, into the abyss which I could not see opening wide before me, I had taken the place for which. I was destined by the intelligence and the energy with which Providence had endowed me, I should have become as great as Kleber, Murat, and the rest of them. Both in head and in heart I was as good as they were; and I should have risen, as they rose. I lost the opportunity. I was born to figure in the noble scenes of war. When my eyes, at last, were open to reason, I beheld no other prospect before me than the prison, the dungeon, and the hulks. But if I have failed to attain the glory of military heroes, I retain the consolation of having always remained an honest man amidst the miasms of perversity and the atmosphere of crime. I have battled for the defence of order, in the name of justice, as soldiers battle for the defence of their country under the flag of their regiment. I wore no epaulette, but I incurred as great dangers as they did, and like them I exposed my life every day.”

During the troubled times of 1848, Vidocq was in direct communication with M. de Lamartine; and at the Fete of Fraternity, in the Champ-de-Mars, he saved the Provisional Government and the Constituant Assembly from being burnt alive. Lamartine retained so lively a remembrance of the service, that he is stated to have been very near visiting Vidocq on his deathbed.

Not only did Vidocq place himself at the disposal of the Provisional Government, but long after its fall he offered to propagate democratic ideas. What is curious is, that at the same time, by his own confession, he was vaunting the services he had rendered in another cause.

“Four or five months ago, I addressed to the Prince (Louis Napoleon) a letter in which I acquainted him with the poverty into which I have fallen, in consequence of an infamous abuse of confidence. In this letter, I reminded the President that, during his detention at Ham, I proposed, through M. Thélin’s brother, to effect his escape, without conditions, disinterestedly. I reminded him, besides, that when he was a candidate for the national representation, and at the time of the vote for the presidency, I obtained more than eight thousand votes in Paris, and at least as many more in the banlieue – in Saint-Denis, Neuilly, Surênes, Puteaux, and other parishes – where I was continually present during the workpeople’s meal times. I had not forgotten the kind manner with which he had the goodness to receive me in London, and to permit me to converse with him several times. I am vexed at the sight of a multitude of men who are aided by the minister and the President. What have they done to obtain those favours? Nothing! They only came to offer their interested devotion to the Prince when they felt certain he must rise to power, whilst I proposed to break his chains when he was still under lock and key.”

It seems that Vidocq, for a time, had really put his faith in princes. All his life long, he had always manifested his enthusiasm in favour of new governments. When the Prince President returned from his progress in the south of France, Vidocq displayed from the window of his apartments in the Boulevard Beaumarchais, a magnificent transparency thus inscribed:

Louis Napoleon, thou Messiah of December 2, 1851, blessings on thee! Thou hast saved and regenerated France. Long live the Empire!

The sale of his furniture, which occupied two whole days, afforded evidence of his former easy circumstances, as well as of his decided taste for pictures and works of art. It is supposed, without being certain, that he had nothing left but an annuity of a hundred and twenty pounds. However, in his latter days, he freely taxed the generosity of the few friends left to him. He writes: “Wounded at heart and in the paw, the old lion cannot leave his den, where he groans, having no longer the strength to roar. Abandoned by all, he waits with courage and resignation for the gates of eternity to open. To oblige quickly, is to oblige twice. It seems that you have forgotten the proverb.”

Vidocq’s constitution was unusually robust and vigorous; every report of his numerous trials begins by describing his athletic stature and build.

“I believe,” he would say, “I shall get as far as a hundred. At any rate, I have more than ten years before me.” Paralysis proved that he was mistaken. He requested the attendance of a priest, whom he had previously sent for as a confessor, to receive the last ceremonies of the Roman Church. The priest, on accosting the sick man, warned him of the disposition of mind necessary to receive the sacrament; and that, before all, it was needful to make absolute and complete avowal of all his faults.

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” replied Vidocq; “when I tell you that I sent for you myself, you may be sure that I intend to be sincere.”

Extreme unction and the viaticum were given. The moribund, suffocated, because he had restrained his deep emotion, sobbed aloud, and laid his hand on his heart to express what his lips were unable to utter. He wept pious tears, and with an effort said, “This is the happiest day of my life. It is too much happiness for Vidocq.”

Shortly before receiving the Holy Communion, the priest had given him a cross to kiss, which was made of olive kernels from the Mount of Olives and blessed by the Pope, and a rosary also blessed by the Pope, and which he held twisted round his arm. He became calm as he respectfully gazed at these relics, and at intervals made a declaration, partly repentant, and partly justifying his past life.

His funeral was followed by fifty male and female paupers, who each received three francs. Besides these paid mourners, there were not ten people in the church. Amongst those few, a young person in tears was observed.

As soon as he was dead, in addition to other claimants of the inheritance, there came an actress of the Boulevard, and two, three, five, ten, women of doubtful reputation, each armed with a will in proper form; but all anterior to another that was produced by the persons with whom he lodged.

When the seals on his property were broken, the Government intervened, and removed from Vidocq’s papers all such as might have any connexion with the functions he had formerly fulfilled. The same thing happened after the deaths of Cambacérès and Talleyrand.

Boxing Day

All the Year Round, Volume 4, page 258

Mr Skinner Stone presents his respectful compliments to the Editor of All the Year Round, and begs to lay before him a statement of certain circumstances in connexion with the present season of the year which have come under his observation, together with the inferences which he has been enabled to deduce from the same.

The residence of your informant is at the end of a certain row of stuccoed houses in the postal district N.W. The house is not in a line with the other houses in Lumbago Terrace. It is situated at the eastern extremity of that stronghold of miasma, and projects from the other clammy and exudacious tenements.

Lumbago Terrace is a fair specimen of the architecture of Corinth, as adapted to the necessities of our age and habits. It is well known that the great glare and blaze of sunlight to which in this country we are perpetually subject, dazzles and scorches us during the major portion of the year. The architect of Lumbago Terrace, therefore, “threw up” the great Corinthian facade in the centre of Lumbago Terrace, by which he succeeded in darkening the four centre houses of the row, letting into the drawing and dining rooms of the others the light of heaven. But he remedied this intolerable defect, by “throwing forward” a couple of massive corner buildings at each end of the terrace; themselves kept from the sun’s glare by the centre pile, and immensely helping in their turn to overshadow the receding portions of the wings, and preserving them from the unendurable annoyance of the solar rays.

In one of the projecting extremities of the line of Lumbago Terrace, is situated the room in which your Informant ordinarily works at his History of Space. The window before which his desk is placed commands the whole extent of the terrace from end to end, and he is thus enabled to rake that row of houses completely, as from a tower of observation. It was on the morning after Christmas Day, then, that, seated at his desk before this window, his attention – which will sometimes wander to external things – was caught by certain phenomena, which he now proposes to describe.

A group, consisting of two tall men and a short one, all very seedy, enters the terrace at its western extremity, which is that farthest from the position occupied by your informant. The men, after loitering undecidedly for a short time in front of the last house (No. 20), separate; the two tall men advance to the house door, and knock a single knock, while the short man stands at the edge of the pavement, with his back to the others, and one foot projecting over the side of the kerbstone. He also chews a straw, and every now and then looks round furtively and uneasily, to see how his companions are getting on.

They are getting on particularly well, one would think. The door opens, and one of the men, taking a step forward, asserts a foot upon the mat, and speaks to the housemaid; the other man leans against the doorpost; and the short man, on the kerbstone, examines the sky and the prospects of the weather, and tries to look as if he did not belong to the party. The door is now closed, and the man who stepped upon the mat, is shut in, while his mate remains upon the step, and in his turn becomes interested in the state of the weather; also in the condition of his nails; also in the paint upon the entrance pillars. Very suddenly, the door is again opened, and the man who had been enclosed drops out upon the steps, with an appearance of immense relief. Immediately upon this the short man gives up his fiction of not belonging to the party, and a secret conference takes place. This over, the party once more separate, and the two tall men ascend the steps of No. 19. Everything happens as before. No. 18 in like order. This routine is performed at every house. The only thing which is at all subject to change being the demeanour of the men when engaged in consultation; which sometimes, leaves them brisk and cheerful, but sometimes deeply and sulkily despondent.

If this first deputation was of a bewildering nature, what were the feelings of your informant when a second and a third group, each consisting of three seedy ones, appeared in Lumbago Terrace, and went through a series of performances precisely similar to those engaged in by the first comers. What! in every case three men; never more, never less; in every case two who did the work, and one who stood upon the kerbstone and ignored them while they did it? In every case a conference after each call? In every case that conference marked by great briskness or deep gloom and stagnation? In every case? No, not in every case – once, a clarionet, a trombone, and an ophicleide.[2]

The deputation bearing these instruments threw a perfect blaze of light on the mystery. The waits! Christmas boxes. These groups of diffident and embarrassed personages were composed of your regular dustmen, and your united scavengers, and your lamplighters embodied into a company (limited), and lastly, of your incorporated waits. The waits whom you hear at a distance as you come back from Christmas parties, and whom, gradually approaching as you walk home, you come upon suddenly under a lee wall standing in such shelter as they can get, all looking different ways, with green baize instrument wrappers over their arms, braying out their sad souls in bleak discordancy.

Oh, the waits, the cruel waits, are they worst far off or near? They sink your soul down when they play under your window. They go into the next street and sink it lower. Matters are no better when they get into the next street but one; and, when they have reached the square round the corner, and the notes of the trombone at intervals alone are audible, it is a great question whether you are not worse off still; whether your woes are not more aggravated than ever.

The waits were outside, expectant of a Christmas box. The ophicleide had placed his instrument, across an angle of the area railings appertaining to this writer’s abode while he beat his breast to warm it; the trombone was on the mat in the passage; and the clarionet, with that cheery tube under his arm, was playing that important kerbstone part which it has been mentioned was discharged in every case of a Christmas box application by one member of the corps.

After sending out a shilling to the trombone in the passage – who diffused so much cold that it was worth the money in fuel to get him promptly out of the house – that your Informant began to speculate on the question whether the Christmas box system does not, in some of its aspects, partake of the nature of a nuisance. He endeavoured to avoid the subject, but it pursued him, go where he would.

That night, and the next, and the next after, as the writer was returning home, he happened to observe a general tendency in certain seedy individuals to oscillate in their walk, to regard passers-by with a fixed and vitreous gaze into long explanations not remarkable for clearness, to give a wide berth to drinking fountains, and sometimes to do obeisance, even in the mud, before objects not ordinarily associated with worship, such as lamp posts, gin shop doors, coal plates, and the like. Your Informant observed, also, an affectionate disposition on the part of such of these persons as were husbands and fathers to lean caressingly on their wives, and even on children of tender years, teaching them thus a moral lesson of the necessity there might be for them to support their parents in the decline of life. He observed, too, that these husbands and fathers were prone in some instances to shed tears, in others to cheer with laughter and merry jests those who were accompanying them; whilst others were moved, in their desire to improve the training of their families, to such stern censure of their faults as would sometimes lead them to administer correction, with some violence, in the public streets. There were some individuals who maintained a dignified silence, and steadily refused to yield to the urgent entreaties of those who desired (most unaccountably) their return home. Some, too, when more specially urged by government authorities to advance one way or the other, would hold firmly to iron railings, or to corners of gateways, or would sit down upon damp pavements, rather than alter a determination once taken, or yield to importunity, in a case where the judgment was unconvinced.

Now, putting all the things together, and having it further forced upon his mind that in many instances the individuals whose singularities have just been developed were generally similar in appearance, costume, and all other respects to those whose conduct had attracted his attention in the morning in Lumbago Terrace, it did at last occur to your Informant – especially after recognising a gentleman who was beating his wife with a trombone as the artist who had called in behalf of the waits in the morning – it did occur to the writer at last, to ask himself whether, perchance, there was any connexion between the Christmas boxes of the morning and the eccentric behaviour of their recipients in the evening; whether, again, that eccentric behaviour was in any degree attributable to a misuse of strong waters; and once more, whether the Christmas box system altogether was or was not, in this respect, a nuisance?

Your Informant has no objection to voluntary “tips,” but to mendicancy he has a great objection, and is inclined to think that gratuities should be gratuitously given, and not be extorted by importunity from unwilling donors. Christmastime is a good season for liberality and judicious almsgiving, and were the money annually expended in this country in Christmas boxes collected for some benevolent object, the sum would be of such magnitude as to provide the means of carrying out some great national work of philanthropy, and perhaps also it might happen, that this money, being diverted into other and worthier channels, the annual return of Christmas might be attended by a lessened display of drunkenness in our public streets.

Memoirs

of an Adopted Son

All the Year Round, Volume 5, page 90

1

Circumstances

Which Preceded His Birth

Towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, there stood on a rock in the sea, near a fishing village on the coast of Brittany, a ruined Tower with a very bad reputation. No mortal was known to have inhabited it within the memory of living man. The one tenant whom Tradition associated with the occupation of the place, at a remote period, had moved into it from the infernal regions, nobody knew why – had lived in it, nobody knew how long – and had quitted possession, nobody knew when. Under such circumstances, nothing was more natural than that this unearthly Individual should give a name to his residence. For which reason, the building was thereafter known to all the neighbourhood round as Satanstower.

Early in the year seventeen hundred, the inhabitants of the village were startled, one night, by seeing the red gleam of a fire in the Tower, and by smelling, in the same direction, a preternaturally strong odour of fried fish. The next morning, the fishermen who passed by the building in their boats, were amazed to find that a stranger had taken up his abode in it. Judging of him at a distance, he seemed to be a fine tall stout fellow: he was dressed in fisherman’s costume, and he had a new boat of his own, moored comfortably in a cleft of the rock. If he had inhabited a place of decent reputation, his neighbours would have immediately made his acquaintance – but, under existing circumstances, all they could venture to do was to watch him in silence.

The first day passed, and, though it was fine weather, he made no use of his boat. The second day followed, with a continuance of the fine weather, and still he was as idle as before. On the third day, a violent storm kept all the boats of the village on the beach – and, in the midst of the tempest, away went the man of the Tower to make his first fishing experiment in strange waters! He and his boat came back safe and sound, in a lull of the storm; and the villagers watching on the cliff above, saw him carrying the fish up, by great basketfuls, to his Tower. No such haul had ever fallen to the lot of any one of them – and the stranger had taken it in a whole gale of wind!

Upon this, the inhabitants of the village called a council. The lead in the debate was assumed by a smart, young fellow, a fisherman named Poulailler, who declared that the stranger at the Tower was of infernal origin, and boldly denounced him before the whole meeting as a Fiend Fisherman.

The opinion thus expressed, proved to be the opinion of the entire audience – with the one exception of the village priest. The priest said, “Gently, my sons. Don’t make sure about the man of the Tower, before Sunday. Wait and see if he comes to church.”

“And if he doesn’t come to church?” asked all the fishermen, in a breath.

“In that case,” replied the priest, “I will excommunicate him – and then, my children, you may call him what you like.”

Sunday came; and no sign of the stranger darkened the church doors. He was excommunicated, accordingly. The whole village forthwith adopted Poulailler’s idea; and called the man of the Tower by the name which Poulailler had given him – “The Fiend Fisherman.”

These strong proceedings produced not the slightest apparent effect on the diabolical personage who had occasioned them. He persisted in remaining idle when the weather was fine; in going out to fish when no other boat in the place dare put out to sea; and in coming back again to his solitary dwelling place, with his nets full, his boat uninjured, and himself alive and hearty. He made no attempts to buy and sell with anybody; he kept steadily away from the village; he lived on fish of his own preternaturally strong frying; and he never spoke to a living soul – with the solitary exception of Poulailler himself. One fine evening, when the young man was rowing home past the Tower, the Fiend Fisherman darted out on to the rock – said, “Thank you, Poulailler, for giving me a name” – bowed politely – and darted in again. The young fisherman felt the words run cold down the marrow of his back; and whenever he was at sea again, he gave the Tower a wide berth from that day forth.

Time went on – and an important event occurred in Poulailler’s life. He was engaged to be married. On the day, when his betrothal was publicly made known, his friends clustered noisily about him on the fishing jetty of the village to offer their congratulations. While they were all in full cry, a strange voice suddenly made itself heard through the confusion, which silenced everybody in an instant. The crowd fell back, and disclosed the Fiend Fisherman sauntering up the jetty. It was the first time he had ever set foot – cloven foot – within the precincts of the village.

“Gentlemen,” said the Fiend Fisherman, “where is my friend, Poulailler?” He put the question with perfect politeness; he looked remarkably well in his fisherman’s costume; he exhaled, in the most appetising manner, a relishing odour of fried fish; he had a cordial nod for the men, and a sweet smile for the women – but, with all these personal advantages, everybody fell back from him, and nobody answered his question. The coldness of the popular reception, however, did not in any way abash him. He looked about for Poulailler wiih searching eyes, discovered the place in which he was standing, and addressed him in the friendliest manner.

“So you are going to be married?” remarked the Fiend Fisherman.

“What’s that to you?” said Poulailler. He was inwardly terrified, but outwardly gruff – not an uncommon combination of circumstances with men of his class, in his mental situation.

“My friend,” pursued the Fiend Fisherman, “I have not forgotten your polite attention in giving me a name; and I come here to requite it. You will have a family, Poulailler; and your first child will be a boy. I propose to make that boy my Adopted Son.”

The marrow of Poulailler’s back became awfully cold – but he grew gruffer than ever, in spite of his back.

“You won’t do anything of the sort,” he replied. “If I have the largest family in France, no child of mine shall ever go near you.”

“I shall adopt your firstborn for all that,” persisted the Fiend Fisherman. “Poulailler! I wish you good morning. Ladies and gentlemen! the same to all of you.”

With those words, he withdrew from the jetty; and the marrow of Poulailler’s back recovered its temperature.

The next morning was stormy; and all the village expected to see the boat from the Tower put out, as usual, to sea. Not a sign of it appeared. Later in the day, the rock on which the building stood was examined from a distance. Neither boat nor nets were in their customary places. At night the red gleam of the fire was missed for the first time. The Fiend Fisherman had gone! He had announced his intentions on the jetty, and had disappeared. What did this mean? Nobody knew.

On Poulailler’s wedding day, a portentous circumstance recalled the memory of the diabolical stranger, and, as a matter of course, seriously discomposed the bridegroom’s back. At the moment when the marriage ceremony was complete, a relishing odour of fried fish stole into the nostrils of the company, and a voice from invisible lips said: “Keep up your spirits, Poulailler; I have not forgotten my promise!”

A year later, Madame Poulailler was confined, and a repetition of the portentous circumstance took place. Poulailler was waiting in the kitchen to hear how matters ended upstairs. The nurse came in with a baby. “Which is it?” asked the happy father; “girl or boy?” Before the nurse could answer, an odour of supernaturally fried fish filled the kitchen; and a voice from invisible lips replied: “A boy, Poulailler – and I’ve got him!”

Such were the circumstances under which the subject of this Memoir was introduced to the joys and sorrows of mortal existence.

2

His Boyhood and Early Life

When a boy is born under auspices which lead his parents to suppose that, while the bodily part of him is safe at home; the spiritual part is subjected to a course of infernal tuition elsewhere – what are his father and mother to do with him? They must do the best they can – which was exactly what Poulailler and his wife did with the hero of these pages.

In the first place, they had him christened instantly. It was observed with horror that his infant face was distorted with grimaces, and that his infant voice roared with a preternatural lustiness of tone the moment the priest touched him. The first thing he asked for, when he learnt to speak, was “fried fish;” and the first place he wanted to go to, when he learnt to walk, was the diabolical Tower on the rock. “He won’t learn anything,” said the master, when he was old enough to go to school. “Thrash him,” said Poulailler – and the master thrashed him. “He won’t come to his first communion,” said the priest. “Thrash him,” said Poulailler – and the priest thrashed him. The farmers’ orchards were robbed; the neighbouring rabbit warrens were depopulated; linen was stolen from the gardens, and nets were torn on the beach. “The deuce take Poulailler’s boy,” was the general cry. “The deuce has got him,” was Poulailler’s answer. “And yet he is a nice-looking boy,” said Madame Poulailler. And he was – as tall, as strong, as handsome a young fellow, as could be seen in all France. “Let us pray for him,” said Madame Poulailler. “Let us thrash him,” said her husband. “Our son has been thrashed till all the sticks in the neighbourhood are broken,” pleaded his mother. “We will try him with the rope’s-end next,” retorted his father; “he shall go to sea and live in an atmosphere of thrashing. Our son shall be a cabin boy.” It was all one to Poulailler Junior – he knew as well as his father who had adopted him – he had been instinctively conscious from infancy of the Fiend Fisherman’s interest in his welfare – he cared for no earthly discipline – and a cabin boy he became at ten years old.

After two years of the rope’s-end (applied quite ineffectually), the subject of this Memoir robbed his captain, and ran away in an English port. London became the next scene of his adventures. At twelve years old, he persuaded society in the Metropolis that he was the forsaken natural son of a French duke. British benevolence, after blindly providing for him for four years, opened its eyes and found him out at the age of sixteen; upon which he returned to France, and entered the army in the capacity of drummer. At eighteen, he deserted, and had a turn with the gypsies. He told fortunes, he conjured, he danced on the tightrope, he acted, he sold quack medicines, he altered his mind again, and returned to the army. Here he fell in love with the vivandière of his new regiment. The sergeant major of the company, touched by the same amiable weakness, naturally resented his attentions to the lady. Poulailler (perhaps unjustifiably) asserted himself by boxing his officer’s ears. Out flashed the swords on both sides, and in went Poulailler’s blade through and through the tender heart of the sergeant major. The frontier was close at hand. Poulailler wiped his sword, and crossed it.

Sentence of death was recorded against him in his absence. When society has condemned us to die, if we are men of any spirit how are we to return the compliment? By condemning society to keep us alive – or, in other words, by robbing right and left for a living. Poulailler’s destiny was now accomplished. He was picked out to be the Greatest Thief of his age; and when Fate summoned him to his place in the world, he stepped forward and took it. His life hitherto had been merely the life of a young scamp – he was now to do justice to the diabolical father who had adopted him, and to expand to the proportions of a full-grown Robber.

His first exploits were performed in Germany. They showed such novelty of combination, such daring, such dexterity, and, even in his most homicidal moments, such irresistible gaiety and good humour, that a band of congenial spirits gathered about him in no time. As commander-in-chief of the Thieves’ army, his popularity never wavered. His weaknesses – and what illustrious man is without them? – were three in number. First weakness – he was extravagantly susceptible to the charms of the fair sex. Second weakness – he was perilously fond of practical jokes. Third weakness (inherited from his adopted parent) – his appetite was insatiable in the matter of fried fish. As for the merits to set against these defects, some have been noticed already, and others will appear immediately. Let it merely be premised, in this place, that he was one of the handsomest men of his time, that he dressed superbly, and that he was capable of the most exalted acts of generosity wherever a handsome woman was concerned – let this be understood, to begin with; and let us now enter on the narrative of his last exploit in Germany before he returned to France. This adventure is something more than a mere specimen of his method of workmanship – it proved, in the future, to be the fatal event of his life.

On a Monday in the week, he had stopped on the highway, and robbed of all his valuables and all his papers, an Italian nobleman – the Marquis Petrucci of Sienna. On Tuesday, he was ready for another stroke of business. Posted on the top of a steep hill, he watched the road which wound up to the summit on one side, while his followers were ensconced on the road which led down from it on the other. The prize expected, in this case, was the travelling carriage (with a large sum of money inside) of the Baron de Kirbergen.

Before long, Poulailler discerned the carriage afar off, at the bottom of the hill, and in advance of it, ascending the eminence, two ladies on foot. They were the Baron’s daughters – Wilhelmina, a fair beauty; Frederica, a brunette – both lovely, both accomplished, both susceptible, both young. Poulailler sauntered down the hill to meet the fascinating travellers. He looked – bowed – introduced himself – and fell in love with Wilhelmina on the spot. Both the charming girls acknowledged in the most artless manner that confinement to the carriage had given them the fidgets, and that they were walking up the hill to try the remedy of gentle exercise. Poulailler’s heart was touched, and Poulailler’s generosity to the sex was roused in the nick of time. With a polite apology to the young ladies, he ran back, by a short cut, to the ambush on the other side of the hill in which his men were posted. “Gentlemen!” cried the generous Thief, “in the charming name of Wilhelmina de Kirbergen, I charge you all, let the Baron’s carriage pass free.” The band was not susceptible – the band demurred. Poulailler knew them. He had appealed to their hearts in vain – he now appealed to their pockets. “Gentlemen!” he resumed, “excuse my momentary misconception of your sentiments, Here is my one half share of the Marquis Petrucci’s property. If I divide it among you, will you let the carriage pass free?” The band knew the value of money – and accepted the terms. Poulailler rushed back up the hill, and arrived at the top just in time to hand the young ladies into the carriage. “Charming man!” said the white Wilhelmina to the brown Frederica, as they drove off. Innocent soul! what would she have said if she had known that her personal attractions had saved her father’s property? Was she ever to see the charming man again? Yes: she was to see him the next day – and, more than that, Fate was hereafter to link her fast to the robber’s life and the robber’s doom.

Confiding the direction of the band to his first lieutenant, Poulailler followed the carriage on horseback; and ascertained the place of the Baron’s residence that night.

The next morning a superbly dressed stranger knocked at the door. “What name, sir?” said the servant. “The Marquis Petrucci of Sienna,” replied Poulailler. “How are the young ladies after their journey?” The Marquis was shown in, and introduced to the Baron. The Baron was naturally delighted to receive a brother nobleman – Miss Wilhelmina was modestly happy to see the charming man again – Miss Frederica was affectionately pleased on her sister’s account. Not being of a disposition to lose time where his affections were concerned, Poulailler expressed his sentiments to the beloved object that evening. The next morning he had an interview with the Baron, at which he produced the papers which proved him to be the Marquis. Nothing could be more satisfactory to the mind of the most anxious parent – the two noblemen embraced. They were still in each other’s arms, when a second stranger knocked at the door. What name, sir?” said the servant. “The Marquis Petrucci of Sienna,” replied the stranger. “Impossible!” said the servant; “his lordship is now in the house.” “Show me in, scoundrel,” cried the visitor. The servant submitted, and the two Marquises stood face to face. Poulailler’s composure was not shaken in the least; he had come first to the house, and he had got the papers. “You are the villain who robbed me!” cried the true Petrucci. “You are drunk, mad, or an impostor,” retorted the false Petrucci. “Send to Florence, where I am known,” exclaimed one of the Marquises, apostrophising the Baron. “Send to Florence by all means,” echoed the other, addressing himself to the Baron also. “Gentlemen,” replied the noble Kirbergen, “I will do myself the honour of taking your advice” – and he sent to Florence accordingly.

Before the messenger had advanced ten miles on his journey, Poulailler had said two words in private to the susceptible Wilhelmina – and the pair eloped from the baronial residence that night. Once more the subject of this Memoir crossed the frontier and re-entered France. Indifferent to the attractions of rural life, he forthwith established himself with the beloved object in Paris. In that superb city he met with his strangest adventures, performed his boldest achievements, committed his most prodigious robberies, and, in a word, did himself and his infernal patron the fullest justice, in the character of the Fiend Fisherman’s Adopted Son.

3

His Career in Paris

Once established in the French metropolis, Poulailler planned and executed that vast system of perpetual robbery and occasional homicide which made him the terror and astonishment of all Paris. Indoors, as well as out, his good fortune befriended him. No domestic anxieties harassed his mind and diverted him from the pursuit of his distinguished public career. The attachment of the charming creature with whom he had eloped from Germany survived the discovery that the Marquis Petrucci was Poulailler the robber. True to the man of her choice, the devoted Wilhelmina shared his fortunes, and kept his house. And why not, if she loved him? – in the name of Cupid, why not?

Joined by picked men from his German followers, and by new recruits gathered together in Paris, Poulailler now set society and its safeguards at flat defiance. Cartouche himself was his inferior in audacity and cunning. In course of time the whole city was panic-stricken by the new robber and his band – the very Boulevards were deserted after nightfall. Monsieur Hérault, lieutenant of police of the period, in despair of laying hands on Poulailler by any other means, at last offered a reward of a hundred pistoles and a place in his office worth two thousand livres a year to any one who would apprehend the robber alive. The bills were posted all over Paris – and, the next morning, they produced the very last result in the world which the lieutenant of police could possibly have anticipated.

Whilst Monsieur Hérault was at breakfast in his study, the Count de Villeneuve was announced as wishing to speak to him. Knowing the Count by name only, as belonging to an ancient family ia Provence, or in Languedoc, Monsieur Hérault ordered him to be shown in. A perfect gentleman appeared, dressed with an admirable mixture of magnificence and good taste. “I have something for your private ear, sir,” said the Count. “Will you give orders that no one must be allowed to disturb us?” Monsieur Hérault gave the orders. “May I inquire, Count, what your business is?” he asked, when the door was closed. “To earn the reward you offer for taking Poulailler,” answered the Count. “I am Poulailler.” Before Monsieur Hérault could open his lips, the robber produced a pretty little dagger and some rose-coloured silk cord. “The point of this dagger is poisoned,” he observed; “and one scratch with it, my dear sir, would be the death of you.” With these words, Poulailler gagged the lieutenant of police, bound him to his chair with the rose-coloured cord, and lightened his writing desk of one thousand pistoles. “I’ll take money down, instead of taking the place in the office which you kindly offer,” said Poulailler. “Don’t trouble yourself to see me to the door. Good morning!”

A few weeks later, while Monsieur Hérault was still the popular subject of ridicule throughout Paris, business took Poulailler on the road to Lille and Cambrai. The only inside passenger in the coach besides himself was the venerable Dean Potter, of Brussels. They fell into talk on the one interesting subject of the time – not the weather, but Poulailler. “It’s a disgrace, sir, to the police,” said the Dean, “that such a miscreant is still at large. I shall be returning to Paris, by this road, in ten days’ time, and I shall call on Monsieur Hérault, to suggest a plan of my own for catching the scoundrel.” “May I ask what it is,” said Poulailler. “Excuse me,” replied the Dean; “you are a stranger, sir, – and, moreover, I wish to keep the merit of suggesting the plan to myself.” “Do you think the lieutenant of police will see you,” asked Poulailler; “he is not accessible to strangers, since the miscreant you speak of played him that trick at his own breakfast table.” “He will see Dean Potter, of Brussels,” was the reply, delivered with the slightest possible tinge of offended dignity. “Oh, unquestionably!” said Poulailler, – “pray pardon me.” “Willingly, sir,” said the Dean – and the conversation flowed into other channels.

Nine days later the wounded pride of Monsieur Hérault was soothed by a very remarkable letter. It was signed by one of Poulailler’s band, who offered himself as King’s evidence, in the hope of obtaining a pardon. The letter stated, that the venerable Dean Potter had been waylaid and murdered by Poulailler, and that the robber, with his customary audacity, was about to re-enter Paris by the Lisle coach, the next day, disguised in the Dean’s own clothes, and furnished with the Dean’s own papers. Monsieur Hérault took his precautions without losing a moment. Picked men were stationed, with their orders, at the barrier through which the coach must pass to enter Paris; while the lieutenant of police waited at his office, in the company of two French gentlemen who could speak to the Dean’s identity, in the event of Poulailler’s impudently persisting in the assumption of his victim’s name. At the appointed hour, the coach appeared, and out of it got a man in the Dean’s costume. He was arrested in spite of his protestations; the papers of the murdered Potter were found on him, and he was dragged off to the police office in triumph. The door opened, and the posse comitatus entered with the prisoner. Instantly the two witnesses burst out with a cry of recognition, and turned indignantly on the lieutenant of police. “Gracious Heaven, sir, what have you done!” they exclaimed in horror; “this is not Poulailler – here is our venerable friend; here is the Dean himself! At the same moment, a servant entered with a letter. “Dean Potter. To the care of Monsieur Hérault, Lieutenant of Police.” The letter was expressed in these words:

Venerable sir,

Profit by the lesson I have given you. Be a Christian for the future, and never again try to injure a man unless he tries to injure you.

Entirely yours,

Poulailler

These feats of cool audacity were matched by others, in which his generosity to the sex asserted itself as magnanimously as ever.

Hearing, one day, that large sums of money were kept in the house of a great lady, one Madame de Brienne, whose door was guarded, in anticipation of a visit from the famous thief, by a porter of approved trustworthiness and courage, Poulailler undertook to rob her, in spite of her precautions, and succeeded. With a stout pair of leather straps and buckles in his pocket, and with two of his band, disguised as a coachman and footman, he followed Madame de Brienne one night to the theatre. Just before the close of the performance, the lady’s coachman and footman were tempted away for five minutes by Poulailler’s disguised subordinates to have a glass of wine. No attempt was made to detain them, or to drug their liquor. But, in their absence, Poulailler had slipped under the carriage, had hung his leather straps round the pole – one to hold by, and one to support his feet – and, with these simple preparations, was now ready to wait for events. Madame de Brienne entered the carriage – the footman got up behind – Poulailler hung himself horizontally under the pole, and was driven home with them, under those singular circumstances. He was strong enough to keep his position, after the carriage had been taken into the coach house; and he only left it when the doors were locked for the night. Provided with food beforehand, he waited patiently, hidden in the coach house, for two days and nights, watching his opportunity of getting into Madame de Brienne’s boudoir.

On the third night, the lady went to a grand ball – the servants relaxed in their vigilance while her back was turned – and Poulailler slipped into the room. He found two thousand louis d’ors, which was nothing like the sum he expected; and a pocketbook, which he took away with him to open at home. It contained some stock warrants for a comparatively trifling amount. Poulailler was far too well off to care about taking them; and far too polite, where a lady was concerned, not to send them back again, under those circumstances. Accordingly, Madame de Brienne received her warrants wiih a note of apology from the polite thief. “Pray excuse my visit to your charming boudoir,” wrote Poulailler, “in consideration of the false reports of your wealth, which alone induced me to enter It. If I had known what your pecuniary circumstances really were, on the honour of a gentleman, Madam, I should have been incapable of robbing you. I cannot return your two thousand louis d’ors by post, as I return your warrants. But if you are at all pressed for money in future, I shall be proud to assist so distinguished a lady by lending her, from my own ample resources, the sum of which I regret to have deprived her on the present occasion.” This letter was shown to royalty at Versailles. It excited the highest admiration of the Court – especially of the ladies. Whenever the robber’s name was mentioned, they indulgently referred to him as the Chevalier de Poulailler. Ah! that was the age of politeness, when good breeding was recognised, even in a thief. Under similar circumstances, who would recognise it now? O tempera! O mores!

On another occasion, Poulailler was out, one night, taking the air and watching his opportunities on the roofs of the houses; a member of the band being posted in the street below to assist him in case of necessity. While in this position, sobs and groans proceeding from an open back-garret window caught his ear. A parapet rose before the window, which enabled him to climb down and look in. Starving children surrounding a helpless mother, and clamouring for food, was the picture that met his eye. The mother was young and beautiful; and Poulailler’s hand impulsively clutched his purse, as a necessary consequence. Before the charitable thief could enter by the window, a man rushed in by the door, with a face of horror; and cast a handful of gold into the lovely mother’s lap. “My honour is gone!” he cried; “but our children are saved! Listen to the circumstances. I met a man in the street below; he was tall and thin; he had a green patch over one eye; he was looking up suspiciously at this house, apparently waiting for somebody. I thought of you – I thought of the children – I seized the suspicious stranger by the collar. Terror overwhelmed him on the spot. ‘Take my watch, my money, and my two valuable gold snuffboxes,’ he said – ‘but spare my life.’ I took them.” “Noble hearted man!” cried Poulailler, appearing at the window. The husband started; the wife screamed; the children hid themselves. “Let me entreat you to be composed,” continued Poulailler. “Sir! I enter on the scene, for the purpose of soothing your uneasy conscience. From your vivid description, I recognise the man whose property is now in your wife’s lap. Resume your mental tranquillity. You have robbed a robber – in other words, you have vindicated society. Accept my congratulations on your restored innocence. The miserable coward whose collar you seized is one of Poulailler’s band. He has lost his stolen property, as the fit punishment, for his disgraceful want of spirit.” “Who are you?” exclaimed the husband. “I am Poulailler,” replied the illustrious man, with the simplicity of an ancient hero. “Take this purse; and set up in business with the contents. There is a prejudice, sir, in favour of honesty. Give prejudice a chance. There was a time when I felt it myself; I regret to feel it no longer. Under all varieties of misfortune, an honest man has his consolation still left. Where is it left? Here!” He struck his heart – and the family fell on their knees before him. “Benefactor of your species!” cried the husband – “how can I show my gratitude?” “You can permit me to kiss the hand of madame,” answered Poulailler. Madame started to her feet, and embraced the generous stranger. “What else can I do?” exclaimed this lovely woman eagerly – “Oh, Heavens! what else?” “You can beg your husband to light me down stairs,” replied Poulailler. He spoke, pressed their hands, dropped a generous tear, and departed. At that touching moment, his own adopted father would not have known him.

This last anecdote closes the record of Poulailler’s career in Paris. The lighter and more agreeable aspects of that career have hitherto been designedly presented, in discreet remembrance of the contrast which the tragic side of the picture must now present. Comedy and Sentiment, twin sisters of French extraction, farewell! Horror enters next on the stage – and enters welcome, in the name of the Fiend Fisherman’s Adopted Son.

4

His Exit from the Scene

The nature of Poulailler’s more serious achievements in the art of robbery may be realised by reference to one terrible fact. In the police records of the period, more than one hundred and fifty men and women are reckoned up as having met their deaths at the hands of Poulailler and his band. It was not the practice of this formidable robber to take life as well as property, unless life happened to stand directly in his way – in which case, he immediately swept off the obstacle without hesitation and without remorse. His deadly determination to rob, which was thus felt by the population in general, was matched by his deadly determination to be obeyed, which was felt by his followers in particular. One of their number, for example, having withdrawn from his allegiance, and having afterwards attempted to betray his leader, was tracked to his hiding place in a cellar, and was there walled up alive in Poulailler’s presence; the robber composing the unfortunate wretch’s epitaph, and scratching it on the wet plaster with his own hand. Years afterwards, the inscription was noticed, when the house fell into the possession of a new tenant, and was supposed to be nothing more than one of the many jests which the famous robber had practised in his time. When the plaster was removed, the skeleton fell out, and testified that Poulailler was in earnest.

To attempt the arrest of such a man as this by tampering with his followers, was practically impossible. No sum of money that could be offered would induce any one of the members of his band to risk the fatal chance of his vengeance. Other means of getting possession of him had been tried, and tried in vain. Five times over, the police had succeeded in tracking him to different hiding places; and on all five occasions, the women – who adored him for his gallantry, his generosity, and his good looks – had helped him to escape. If he had not unconsciously paved the way to his own capture, first by eloping with Mademoiselle Wilhelmina de Kirbergen, and secondly by maltreating her, it is more than doubtful whether the long arm of the law would ever have reached far enough to fasten its grasp on him. As it was, the extremes of love and hatred met at last in the bosom of the devoted Wilhelmina; and the vengeance of a neglected woman accomplished what the whole police force of Paris had been powerless to achieve.

Poulailler, never famous for the constancy of his attachments, had wearied at an early period of the companion of his flight from Germany – but Wilhelmina was one of those women whose affections, once aroused, will not take No for an answer. She persisted in attaching herself to a man who had ceased to love her. Poulailler’s patience became exhausted; he tried twice to rid himself of his unhappy mistress – once by the knife and once by poison – and failed on both occasions. For the third and last time, by way of attempting an experiment, of another kind, he established a rival to drive the German woman out of the house. From that moment his fate was sealed. Maddened by jealous rage, Wilhelmina cast the last fragments of her fondness to the winds. She secretly communicated with the police – and Poulailler met his doom.

A night was appointed with the authorities; and the robber was invited by his discarded mistress to a farewell interview. His contemptuous confidence in her fidelity rendered him careless of his customary precautions. He accepted the appointment; and the two supped together, on the understanding that they were henceforth to be friends, and nothing more. Towards the close of the meal, Poulailler was startled by a ghastly change in the face of his companion.

“What is wrong with you?” he asked.

“A mere trifle,” she answered, looking at her glass of wine. “I can’t help loving you still, badly as you have treated me. You are a dead man, Poulailler – and I shall not survive you.”

The robber started to his feet, and seized a knife on the table.

“You have poisoned me!” he exclaimed.

“No,” she replied. “Poison is my vengeance on myself; not my vengeance on you. You will rise from this table as you sat down to it. But your evening will be finished in prison; and your life will be ended on the Wheel.”

As she spoke the words, the door was burst open by the police, and Poulailler was secured. The same night the poison did its fatal work; and his mistress made atonement with her life for the first, last, act of treachery which had revenged her on the man she loved.

Once safely lodged in the hands of justice, the robber tried to gain time to escape in, by promising to make important disclosures. The manoeuvre availed him nothing. In those days, the Laws of the Land had not yet made acquaintance with the Laws of Humanity. Poulailler was put to the torture – was suffered to recover – was publicly broken on the Wheel – and was taken off it alive, to be cast into a blazing fire. By those murderous means, Society rid itself of a murderous man – and the idlers on the Boulevards took their evening stroll again in recovered security.

Paris had seen the execution of Poulailler – but, if legends are to be trusted, our old friends, the people of the fishing village in Brittany, saw the end of him afterwards. On the day and hour when he perished, the heavens darkened, and a terrible storm arose. Once more, and for a moment only, the gleam of the unearthly fire reddened the windows of the old Tower. Thunder pealed and struck the building into fragments. Lightning flashed incessantly over the ruins; and, in the scorching glare of it, the boat which, in former years, had put off to sea whenever the storm rose highest, was seen to shoot out into the raging ocean from the cleft in the rock – and was discovered, on this final occasion, to be doubly manned. The Fiend Fisherman sat at the helm; his Adopted Son tugged at the oars; and a clamour of diabolical voices, roaring awfully through the roaring storm, wished the pair of them a prosperous voyage.

The Cauldron of Oil

All the Year Round, Volume 5, page 162

About one French league distant from the city of Toulouse, there is a village called Croix-Daurade. In the military history of England, this place is associated with a famous charge of the eighteenth hussars, which united two separate columns of the British army, on the day before the Duke of Wellington fought the battle of Toulouse. In the criminal history of France, the village is memorable as the scene of a daring crime, which was discovered and punished under circumstances sufficiently remarkable to merit preservation in the form of a plain narrative.

1

The Persons of the Drama

In the year seventeen hundred, the resident priest of the village of Croix-Daurade was Monsieur Pierre-Célestin Chaubard. He was a man of no extraordinary energy or capacity, simple in his habits, and sociable in his disposition. His character was irreproachable; he was strictly conscientious in the performance of his duties; and he was universally respected and beloved by all his parishioners.

Among the members of his flock, there was a family named Siadoux. The head of the household, Saturnin Siadoux, had been long established in business at Croix-Daurade as an oil manufacturer, at the period of the events now to be narrated. He had attained the age of sixty, and was a widower. His family consisted of five children – three young men, who helped him in the business, and two daughters – and his nearest living relative was his sister, the widow Mirailhe.

The widow resided principally at Toulouse. Her time in that city was mainly occupied in winding up the business affairs of her deceased husband, which had remained unsettled for a considerable period after his death, through delays in realising certain sums of money owing to his representative. The widow had been left very well provided for – she was still a comely attractive woman – and more than one substantial citizen of Toulouse had shown himself anxious to persuade her into marrying for the second time. But the widow Mirailhe lived on terms of great intimacy and affection with her brother Siadoux and his family; she was sincerely attached to them, and sincerely unwilling, at her age, to deprive her nephews and nieces, by a second marriage, of the inheritance, or even of a portion of the inheritance, which would otherwise fall to them on her death. Animated by these motives, she closed her doors resolutely on all suitors who attempted to pay their court to her, with the one exception of a master butcher of Toulouse, whose name was Cantegrel.

This man was a neighbour of the widow’s, and had made himself useful by assisting her in the business complications which still hung about the realisation of her late husband’s estate. The preference which she showed for the master butcher was, thus far, of the purely negative kind. She gave him no absolute encouragement; she would not for a moment admit that there was the slightest prospect of her ever marrying him – but, at the same time, she continued to receive his visits, and she showed no disposition to restrict the neighbourly intercourse between them, for the future, within purely formal bounds. Under these circumstances, Saturnin Siadoux began to be alarmed, and to think it time to bestir himself. He had no personal acquaintance with Cantegrel, who never visited the village; and Monsieur Chaubard (to whom he might otherwise have applied for advice) was not in a position to give an opinion: the priest and the master butcher did not even know each other by sight. In this difficulty, Siadoux bethought himself of inquiring privately at Toulouse, in the hope of discovering some scandalous passages in Cantegrel’s early life, which might fatally degrade him in the estimation of the widow Mirailhe. The investigations, as usual in such cases, produced rumours and reports in plenty, the greater part of which dated back to a period of the butcher’s life when he had resided in the ancient town of Narbonne. One of these rumours, especially, was of so serious a nature, that Siadoux determined to test the truth or falsehood of it, personally, by travelling to Narbonne. He kept his intention a secret not only from his sister and his daughters, but also from his sons; they were young men, not over patient in their tempers – and he doubted their discretion. Thus, nobody knew his real purpose but himself, when he left home.

His safe arrival at Narbonne was notified in a letter to his family. The letter entered into no particulars relating to his secret errand: it merely informed his children of the day when they might expect him back, and of certain social arrangements which he wished to be made to welcome him on his return. He proposed, on his way home, to stay two days at Castelnaudry, for the purpose of paying a visit to an old friend who was settled there. According to this plan, his return to Croix-Daurade would be deferred until Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of April, when his family might expect to see him about sunset, in good time for supper. He further desired that a little party of friends might be invited to the meal, to celebrate the twenty-sixth of April (which was a feast-day in the village), as well as to celebrate his return. The guests whom he wished to be invited were, first, his sister; secondly, Monsieur Chaubard, whose pleasant disposition made him a welcome guest at all the village festivals; thirdly and fourthly, two neighbours, businessmen like himself, with whom he lived on terms of the friendliest intimacy. That was the party; and the family of Siadoux took especial pains, as the time approached, to provide a supper worthy of the guests, who had all shown the heartiest readiness in accepting their invitations. This was the domestic position, these were the family prospects, on the morning of the twenly-sixth of April a memorable day, for years afterwards, in the village of Croix-Daurade.

2

The Events of the Day

Besides the curacy of the village church, good Monsieur Chaubard held some small ecclesiastical preferment in the cathedral church of St. Stephen at Toulouse. Early in the forenoon of the twenty-sixth, certain matters connected with this preferment took him from his village curacy to the city – a distance which has been already described as not greater than one French league, or between two and three English miles.

After transacting his business, Monsieur Chaubard parted with his clerical brethren, who left him by himself in the sacristy (or vestry) of the church. Before he had quitted the room, in his turn, the beadle entered it, and inquired for the Abbé de Mariotte, one of the officiating priests attached to the cathedral.

“The Abbé has just gone out,” replied Monsieur Chaubard. “Who wants him?”

“A respectable looking man,” said the beadle. “I thought he seemed to be in some distress of mind, when he spoke to me.”

“Did he mention his business with the Abbé?”

“Yes, sir; he expressed himself as anxious to make his confession immediately.”

“In that case,” said Monsieur Chaubard, “I may be of use to him in the Abbé’s absence – for I have my authority to act here as confessor. Let us go into the church, and see if this person feels disposed to accept my services.”

When they went into the church, they found the man walking backwards and forwards in a restless, disordered manner. His looks were so strikingly suggestive of some serious mental perturbation, that Monsieur Chaubard found it no easy matter to preserve his composure, when he first addressed himself to the stranger.

“I am sorry,” he began, “that the Abbé de Mariotte is not here to offer you his services –”

“I want to make my confession,” said the man, looking about him vacantly, as if the priest’s words bad not attracted his attention.

“You can do so at once, if you please,” said Monsieur Chaubard. “I am attached to this church, and I possess the necessary authority to receive confessions in it. Perhaps, however, you are personally acquainted with the Abbé de Mariotte? Perhaps you would prefer waiting –”

“No!” said the man, roughly. “I would as soon, or sooner, confess to a stranger.”

“In that case,” replied Monsieur Chaubard, “be so good as to follow me.”

He led the way to the confessional. The beadle, whose curiosity was excited, waited a little, and looked after them. In a few minutes, he saw the curtains, which were sometimes used to conceal the face of the officiating priest, suddenly drawn. The penitent knelt with his back turned to the church. There was literally nothing to see – but the beadle waited nevertheless, in expectation of the end.

After a long lapse of time, the curtain was withdrawn, and priest and penitent left the confessional.

The change which the interval had worked in Monsieur Chaubard was so extraordinary, that the beadle’s attention was altogether withdrawn, in the interest of observing it, from the man who had made the confession. He did not remark by which door the stranger left the church – his eyes were fixed on Monsieur Chaubard. The priest’s naturally ruddy face was as white as if he had just risen from a long sickness – he looked straight before him, with a stare of terror and he left the church as hurriedly as if he had been a man escaping from prison; left it without a parting word, or a farewell look, although he was noted for his courtesy to his inferiors on all ordinary occasions.

“Good Monsieur Chaubard has heard more than he bargained for,” said the beadle, wandering back to the empty confessional, with an interest which he had never felt in it till that moment.

The day wore on as quietly as usual in the village of Croix-Daurade. At the appointed time, the supper table was laid for the guests in the house of Saturnin Siadoux. The widow Mirailhe, and the two neighbours, arrived a little before sunset. Monsieur Chaubard, who was usually punctual, did not make his appearance with them; and when the daughters of Saturnin Siadoux looked out from the upper windows, they saw no signs on the high road of their father’s return.

Sunset came – and still neither Siadoux nor the priest appeared. The little party sat waiting round the table, and waited in vain. Before long, a message was sent up from the kitchen, representing that the supper must be eaten forthwith, or be spoilt; and the company began to debate the two alternatives, of waiting, or not waiting, any longer.

“It is my belief,” said the widow Mirailhe, “that my brother is not coming home tonight. When Monsieur Chaubard joins us, we had better sit down to supper.”

“Can any accident have happened to my father?” asked one of the two daughters, anxiously.

“God forbid!” said the widow.

“God forbid!” repeated the two neighbours, looking expectantly at the empty supper table.

“It has been a wretched day for travelling,” said Louis, the eldest son.

“It rained in torrents, all yesterday,” added Thomas, the second son.

“And your father’s rheumatism, makes him averse to travelling in wet weather,” suggested the widow, thoughtfully.

“Very true!” said the first of the two neighbours, shaking his head piteously at his passive knife and fork.

Another message came up from the kitchen, and peremptorily forbade the company to wait any longer.

“But where is Monsieur Chaubard?” said the widow. “Has he been taking a journey too? Why is he absent? Has anybody seen him today?”

“I have seen him today,” said the youngest son, who had not spoken yet. This young man’s name was Jean; he was little given to talking, but he had proved himself, on various domestic occasions, to be the quickest and most observant member of the family.

“Where did you see him?” asked the widow.

“I met him, this morning, on his way into Toulouse.”

“He has not fallen ill, I hope? Did he look out of sorts when you met him?”

“He was in excellent health and spirits,” said Jean. “I never saw him look better –”

“And I never saw him look worse,” said the second of the neighbours, striking into the conversation with the aggressive fretfulness of a hungry man.

“What! this morning?” cried Jean, in astonishment.

“No; this afternoon,” said the neighbour. “I saw him going into our church here. He was as white as our plates will be – when they come up. And what is almost as extraordinary, he passed without taking the slightest notice of me.”

Jean relapsed into his customary silence. It was getting dark; the clouds had gathered while the company had been talking; and, at the first pause in the conversation, the rain, falling again in torrents, made itself drearily audible.

“Dear, dear me!” said the widow. “If it was not raining so hard, we might send somebody to inquire after good Monsieur Chaubard.”

“I’ll go and inquire,” said Thomas Siadoux. “It’s not five minutes’ walk. Have up the supper; I’ll take a cloak with me; and if our excellent Monsieur Chaubard is out of his bed, I’ll bring him back, to answer for himself.”

With those words he left the room. The supper was put on the table forthwith. The hungry neighbour disputed with nobody from that moment, and the melancholy neighbour recovered his spirits.

On reaching the priest’s house, Thomas Siadoux found him sitting alone in his study. He started to his feet, with every appearance of the most violent alarm, when the young man entered the room.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Thomas; “I am afraid I have startled you.”

“What do you want?” asked Monsieur Chaubard, in a singularly abrupt, bewildered manner.

“Have you forgotten, sir, that this is the night of our supper?” remonstrated Thomas. “My father has not come back; and we can only suppose –”

At those words the priest dropped into his chair again, and trembled from head to foot. Amazed to the last degree by this extraordinary reception of his remonstrance, Thomas Siadoux remembered, at the same time, that he had engaged to bring Monsieur Chaubard back with him; and he determined to finish his civil speech, as if nothing had happened.

“We are all of opinion,” he resumed, “that the weather has kept my father on the road. But that is no reason, sir, why the supper should be wasted, or why you should not make one of us, as you promised. Here is a good warm cloak –”

“I can’t come,” said the priest. “I’m ill; I’m in bad spirits; I’m not fit to go out.” He sighed bitterly, and hid his face in his hands.

“Don’t say that, sir,” persisted Thomas. “If you are out of spirits, let us try to cheer you. And you, in your turn, will enliven us. They are all waiting for you at home. Don’t refuse, sir,” pleaded the young man, “or we shall think we have offended you, in some way. You have always been a good friend to our family –”

Monsieur Chaubard again rose from his chair, with a second change of manner, as extraordinary and as perplexing as the first. His eyes moistened as if the tears were rising in them; he took the hand of Thomas Siadoux, and pressed it long and warmly in his own. There was a curious mixed expression of pity and fear in the look which he now fixed on the young man.

“Of all the days in the year,” he said, very earnestly, “don’t doubt my friendship today. Ill as I am, I will make one of the supper party, for your sake –”

“And for my father’s sake?” added Thomas, persuasively.

“Let us go to the supper,” said the priest.

Thomas Siadoux wrapped the cloak round him, and they left the house.

Every one at the table noticed the change in Monsieur Chaubard. He accounted for it by declaring, confusedly, that he was suffering from nervous illness; and then added that he would do his best, notwithstanding, to promote the social enjoyments of the evening. His talk was fragmentary, and his cheerfulness was sadly forced; but he contrived, with these drawbacks, to take his part in the conversation – except in the case when it happened to turn on the absent master of the house. Whenever the name of Saturnin Siadoux was mentioned – either by the neighbours, who politely regretted that he was not present; or by the family, who naturally talked about the resting place which he might have chosen for the night – Monsieur Chaubard either relapsed into blank silence, or abruptly changed the topic. Under these circumstances, the company, by whom he was respected and beloved, made the necessary allowances for his state of health; the only person among them, who showed no desire to cheer the priest’s spirits, and to humour him in his temporary fretfulness, being the silent younger son of Saturnin Siadoux.

Both Louis and Thomas noticed that, from the moment when Monsieur Chaubard’s manner first betrayed his singular unwillingness to touch on the subject of their father’s absence, Jean fixed his eyes on the priest, with an expression of suspicious attention; and never looked away from him for the rest of the evening. The young man’s absolute silence at table did not surprise his brothers, for they were accustomed to his taciturn habits. But the sullen distrust betrayed in his close observations of the honoured guest and friend of the family, surprised and angered them. The priest himself seemed once or twice to be aware of the scrutiny to which he was subjected, and to feel uneasy and offended, as he naturally might. He abstained, however, from openly noticing Jean’s strange behaviour; and Louis and Thomas were bound, therefore, in common politeness to abstain from noticing it also.

The inhabitants of Croix-Daurade kept early hours. Towards eleven o’clock the company rose and separated for the night. Except the two neighbours, nobody had enjoyed the supper, and even the two neighbours having eaten their fill, were as glad to get home as the rest. In the little confusion ot parting. Monsieur Chaubard completed the astonishment of the guests at the extraordinary change in him, by slipping away alone, without waiting to bid anybody good night.

The widow Mirailhe and her nieces withdrew to their bedrooms, and left the three brothers by themselves in the parlour.

“Jean,” said Thomas Siadoux, “I have a word to say to you. “You stared at our good Monsieur Chaubard in a very offensive manner all through the evening. What did you mean by it?”

“Wait till tomorrow,” said Jean; “and perhaps I may tell you.”

He lit his candle, and left them. Both the brothers observed that his hand trembled, and that his manner never very winning was, on that night more serious and more unsociable than usual.

3

The Younger Brother

When post time came on the morning of the twenty-seventh, no letter arrived from Saturnin Siadoux. On consideration, the family interpreted this circumstance in a favourable light. If the master of the house had not written to them, it followed, surely, that he meant to make writing unnecessary by returning on that day.

As the hours passed, the widow and her nieces looked out, from time to time, for the absent man. Towards noon, they observed a little assembly of people approaching the village. Ere long, on a nearer view, they recognised at the head of the assembly, the chief magistrate of Toulouse, in his official dress. He was accompanied by his Assessor (also in his official dress), by an escort of archers, and by certain subordinates attached to the town hall. These last appeared to be carrying some burden, which was hidden from view by the escort of archers. The procession stopped at the house of Saturnin Siadoux; and the two daughters hastening to the door, to discover what had happened – met the burden which the men were carrying, and saw, stretched on a litter, the dead body of their father.

The corpse had been found that morning on the banks of river Lers. It was stabbed in eleven places with knife or dagger wounds. None of the valuables about the dead man’s person had been touched; his watch and his money were still in his pockets. Whoever had murdered him, had murdered him for vengeance, not for gain.

Some time elapsed before even the male members of the family were sufficiently composed to hear what the officers of justice had to say to them. When this result had been at length achieved, and when the necessary inquiries had been made, no information of any kind was obtained which pointed to the murderer, in the eye of the law. After expressing his sympathy, and promising that every available means should be tried to effect the discovery of the criminal, the chief magistrate gave his orders to his escort, and withdrew.

When night came the sister and the daughters of the murdered man retired to the upper part of the house, exhausted by the violence of their grief. The three brothers were left once more alone in the parlour, to speak together of the awful calamity which had befallen them. They were of hot Southern blood, and they looked on one another with a Southern thirst for vengeance in their tearless eyes.

The silent younger son was now the first to open his lips.

“You charged me, yesterday,” he said to his brother Thomas, “with looking strangely at Monsieur Chaubard all the evening; and I answered that I might tell you why I looked at him when tomorrow came. tomorrow has come, and I am ready to tell you.”

He waited a little, and lowered his voice to a whisper when he spoke again.

“When Monsieur Chaubard was at pur supper table last night,” he said, “I had it in my mind that something had happened to our father, and that the priest knew it.”

The two elder brothers looked at him in speechless astonishment.

“Our father has been brought back to us a murdered man!” Jean went on, still in a whisper. “I tell you, Louis – and you, Thomas – that the priest knows who murdered him.”

Louis and Thomas shrank from their younger brother, as if he had spoken blasphemy.

“Listen,” said Jean. “No clue has been found to the secret of the murder. The magistrate has promised us to do his best – but I saw in his face that he had little hope. We must make the discovery ourselves – or our father’s blood will have cried to us for vengeance, and cried in vain. Remember that – and mark my next words. You heard me say yesterday evening, that I had met Monsieur Chaubard on his way to Toulouse in excellent health and spirits. You heard our old friend and neighbour at the supper table contradict me, and declare that he had seen the priest, some hours later, go into our church here with the face of a panic-stricken man. You saw, Thomas, how he behaved when you went to fetch him to our house. You saw, Louis, what his looks were like when he came in. The change was noticed by everybody – what was the cause of it? I saw the cause in the priest’s own face, when our father’s name turned up in the talk round the supper table. Did Monsieur Chaubard join in that talk? He was the only person present who never joined in it once. Did he change it, on a sudden, whenever it came his way? It came his way four times; and four times he changed it – trembling, stammering, turning whiter and whiter, but still, as true as the Heaven above us, shifting the talk off himself, every time! Are you men? Have you brains in your heads? Don’t you see, as I see, what this leads to? On my salvation I swear it – the priest knows the hand that killed our father!”

The faces of the two elder brothers darkened vindictively, as the conviction of the truth fastened itself on their minds.

“How could he know it?” they inquired, eagerly.

“He must tell us himself,” said Jean.

“And if he hesitates – if he refuses to open his lips?”

“We must open them by main force.”

They drew their chairs together after that last answer, and consulted, for some time, in whispers.

When the consultation was over, the brothers rose and went into the room where the dead body of their father was laid out. The three kissed him, in turn, on the forehead then took hands together, and looked, meaningly, in each other’s faces – then separated. Louis and Thomas put on their hats, and went at once to the priest’s residence; while Jean withdrew by himself to the great room at the back of the house, which was used for the purposes of the oil factory.

Only one of the workmen was left in the place. He was watching an immense cauldron of boiling linseed oil.

“You can go home,” said Jean, patting the man kindly on the shoulder. “There is no hope of a night’s rest for me, after the affliction that has befallen us – I will take your place at the cauldron. Go home, my good fellow – go home.”

The man thanked him, and withdrew. Jean followed, and satisfied himself that the workman had really left the house. He then returned, and sat down by the boiling cauldron.

Meanwhile, Louis and Thomas presented themselves at the priest’s house. He had not yet retired to bed, and he received them kindly – but with the same extraordinary agitation in his face and manner which had surprised all who saw him on the previous day. The brothers were prepared beforehand with an answer, when he inquired what they wanted of him. They replied immediately that the shock of their father’s horrible death had so seriously affected their aunt and their eldest sister, that it was feared the minds of both might give way, unless spiritual consolation and assistance were afforded to them that night. The unhappy priest – always faithful and self-sacrificing where the duties of his ministry were in question – at once rose to accompany the young men back to the house. He even put on his surplice, and took the crucifix with him, to impress his words of comfort all the more solemnly on the afflicted women whom he was called on to succour.

Thus innocent of all suspicion of the conspiracy to which he had fallen a victim, he was taken into the room where Jean sat waiting by the cauldron of oil; and the door was locked behind him.

Before he could speak, Thomas Siadoux openly avowed the truth.

“It is we three who want you,” he said – “not our aunt, and not our sister. If you answer our questions truly, you have nothing to fear. If you refuse –” He stopped, and looked toward Jean and the boiling cauldron.

Never, at the best of times, a resolute man; deprived, since the day before, of such resources of energy as he possessed, by the mental suffering which he had undergone in secret the unfortunate priest trembled from head to foot, as the three brothers closed round him. Louis took the crucifix from him, and held it; Thomas forced him to place his right hand on it; Jean stood in front of him and put the questions.

“Our father has been brought home, a murdered man,” he said. “Do you know who killed him?”

The priest hesitated; and the two elder brothers moved him nearer to the cauldron.

“Answer us, on peril of your life,” said Jean. “Say, with your hand on the blessed crucifix, do you know the man who killed our father?”

“I do know him.”

“When did you make the discovery?”

“Yesterday.”

“Where?”

“At Toulouse.”

“Name the murderer.”

At those words, the priest closed his hand fast on the crucifix, and rallied his sinking courage.

“Never!” he said, firmly. “The knowledge I possess was obtained in the confessional. The secrets of the confessional are sacred. If I betray them, I commit sacrilege. I will die first!”

“Think!” said Jean. “If you keep silence, you screen the murderer. If you keep silence, you are the murderer’s accomplice. We have sworn over our father’s dead body to avenge him – if you keep silence, we will avenge him on you. I charge you again, Name the man who killed him.”

“I will die first,” the priest reiterated, as firmly as before.

“Die then!” said Jean. “Die in that cauldron of boiling oil.”

“Give him time,” cried Louis and Thomas earnestly pleading together.

“We will give him time,” said the younger brother. “There is the clock yonder, against the wall. We will count five minutes by it. In those five minutes, let him make his peace with God – or make up his mind to speak.

They waited, watching the clock. In that dreadful interval, the priest dropped on his knees and hid his face. The time passed in dead silence.

“Speak! for your own sake, for our sakes, speak!” said Thomas Siadoux, as the minute hand reached the point at which the five minutes expired.

The priest looked up – his voice died away on his lips – the mortal agony broke out on his face in great drops of sweat – his head sank forward on his breast.

“Lift him!” cried Jean, seizing the priest on one side. “Lift him, and throw him in!”

The two elder brothers advanced a step – and hesitated.

“Lift him, on your oath over our father’s body!”

The two brothers seized him on the other side. As they lifted him to a level with the cauldron, the horror of the death that threatened him, burst from the lips of the miserable man in a scream of terror. The brothers held him firm at the cauldron’s edge. “Name the man!” they said for the last time.

The priest’s teeth chattered – he was speechless. But he made a sign with his head – a sign in the affirmative. They placed him in a chair, and waited patiently until he was able to speak.

His first words were words of entreaty. He begged Thomas Siadoux to give him back the crucifix. When it was placed in his possession, he kissed it, and said faintly, “I ask pardon of God for the sin that I am about to commit.”

He paused; and then looked up at the younger brother, who still stood in front of him. “l am ready,” he said. “Question me, and I will answer.”

Jean repeated the questions which he had put, when the priest was first brought into the room.

“You know the murderer of our father?”

“I know him.”

“Since when?”

“Since he made his confession to me yesterday, in the cathedral of Toulouse.”

“Name him.”

“His name is Cantegrel.”

“The man who wanted to marry our aunt?”

“The same.”

“What brought him to the confessional?”

“His own remorse.”

“What were the motives for his crime?”

“There were reports against his character; and he discovered that your father had gone privately to Narbonne to make sure that they were true.”

“Did our father make sure of their truth?”

“He did.”

“Would those discoveries have separated our aunt from Cantegrel if our father had lived to tell her of them?”

“They would. If your father had lived, he would have told your aunt that Cantegrel was married already; that he had deserted his wife at Narbonne; that she was living there with another man, under another name; and that she had herself confessed it in your father’s presence.”

“Where was the murder committed?”

“Between Villefranche and this village. Cantegrel had followed your father to Narbonne; and had followed him back again to Villefranche. As far as that place he travelled in company with others, both going and returning. Beyond Villefranche, he was left alone at the ford over the river. There, Cantegrel drew the knife to kill him, before he reached home and told his news to your aunt.”

“How was the murder committed?”

“It was committed while your father was watering his pony by the bank of the stream. Cantegrel stole on him from behind, and struck him as he was stooping over the saddle-bow.”

“This is the truth, on your oath?”

“On my oath, it is the truth!”

“You may leave us.”

The priest rose from his chair without assistance. From the time when the terror of death had forced him to reveal the murderer’s name, a great change had passed over him. He had given his answers with the immovable calmness of a man on whose mind all human interests had lost their hold. He now left the room, strangely absorbed in himself; moving with the mechanical regularity of a sleepwalker; lost to all perception of things and persons about him. At the door he stopped – woke, as it seemed, from the trance that possessed him – and looked at the three brothers with a steady changeless sorrow, which they had never seen in him before, which they never afterwards forgot.

“I forgive you,” he said, quietly and solemnly. “Pray for me, when my time comes.”

With those last words, he left them.

4

The End

The night was far advanced; but the three Brothers determined to set forth instantly for Toulouse, and to place their information the magistrate’s hands, before the morning dawned.

Thus far, no suspicion had occurred to them of the terrible consequences which were to follow their night interview with the priest. They were absolutely ignorant of the punishment to which a man in holy orders exposed himself, if he revealed the secrets of the confessional. No infliction of that punishment had been known in their neighbourhood – for, at that time, as at this, the rarest of all priestly offences was a violation of the sacred trust confided to the confessor by the Roman Church. Conscious that they had forced the priest into the commission of a clerical offence, the brothers sincerely believed that the loss of his curacy would be the heaviest penalty which the law could exact from him. They entered Toulouse that night, discussing the atonement which they might offer to Monsieur Chaubard, and the means which they might best employ to make his future life easy to him.

The first disclosure of the consequences which would certainly follow the outrage they had committed, was revealed to them when they made their deposition before the officer of justice. The magistrate listened to their narrative with horror vividly expressed in his face and manner.

“Better you had never been born,” he said, “than have avenged your father’s death, as you three have avenged it. Your own act has doomed the guilty and the innocent to suffer alike.”

Those words proved prophetic of the truth. The end came quickly, as the priest had foreseen it, when he spoke his parting words.

The arrest of Cantegrel was accomplished without difficulty, the next morning. In the absence of any other evidence on which to justify this proceeding, the private disclosure to the authorities of the secret which the priest had violated, became inevitable. The Parliament of Languedoc was, under these circumstances, the tribunal appealed to; and the decision of that assembly immediately ordered the priest and the three brothers to be placed in confinement, as well as the murderer Cantegrel. Evidence was then immediately sought for, which might convict this last criminal, without any reference to the revelation that had been forced from the priest – and evidence enough was found to satisfy judges whose minds already possessed the foregone certainty of the prisoner’s guilt. He was put on his trial, was convicted of the murder, and was condemned to be broken on the wheel. The sentence was rigidly executed, with as little delay as the law would permit.

The cases of Monsieur Chaubard, and of the three sons of Siadoux, next occupied the judges. The three brothers were found guilty of having forced the secret of a confession from a man in holy orders, and were sentenced to death by hanging. A far more terrible expiation of his offence awaited the unfortunate priest. He was condemned to have his limbs broken on the wheel, and to be afterwards, while still living, bound to the stake, and destroyed by fire.

Barbarous as the punishments of that period were, accustomed as the population was to hear of their infliction, and even to witness it, the sentences pronounced in these two cases dismayed the public mind; and the authorities were surprised by receiving petitions for mercy from Toulouse, and from all the surrounding neighbourhood. But the priest’s doom had been sealed. All that could be obtained, by the intercession of persons of the highest distinction, was, that the executioner should grant him the mercy of death, before his body was committed to the flames. With this one modification, the sentence was executed, as the sentence had been pronounced, on the curate of Croix-Daurade.

The punishment of the three sons of Siadoux remained to be inflicted. But the people, roused by the death of the ill-fated priest, rose against this third execution, with a resolution before which the local government gave way. The cause of the young men was taken up by the hot-blooded populace, as the cause of all fathers and all sons; their filial piety was exalted to the skies; their youth was pleaded in their behalf; their ignorance of the terrible responsibility which they had confronted in forcing the secret from the priest, was loudly alleged in their favour. More than this, the authorities were actually warned that the appearance of the prisoners on the scaffold would be the signal for an organised revolt and rescue. Under this serious pressure, the execution was deferred, and the prisoners were kept in confinement until the popular ferment had subsided.

The delay not only saved their lives, it gave them back their liberty as well. The infection of the popular sympathy had penetrated through the prison doors. All three brothers were handsome, well-grown young men. The gentlest of the three in disposition – Thomas Siadoux – aroused the interest and won the affection of the head gaoler’s daughter. Her father was prevailed on at her intercession to relax a little in his customary vigilance; and the rest was accomplished by the girl herself. One morning, the population of Toulouse heard, with every testimony of the most extravagant rejoicing, that the three brothers had escaped, accompanied by the gaoler’s daughter. As a necessary legal formality, they were pursued, but no extraordinary efforts were used to overtake them; and they succeeded, accordingly, in crossing the nearest frontier.

Twenty days later, orders were received from the capital, to execute their sentence in effigy. They were then permitted to return to France, on condition that they never again appeared in their native place, or in any other part of the province of Languedoc. With this reservation they were left free to live where they pleased, and to repent the fatal act which had avenged them on the murderer of their father at the cost of the priest’s life.

Beyond this point the official documents do not enable us to follow their career. All that is now known has been now told of the village tragedy at Croix-Daurade.

A Night in the Jungle

All the Year Round, Volume 5, page 444

“The hyaenas and wolves were roaring all night outside my tent, but I kept up a good fire, and rose from time to time to look to it, and to the priming of my guns, and so got through the dark hours without accident.” – Vide Travels of anybody, anywhere, at any page you like to turn to.

I venture to take the above quotation as a motto to my modest article, because it is appropriate to the matter of which I design to treat. I too have heard the hyaenas and wolves howling outside my tent – if I may call it so – I have risen from time to time to relieve my restlessness, and though I have neither looked to my fire or my gun, I also have got through the dark hours without any accident whatever – even the slightest. The fact being, that these sounds have reached me without my stirring from home, or forsaking the protection of Marylebone for so much as a single day.

It is one of the romantic circumstances connected with a residence in Lumbago Terrace, Regent’s Park, that the inhabitants of that moist and reeking region are able, in certain states of the wind, to hear in the dead of night the roar of the lion and the yell of the tiger, without apprehending any annoyance from the near neighbourhood of these terrible animals. To listen to such music, while lying comfortably between the sheets, is not bad sport. It is having, so to speak, the jungle brought home to one’s door. You have the excitement of a night in the desert without any sense of insecurity, or any of the inconveniences inseparable from Eastern and Southern travel. And all this we, the inhabitants of Lumbago Terrace, owe to the happy chance which caused the Zoological authorities of this country to fix upon the Regent’s Park as the spot best suited for the exhibition of their collection.

I have often heard, then, from my abode in Lumbago Terrace (to which residence I have adhered through twenty years of rheumatism), the roaring of the wild beasts in the Zoological Gardens; but I never heard it so loud, I never heard it break forth with such a sudden frenzy of violence, as it did at midnight on Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of June of the present year.

I have said that I have frequently heard these sounds before. When a change of weather is toward – which is very often – when thunder is at hand, when the wind is in the east, and at other seasons of discomfort, the poor beasts behind the bars in the Zoological Garden solace their misery by giving vent to the most dismal moans and roarings conceivable, and sometimes among the other sounds the thunder of the lion’s roar may be heard pre-eminent and distinct.

On the night, however, to which I have alluded, the outcry of these unhappy animals was altogether of a different character. They had been quiet all day, and all through the early part of the night, when suddenly, and almost to a minute, at twelve p.m., the whole chorus of them burst out into one mighty shriek and yell of passion, which lasted in its fury so considerable a time that I came to the conclusion that some altogether unprecedented event must have taken place. In fact, I sat up in bed and said to myself, as I struck twelve cheerful little strokes out of my repeater:

“What can be going on tonight at the Zoological Gardens?”

The reader shall hear what was going on.

At exactly fifteen minutes after nine p.m. on the evening mentioned above, a party of four gentlemen might have been observed ringing at a little postern gate, which, when closed, forms part of the fence of the outer circle of the Regent’s Park. With the reader’s permission we will adopt, in case it should be needful to speak of any one of these persons, a practice which has received the sanction of the Poet Shakespeare, though he generally reserved it for robbers, murderers, mobs, and other disorderly characters – in a word, we will call them 1st Gentleman, 2nd Gentleman, 3rd Gentleman, and 4th Gentleman.

These four gentlemen, then, having rung at the gate, and having been admitted by a keeper, were by him guided to the house of the superintendent of the collection; and it then became apparent that their visit was a premeditated visit, and that they had come there by appointment, for the express purpose of making a night inspection of the Gardens, and ascertaining for themselves how that collection, which we all know so well by daylight, looked in the dark, or illuminated only by the light of a lantern.

The party was formed with little delay. It was headed by the superintendent, who was closely followed by his four visitors; a guard of officials connected with the place bringing up the rear. At this time the feelings of our four friends, as they moved across the Gardens with a lantern in front and a lantern behind, were of a peculiar kind, oscillating between a conviction that they were going to sit up all night to see an execution at daybreak, and a firm belief that they were about to start immediately for foreign parts, on a voyage attended with many difficulties, and inconceivable peril.

It was quite possible to imagine that some such journey was not only in contemplation, but that it had actually been entered on and prosecuted till the four travellers had reached some remote and savage district thousands of miles out of the way of civilisation. The small huts and low buildings which were scattered about being easily imagined into wigwams, and the occasional cry of some distant wild beast, or the shriek of some tropical bird striking on the ear, much as they might do in some Indian jungle, or Australian forest. The trees, too, in the darkness showed only the vaguest outline of their shape, and might have been shrubs of tropical growth, for aught that could be said to the contrary.

It was not long before the four gentlemen who had found themselves suddenly transported from Central London to Central Africa were able to detect, at some considerable distance, the form of an animal of huge size and ungainly shape, standing motionless on the margin of a small pool of water, which lay stretched out in front of it. The lines of this creature were only very vaguely discernible in the dim twilight of a June night, and it was too far off for the lanterns of the guides to be of any use. Supernaturally still, supernaturally huge and terrible in its forms, its faint grey masses only partially relieved from the faint grey masses of the ground and bank behind it, there was something so ghostlike about this motionless spectre, that 3rd Gentleman remarked to 4th Gentleman as the party moved on, that he saw now for the first time that the particular monster which had reappeared from time to time in all the fevered dreams of which he had been the victim since he was five years old, was, beyond all doubt, a hippopotamus seen by twilight.

Compared with this vision, the next animal with whom the travellers came in contact was almost homely in its unimpressiveness. An elephant lying down on its side close before you, and snoring so regularly and so loudly, that it was a wonder that his next-door neighbour, the rhinoceros, did not kick at the partition to wake him, is not, in truth, a spectacle to awe the beholder. Our adventurers passed on, after remarking to each other that they thought they detected a self-contained fury in the eye of the rhinoceros, which looked as if he could not stand the snoring of the elephant much longer, and would infallibly give warning next day.

Past the startled giraffes waving their heads in alarm at this night visit, the little party moved on to where the vigorous and healthy ostriches live side by side with a certain little wan shy creature which is neither healthy nor vigorous. It was pitiful to see that poor, bare, wingless, featherless biped, the aptoryx,[3] turned out of that shelter and concealment which she adheres to strenuously. The very wall of her hiding-place had to be removed before there was any possibility of getting her to show herself, and her misery at being thus suddenly turned out in the night with the glare of a lamp upon her, and strangers peering at her through the wires of the cage, was touching in the extreme.

The poor wretch even dodged about to get behind the shadow of the keeper who went into the den, so as to get that functionary’s body and limbs between itself and the light. Poor obsolete creature, rarely found upon the surface of the world, belonging to a species fast dying out, and which almost ought to be extinct, it shuns the light and loves the shade and retirement as some unlucky person who has survived his age and cannot adapt himself to the new state of things might keep himself out of the way of the new generation and its rapid progress. “Here, let me get away out of this glare,” says the poor aptoryx, “I am not of this period; I know I ought to be extinct; I can’t move with the age; I don’t approve of the present goings on; they don’t suit me. Not that I wish to interfere or prevent your moving on as you like, but please to let me keep out of it all – for it’s not in my line, and, if you’ll allow me, I’ll get back again behind my screen, and end my days out of sight and out of mind.”

The grove of parrots starts at first sight of the lantern into such a bristling phalanx of glaring, shrieking, bobbing, vengeful demons, that our adventurers do not spend many seconds in their society, but, owning themselves vanquished, fly off into the darkness again, leaving this whole army of malignants in full screech of triumph behind them, and betaking themselves to the region where the beaver, busy in the night, is like some country gentleman for ever occupied with the “improvements” in and about his small estate.

For, there never was such a fidget as your beaver. Talk about human manias for bricks and mortar; talk about throwing out bows, making new paths through the woods, flinging up slight conservatories, or knocking your passage into your dining room; these human weaknesses are nothing to the alterations which the beaver is perpetually making in his estate, and apparently simply for the sake of making them. It is quite impossible not to envy the obvious sense of enjoyment with which this rascal crawls over the top of his house to where some bough which has made part of his thatch, does not meet his approval, and taking one end of it into his mouth, drags it after him till he gets to the edge of his pond, into which he allows himself to tumble, bough and all, with a lazy flop. Would that the poor aptoryx could have such sport as that beaver when he swims round the pond with the end of the bough still in his mouth, and presently dragging it out of the water again, tries how it will look on the other side of his roof. This beaver seems perpetually happy. He has constructed his own abode with materials thrown over into his enclosure, and goes on thus reconstructing and altering it for ever. The superintendent communicates it to 1st Gentleman, who retails it to 2nd, and so on, that this beaver is so fond of his house that though he managed on one occasion to get out of his enclosure and down to the banks of the neighbouring canal in the dead of the night, he was yet found next morning back in his legitimate domain, and working away at his “improvements” as hard as ever. He is a lively chap at night, and was not the least disconcerted by the presence of the party gathered round him, but was, on the contrary, so tremendously busy in doing nothing and then undoing it again, still keeping his eye upon the four gentlemen who had come to see him, that 3rd Gentleman was heard at last to remark to 4th Gentleman that he “looked upon this animal as an impostor, and believed he was doing it all for effect.”

In the due course of such rapid changes of country and climate as our adventurers are at this time subject to, it is not long before they come to a region where snakes and reptiles writhe and twist and stand erect, glaring malignantly at the intruders on their solitude, and at the unwonted blaze of lamplight that comes with them. Festooned boas hang like tropical plants above them, reptiles with legs crawl out and watch them with erect heads, and small malignant dust-coloured vipers stand upon the tips of their tails and gasp envenomed breath, against them.

Was it a dream – 2nd Gentleman and 4th Gentleman were now getting very sleepy, and it might have been – was it a dream that one of the guides about this time remarked, pulling out a small heavy bag from a place of concealment, that he had got a few mice there, and that, perhaps, some of the reptiles might be on the feed? Was it a dream that he presently dived down into this bag, and, fishing up a little white mouse by the tail, introduced it into the den of a fearfully wide awake and restless dragon, with four legs, and a tail, and a pair of watchful eyes? It must have been a dream – it was too horrible to be anything else – that this little creature ran to the farthest corner of the den from that occupied by the dragon, and that anon, finding itself unmolested – for the dragon was too much occupied with our four gentlemen to take any notice of his small guest – came out and began to play about in the close vicinage of its tormentor, who evidently had his eye upon it, even while he appeared to be watching his human visitors. Yes; this was evidently a dream, and (dreamlike) there was no termination to it; the mouse and the monster being left thus together, the mouse playing and the monster watching, without seeming to do so, out of the corner of his eye. Stop; perhaps the mouse got out afterwards through the bars; there seemed to be room. Thank goodness, there seemed to be room.

There is no worse place to dream in, than the Zoological Gardens. Gentleman No. 2 dreamed about this time, and so did No. 4, that a voice said once again, “Perhaps this one will take a mouse” – “this one” being the wretch who stood upon the end of his tail. The mouse was again handed in alive, and then both the above-mentioned gentlemen dreamed of a crunch, and then of a white mouse slowly disappearing down a throat not anything like so large as the object it swallowed, and they dreamed further that at last only the hind legs of the mouse and the end of its tail remained outside the snake’s jaws, and that after this the form of the mouse was plainly discernible as it made its way along the interior of the snake’s throat, till it was lost in the coils of the reptiles body, and might be considered to be finally disposed of; at which point in their their dream Gentlemen Nos. 2 and 4 both felt as if they had taken a large and uncompromising pill.

After this, both these gentlemen saw in their dream, a monster nightmare frog, impossibly huge and bloated, and then they went on to a place where they had the most horrible vision of all; the dream monster this time being called “The Javan Loris.”

2nd Gentleman and 4th Gentleman imagined that they went into a place where there were more festoons of Python snake over their heads, heaving and swelling like animated sandbags, where there was a very sleepy sloth, who was so drowsy that he could never keep upon the top of the tree boughs among which he resided, but always appeared to have tumbled off, and to be holding on by his hands and feet, and looking at society upside down; and our two gentlemen dreamed, moreover, that there were here some very noisome impossibilities which hung pendent from other boughs of trees, and were supposed to be asleep, but could not really have been so, or they would have dropped off – supposing the laws of gravitation to apply to flying foxes, which is, perhaps, supposing too much – and then they thought that all these things had ceased to be, and had turned into a small brown animal something like a rabbit, but more like a huge rat, concerning which a dream voice spake, and said:

“This is the Javan Loris, and you will observe that one of its chief peculiarities is, that it does not kill its prey, but eats it alive.”

It was quite a comfort to our two sleepy gentlemen to remember in their dream that they were dreaming, for the Javan Loris actually seemed to sit up on its hind legs, and holding a live mouse in its paw, took bites out of it, as a schoolboy does out of an apple.

From these horrible visions Gentlemen Nos. 2 and 4 awoke as the night air blew upon them in emerging from the land of reptiles, and they hastened to tell their dreams to their companions. But what was the worst of it all was, that 1st Gentleman and 3rd Gentleman, who professed to have been awake all this time, were not a bit surprised, and said that they, too, had seen and heard all these things, and that they were not dreams but dire realities. Nos. 2 and 4 were so horrified at their statement, that they expressed a desire to return and sacrifice the Javan Loris on his own hearth; they were, however, not allowed to proceed with this praiseworthy act of retribution.

Truly there is a great deal of suffering mixed up with the lives of most members of the animal creation. What a hideous time of it, for instance, a little fish residing in the same neighbourhood with a large pike must have. Those great jaws must be a perpetual nightmare to the poor little wretch, who surely has intellect enough to know that he is continually in danger of finding his way into them. How can he enjoy his meals, the society of his friends, his natural rest and sleep, with that long, narrow, dangerous-looking wolf of the waters ever on the spot, ever ready for a pounce?

Do fish ever sleep? They certainly none of them appeared to be in a slumbering condition when Gentlemen 1, 2, and 3, came in the course of their night journey to the watery regions, and surveyed (outrageous combinations of things) the bottom of the sea, by lamplight, in the Regent’s Park. Gentleman No. 4 was left behind at this particular point in the voyage, and was found by the other more active voyagers, when they emerged from the fish regions, sitting bolt upright upon a bench and fast asleep.

There was something almost painful about the bright-eyed wakefulness of those fish. The pike was lying watching the gudgeons, and the gudgeons were wakefully conscious of the pike. The perch and the minnows were going through a performance of the same kind. The roach had quite a red rim round his eyes from want of rest; and even the zoophytes and sea anemones were making short excursions at the bottom, progressing by means of a kind of ambling movement, compounded of a paralytic hop and a kind of hopeless attempt to swim, ending in a drunken stagger and total collapse of the entire animal into a mass of quivering jelly.

The aggravatingly wakeful condition of the inhabitants of those deep waters, through which our hardy adventurers were now wading, seemed to have upon these three travellers an effect somewhat the reverse of what might have been expected. Far from being refreshed by their bath, or stimulated to wakefulness by the example of these lively animals, our three friends appeared to be suffering under a perfect agony of fatigue and drowsiness, insomuch that they would cling to such underwater plants and other means of support as came in their way, with a drowning man’s grasp; would occasionally stagger against each other; would fall into paroxysms of yawning, and would listen to all statements concerning the habits of the race they were among, with a fixed stare, indicative of hatred towards a tribe concerning which so much useful information was obtainable. They all fell foul, however, of No. 4 when they emerged from the bottom of the sea, and said that he ought to be ashamed of the want of interest he was showing in the whole affair.

It was refreshing, after the detestable wakefulness of the fish, to find in the monkey country, which lay next in the route of our travellers, that the inhabitants were an orderly and well conducted race, and were taking their rest in a natural way, at a natural time. Nervous, too, in the dark, and glad to sit very near each other on their perches. There was one tree which our voyagers passed by on which more than a dozen of these right minded animals were sitting in a row, packed together like larks on a spit, and as tight as figs in a drum, the two outermost being evidently selected for their courage, and neither of them appearing to appreciate the distinction at all, while, farther on, a certain old monkey, shut out from this group, and sent to Coventry by his own species, had got hold of a great domestic cat, and was sitting close beside it, the pair being evidently bound to each other by a firm and well grounded friendship.

“You don’t happen to have lost such a thing as a finger?” said a certain boy in the employment of the Zoological Society, arriving at the house of a gentleman to whom he had been sent to make the above remarkable inquiry.

The gentleman’s hand was bound up, and he made answer to the boy:

“Yes, I have, and you may go back to your master and tell him that if he has found it he may put it in spirits, and keep it as a warning to others not to act so foolishly as I have done.”

“I had observed the gentleman often enough,” said the superintendent, describing the circumstance to the four travellers who had placed themselves under his guidance. “I had observed him, and had often warned him that to play with the bears, as he was in the habit of doing when he came here, was very dangerous; for he would put his hand into the cage and tease them and play with them as if they were tom cats.

“One day I came to the cage here, and saw lying just outside it, a human finger, with the tendon hanging to it in a long strip. ‘It’s that gentleman’s finger,’ I said, ‘and he’s gone away without saying anything, for he used always to make light of my warnings, and would tell me that he knew all about it, and was not afraid a bit.’ And the finger was his, sure enough.”

This curious case was not an isolated one. On another occasion, a finger, with the stretched tendon hanging to it in the same way, was found outside the den of the wolves. People will have the temerity to run these foolish risks, and then go away, ashamed, even in the midst of their pain, to own what their rashness has ended in.

The four gentlemen, whose progress we have been following all this time, had moved so quietly about, and had excited so little disturbance among the animals, whose lairs they had passed, that, as far as might be augured from the deep silence reigning over the region inhabited by the great carnivora, their presence and near approach were not guessed at by those grand and terrible animals. The dens which the lions and tigers inhabit have outside them, at a distance of three or four feet, great heavy blinds, which are drawn down at night, and so a narrow passage is formed between the screen and the bars of the den itself: a passage accessible only by a locked gate at one end of it.

A dead silence reigned over all this region as the superintendent, closely followed by the rest of the party, approached this gate, and even after the key had been introduced into the lock; perhaps the animals were listening now, and scarcely breathed in order that they might hear the better, but no sooner was the gate thrown open and the gleam of the lantern admitted into the narrow passage in front of the dens, than a yell broke forth of mingled fear and rage, which was the most terrific thing ever heard by any member of the little company.

Still anxious to see more, the four gentlemen and their guides advanced a few paces into the passage. There were two young lions in the cage nearest to them, and the terror and fury of these creatures was really tremendous and awful to behold. They sprang at the sides of the cage, they flung themselves against its bars, they even seemed, in the obscure light, to fly at each other. They shook the place with their roaring, and the bars quivered as they dashed against them.

The contagion, too, seemed to have extended with the lamp’s rays farther on, and in an instant the whole of those dens were vibrating with similar sounds. Tigers, leopards, panthers, burst altogether into one hideous unbearable yell, till the noise of this and of the shock of weighty bodies crashing against the bars was of so deafening a sort, that it was hardly possible to hear the voice of the guide when he gave the word to those about him that they must leave the place at once, or the creatures might knock themselves to pieces.

And so the cry of “Sauve qui peut!” went forth, and in another moment the narrow passage before the dens was left once more in darkness, but not in silence: the terror and fury of those disturbed wild beasts being slow to subside, and breaking forth from time to time during the night.

This was the cry of terror spoken of in the introductory portion of this small narrative, which frighted the Regent’s Park “from its propriety.”

But for that speedy retreat from before the lions’ den there is no telling what injury the terrified and enraged creatures might have done themselves. We know not what terror is, in those unreasoning natures; he who gave the signal for flight, told his companions that there were some animals of the more timid kinds who could hardly be moved from one place to another, so fearfully would they maim themselves in their mad struggles.

The night wanderings of our little party were now nearly over. As they passed on, a startled deer would sometimes jump up from the place where it lay, and, running to a distance, would turn at bay to stare at the unusual apparition. Or, perhaps in some shady enclosure the strange stripes of the zebra would show for a moment as the light of the lantern glanced that way, or the white forms of a group of pelicans would dimly appear in ghostly stillness by the waterside. All, to the last moment – and far more so than in the daytime, when visitors destroy the illusion – spoke of distant lands and regions far removed from civilisation; and it was almost a shock, so great and violent was the contrast, when at last the four travellers found themselves taking leave of their guide (with many expressions of their obligation to him), not at the door of a wigwam, or the entrance of a tent, but outside his own pretty little home – in the Regent’s Park.

A Trial at Toulouse

All the Year Round, Volume 6, page 500

In the city of Toulouse there is an old cemetery called the Cemetery of Saint Aubin. One out of the way corner of the burial ground is surrounded by high and rugged walls. Of these, one separates it from the garden of an adjacent monastery; the other, from a street called the Rue Riquet. The little oratory for mourners is close by. The place is desolate, and shut out from the merry world.

Early in the morning of a day in the new spring of the year 1847, the porter and the gravedigger of the cemetery as they go their rounds, wander into this retired corner. Much rain has fallen in the night; the tiny blossoms of the young year gleam through the glittering grass; the sun flings long purple shadows on the ground; the birds chirp gaily. What a time for the discovery of a crime! The men look into the nook, and see in the far corner what they fancy to be a young girl asleep. Strange, for a girl to be asleep in a cemetery at six o’clock in the morning! They go nearer. Yes; she is asleep: but hers is the sleep from which there is no awakening on earth. Her attitude is as though she were praying. Her knees are bent, and she leans on her elbows. Her face is hidden on the ground. On a stake, fixed in the ground close by, the discoverers find a blue handkerchief with white spots, of which the corners are knotted. The sexton, forgetting how important will be every item of evidence, however minute, alters the position of the corpse in his anxiety to behold its features, and to assure himself that no spark of life remains. He and his companion then hasten to inform the authorities of the place: but an hour elapses before the authorities are on the spot. In the mean time the news of the tragedy has spread through the town. A curious crowd besieges the dead girl’s resting place. Some trample on the grass. Others clamber on the wall of the monastery and of the Rue Riquet, and sit staring at the unrecognised body.

The body did not lie long unclaimed. The neighbours said it was the corpse of Cécile Combettes. Cécile’s station in life was humble. Her father worked in a manufactory of files. Her mother added to the family store by lamp lighting. Cécile herself, nearly fifteen years of age, was apprenticed to a bookbinder of the name of Conte. Eager inquiries were made as to when Cécile had last been seen alive, and who had been her companions. On the eve of the discovery of the corpse, Conte had to deliver at the monastery certain books which he had bound. He packed them in two parcels, and impressed Marion Roumagnac, an old woman in his service, and Cécile Combettes, to carry the burdens in two baskets. On arriving at the dwelling of the “frères,” he dismissed the old woman, and told Cécile to wait in the lodge to bring back the empty baskets. He was absent some time in the interior of the establishment unpacking his books and receipting his bill. On his return to the lodge there was no Cécile. The umbrella Conte had left in her charge, was leaning against the wall; but the girl had disappeared. The porter had not seen her go out. Conte supposed she had gone home. It was discovered that she had not returned, and a search was instituted. It is never easy for women to gain access to a monastery, and it was now late at night. Her friends could not hunt for her among the “Brothers,” till morning. They hunted elsewhere in vain.

The next act of the tragedy is the medical examination of the corpse. Cécile, said the doctors, was still a mere child. She had been cruelly ill-used. Her face was bruised and swollen; her eyelids were swollen; the skin was torn. Her mouth and neck, however, showed no sign of strangling or suffocation. Her right cheek was grazed, and stained by mould. The lobes of her ears were torn, and caked with clotted blood. Her hands were scratched and torn, and had been strained in some violent struggle. The examination of the exterior of the body established nothing as to the immediate cause of death. It was only evident that Cécile, after a long conflict, had been subjected to brutal treatment. A careful observation of the neck and throat confirmed the opinion that she had not been strangled or suffocated. But there were marks of several frightful blows on the head, and the faculty affirmed that of these any one would have been sufficient to cause immediate death. It was evident that murder in its worst form had been committed; but by whom?

Suspicion fell at once upon the “frères.” The corpse had been discovered at the foot of the wall of their garden. Their enforced celibacy was an accusation in itself. Before the public authorities had apprehended any one as the possible murderer, the voice of the populace delared loudly that he could be no other than a “frère.”

The first step in the hunt for the assassin was to discover by what means the body bad been deposited where it was found. A minute examination was made of the abbey – cellars, garrets, stables, dormitories, were all carefully searched. Had the murderer carried his victim through their garden, it was hoped that some traces of his passage would be left on the soft ground. There was a broken place at the top of the cemetery wall, near the oratory, but it was supposed that this had been made by he crowd, who climbed up to view the corpse. The long grass at the foot of the wall, immediately beneath the breach, was untrodden, and there were no appearances to warrant the suspicion that the corpse had been conveyed into the cemetery at that spot. The walls were covered with grass and wall plants. On the top of the wall of the garden, close to its junction with that of the street, were found lying several broken stalks of groundsel; and, close by, the grass appeared crushed and broken, as though a hand had rested on it. The searchers had discovered in the hair of the corpse, some cypress leaves, the petals of a flower, and a strip of twisted hemp, which seemed to have been torn from a rope. There were cypress trees growing near the wall and sweeping parts of its summit with their branches. There were also some plants of geranium growing on the walls, the petals of whose blossoms were similar to the petals that fell from Cécile’s hair. It was even remarked that one blossom had lost all its petals. Moreover, on the one spot on the wall whence the corpse could have been thrown, there were signs of some heavy body having passed. A tuft of grass was torn from its place, and hung by a single fibre of the root. And a cypress bough had been snapped.

The strongest argument against the supposition that the body had been thrown from the wall of the Rue Riquet, was the fact that on the roof of the orangery of the “frères” – a building close to the corner of the two walls, and the front of which ran flush with the inner side of the garden, wall – was placed a reflecting light. It was improbable that the murderer should, of all other places, have chosen that portion of the Rue Riquet which was lighted by a lamp, for the disposal of his burden. If the corpse were not thrown from the Rue Riquet, said the police, it must have come from the garden of the “frères.” It did not come from the Rue Riquet; and there were marks of something having passed over the garden wall. Therefore it did come from the garden of the “frères.” The bare logic is not unassailable. But other reasons may be urged why the conclusion of the police showed a want of sagacity. They were very ready to limit the “venue” of the murder to the precincts of the “frères.” They scarcely made a pretence of examining a neighbourhood where they should have examined every square inch. But the strangest thing of all, is, their neglect to account for the position in which the body was found. Their hypothesis is directly contradicted by the facts of the case. They suppose the corpse was thrown from a wall. It is found in an attitude in which it is all but impossible to suppose it could by any possibility have fallen. The clothes are disposed round it, as though it had been deposited with some care. It showed anything but the disorder of a fall from a considerable height. Much rain had fallen in the night. The corpse was entirely dry. The weather had been wet for the last fortnight. The soil must have been soft and easily impressible. There was little or no mark in the ground where the body lay. And yet it was said to have been thrown from the wall.

The police should not have been satisfied with a merely cursory examination of the other parts of the cemetery wall. There was one means by which it might have been deposited in the cemetery by a person in the garden, which does not seem to have occurred to the police, although it might be deemed sufficiently obvious. Supposing the murderer to have lowered the body from the wall, by a rope passed round the waist, it might have descended to the ground in just such an attitude as that in which it was found. It would have descended with no violent shock, and would have made no mark of depth in the soil. The murderer might have drawn up the rope after it had done its work. It showed no marks, they said, but they said so almost before they could have looked. It is probable that the fact of slight marks having been found on the garden wall, aided their belief that there were no other and stronger marks. But it was possible that the corpse might have been conveyed to its place by some other way than over the wall. The cemetery was used as a short cut during the day, and so slight was the security ensured by the lock on the gate, that it was commonly “picked,” by any one who might wish to pass through, with any instrument that happened to be at hand. The gate was opened daily in this manner, and the fact was notorious in Toulouse. Why, then, could the corpse have come from no other place than from the garden of the “frères”?

Having settled how the corpse came into the Cimetière St Aubin, the next point for the authorities to decide was, where was the crime committed? They found, or fancied they found, tracks by which they traced the murderer into the garden. At the base of the wall, on the garden side, were footprints, and marks as of the ends of the uprights of a ladder. The latter were very faint; so faint, that there was a doubt whether they had been caused by a ladder. The prosecution admitted them as weighty facts against the “frères,” though the footprints might have been made by any one of the constant loungers in the garden; and though their theory was, that the criminal had mounted the ladder laden with a heavy load. There being no doubt that the guilty man would be found among the “frerès,” the difficulty was to fix on any one of them as more likely to be guilty than the rest

Now, suspicion had fallen on the bookbinder Conte. He had insisted on Cécile’s accompanying him to the monastery on the morning of the day of her disappearance, although the books he had to deliver might have been conveyed with perfect ease in one basket. He showed signs, it is true, of astonishment and perturbation at the disappearance of his apprentice. But within a few hours after her disappearance, he set off on the Diligence to Auch, urging, as the reason of his sudden departure, his obligation to discharge a loan, the time for the payment of which would not arrive for nearly a week. His pretext was a pretence, and he was evidently anxious to be out of the way. In two days he returned, and immediately communicated with the police on the subject of the missing girl. Before any one accused him, he exclaimed, “Anyhow, I am innocent!” He was arrested on suspicion, on the day of his reappearance, and at first said that Cécile had probably been enticed into some improper house. It was not until the following day that he made a statement which implicated Brother Léotade. It is not unlikely that the popular rumour which reached him in the interval, suggested the statement. This was to the effect that on his arrival at the door of the “Noviciat,” with his books, he had seen in the lobby two of the inmates – Frères Jubrien and Léotade. He showed considerable ingenuity in selecting these two, if he did not really see them. They held a kind of bursar’s office in the monastery, and had free access to all parts of the building. Conte not only swore positively to their having been in the vestibule, but volunteered a theory how the crime was perpetrated. Jubrien might have enticed Cécile into a room where unbound books were kept. Léotade might have induced her to go and see rabbits in the stable. A “frère” named Luc had promised to make Cécile a present, and Frère Luc slept in a room on the ground floor, away from the common dormitory. It was on the 23rd of April, eight days after the murder, that Conte made these depositions. Up to this point the crime was merely localised in the monastery. Several of its inmates were suspected, but no individual specially. On the 26th, Conte said that he had seen Léotade disgrace himself by obscene gestures, and had heard him use accordant words. Léotade was arrested, and with him Jubrien, and Marion Roumagnac, the old woman who had accompanied Conte and Cécile when they carried the books. She was treated in her prison with much severity; and, by losing her support, her fatherless children became utterly destitute. The sole pretext for this woman’s arrest was the fact of her testimony being contrary to that of Conte. She persisted in stating that she had not seen Jubrien and Léotade in the lobby of the monastery.

One or two circumstances appeared indeed specially to criminate Léotade. In the folds of the dress of the deceased were found some scraps of fodder, and a wheat straw stained with blood. The clothes and one of the shoes of Cécile were clotted with white mud, and adhering to this mud was a tiny piece of straw. The scraps of fodder appeared to be clover. Now, in a room over the stable of the “frères” was stored both wheat and clover. But, admitting that a body covered with moist mud and hidden among dry grain, would have carried away traces of the place of its concealment, it would appear probable that more than one or two snips of fodder would adhere to the mud. Moreover, according to this theory, the mud is left altogether unaccounted for.

After so fierce a struggle as the lacerated state of the corpse indicated, it might be supposed that the person of the murderer would show some marks of violence. After an examination to which the whole of the “frères,” from the venerable superior to the youngest in the “Noviciat,” submitted, nothing of the kind was discovered. The only little circumstance which seemed to confine the crime to Léotade was, that on some of his clothes there were found seeds of the common fig; and similar seeds had been found on the body of Cécile. There was a question whether Léotade had or had not taken pains to conceal the garments on which these seeds were found. According to the prosecution, Cécile was induced to leave the lobby immediately after the disappearance of Conte with the books. Léotade knew well that on that day of all others it would be easy for him to carry out his hideous design. It was Thursday; and on Thursday the “frères” were not permitted to leave their classrooms until eleven o’clock. Léotade, in his capacity of house steward, had access to all those parts of the building which were most favourable to his attempt. He might have enticed Cécile, it was urged, into the loft over the stable, have there committed the cruel murder, and have concealed the corpse. When night fell – so said the prosecution – he conveyed the body to the wall, and deposited it in the cemetery.

Further preliminary inquiries resulted in the liberation of Frère Jubrien and Marion Roumagnac. From the day of his arrest to that of the trial, Léotade was kept in close confinement, and was not permitted to communicate with his counsel. In the mean time he was subjected to repeated examinations. The trial did not take place until February 7, 1848: nearly a year after the discovery of the crime.

To understand the judicial proceedings, it is necessary to remember that our neighbours deem an accused person guilty until proved innocent. The judge is counsel for the crown rather than for the accused. In England, so far from a prisoner being tempted to criminate himself, he is scarcely permitted to do so even if he desire it. The English law is, in some cases, more jealous of the character of a prisoner than he is himself. In France, one of the most important parts of the trial is the examination of the prisoner, and the prisoner is examined by the judge.

When Léotade appeared at the bar, his demeanour was calm and dignified. His countenance was remarkable. It would have been singularly bluff and good humoured, had it not been marked by thick black eyebrows. His eyes were bright and intelligent. He appeared to be naturally a strong man; but confinement and anxiety had sorely weakened him. He was defended by Messieurs Gasc and Saint-Gresse. The “président,” or judge, M. de Labaume, may almost be said to have led, on the other side; and to have taken a more active part against the prisoner than even the procureur-général.

“Rise!” said the president, as Léotade appeared before him; and added, addressing the crowded audience, “the prisoner’s voice is very weak; I must therefore demand the most profound silence.”

It would seem that M. de Labaume had conceived the idea that the “frères” had organised a conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice in the defence of one of their number, and that they might even interrupt the court. His first words to Léotade pre-supposed the prisoner’s guilt. “Accused,” he said, “before the reading of the detailed act of accusation, we are of opinion that it will be convenient to question you as to the remarkable contradictions and prevarications in vour answers on previous occasions. Weigh well all your replies. Remember that your life hangs on the result of this inquiry. Did you know Cécile Combettes?”

“No. I never saw her, nor knew her.”

“Did you ever go to Conte’s?”

“Sometimes; on business connected with the house; but I never saw any apprentice there at least, as far as I can remember.”

“You have already made use of like reservations. Let us have done with them. No equivocation, if you please. Have you, or have you not, seen an apprentice at Conte’s? Did you, or did you not, know Cécile Combettes?”

“I did not know her.”

“Is it true that a few days before the murder you went to Conte’s?”

“I do not remember.”

“I will remind you of the reason of your visit. Did you ask for a pocketbook, or an account book?”

“I beg your pardon; I remember now.”

“Did you not on that day say to Conte, ‘Do not send the book by any one but the girl’?” (La petite.)

“Having no acquaintance with any such young girl, I could not have said so.”

The president repeated the question, and again Léotade asserted more vehemently, “I never saw any young girl working for Conte.”

The president then examined Léotade as to the occupation of every hour of the day of Cécile’s disappearance. Léotade told him all he could remember (so he said), and on being told that his present statements differed in some slight particulars from what he had said before, he complained with much bitterness of the manner in which he had been treated before the trial, and said that the severity of the procureur-général was the cause of much of his hesitation.

The president inquired if Léotade had ever used the words imputed to him in connexion with the gestures, and he cried indignantly, “Never did such an expression escape my lips!”

“I prefer,” said the president, “to hear you lie, than to give me evasive answers.”

On the question who were in the lobby on the arrival of Conte and his companions, the president asked, Were you in the vestibule at a few minutes after nine, talking to Frère Jubrien?”

“I was not. On that morning I never left the Pensionnat.” And on the president repeating some of the evidence of Conte, and asking if the prisoner persisted in denying his having been in the “Noviciat” on the morning in question, Léotade cried with warmth, “I declare solemnly – I shall declare to the day of my death – that Conte has lied!”

The only new fact alleged was, that Léotade had first heard of the murder from some boys who were talking of it, and who had seen the corpse. Léotade lowered his voice as he alluded to the murder, and when it appeared that he was about to particularise what he had heard, stopped without finishing his sentence. It was not altogether impossible that a young monk should be modest The president thought otherwise. Even in France, the severity with which an accused is treated is relaxed so far, that he is usually permitted to confer with his counsel at all times during the trial. M. Gasc made some suggestions to Léotade during his examination, but the president, speaking as though he considered himself slighted by any such remarks, forbade all interference between himself and the accused.

The first witnesses examined were Raspaud the gravedigger, and Lévêque the cemetery porter. They detailed the facts already set forth, connected with the discovery of the corpse. One Monsieur Lamarle, an authority of the police, corroborated the statement that crowds had trampled the soil in and near the spot where the body lay, and complained that his investigations had been made much more difficult thereby. M. Estévenet, a physician, explained the result of the post-mortem examination, and gave it as his opinion that the wounds on the head of Cécile, were too severe to have been inflicted by the blow of the hand, or even by a stick. He thought it more probable that they had been caused by a hammer, by violent concussion with a wall or stone, or by a fall from a considerable height.

A multitude of witnesses followed on several successive days, but their depositions related either to what has been already related, or to circumstances that had no real bearing on the points at issue. It was not until the 15th that Conte appeared in the witness box. “I swear to tell nothing but the truth!” he cried, as he took his place. The judge rebuked him, and bade him keep to the words of the oath. Before he began his evidence, he produced a plan he had had made, of the lobby of the monastery, and on which he had indicated the places averred to have been occupied by Léotade and Jubrieu. He was ordered to pocket his plan, and proceed. He told his tale. Why, he was asked, had he made no mention of the presence of the two “frères” in the vestibule on the occasion of his first examination? He replied, “I said nothing about it because no one asked me. But I declare positively that there were two “frères” there; and that they were Jubrieu and Léotade.”

After giving some details of the gestures which he said he had seen made by the accused, he was asked, “Did Léotade request you to forward his account book to him by ‘a girl,’ or by ‘the girl’?”

“l am not sure.”

At the end of certain statements concerning the immorality of the accused, Léotade broke through his reserve, and exclaimed, “I was not – indeed I could not be – in the vestibule at a quarter past nine. He lies! My whole life contradicts the possibility of my being guilty of what he lays to my charge! From my childhood my conduct has been good. In my own village I was the only one out of fifty children, chosen to receive my first communion; and it was not for my birth or because I was a clever child, but because I was a good child, that I was chosen. “When I left my home, I had even the esteem of my neighbours. Even then my thoughts were turned to a religion life; but I was obliged to work because my mother was poor. When my mother died, still wishing to give myself up to a religious life, I went to ask the advice of our curé at home; he took an interest in me, and was glad to help me to my calling. At last he gained me admission to the “frères” of Toulouse. I set off with joy; I finished my novitiate; I was then sent to Mirepoix, and afterwards to Bordeaux. Then I returned to Toulouse – against my own wish; but wherever I have been, my good character speaks in my favour. You can bring no period of my life against me. I was made house steward because I was trusted. My prison has not changed my faith. I pray to God unceasingly; and I pray for you (turning to the jury); I shall pray for you whatever be your decision. You may condemn me to death, but you shall not lose my prayers. I am not fearful for the future, and, if you condemn me, I shall die as cheerfully as missionaries and martyrs die in distant lands.”

“Do you persist in saying you saw Léotade and Jubrien in the vestibule?” said the judge to Conte.

“Before God and man, I swear it. They were both there.”

“The evidence will show which of us has lied,” answered Léotade.

“Accused,” observed the president, “the quality, not the quantity, of evidence is valuable, it is possible that, considering the circumstances of the case, Conte’s statement may be preferred to yours, though yours be corroborated by many more.”

“Conte will be judged sooner or later by Him who is the judge of all.”

“Divine justice is the auxiliary of human justice. If you are condemned by man, you will find your sentence confirmed in another world!”

This is, to say the least of it, rather remarkable on the part of a judge. Every suggestion of the counsel of the defence was slighted; they were rarely allowed to object to the questions of the procureur-général, or to put any of their own. To the unanimous testimony of the whole religious confraternity it was deemed a sufficient refutation that they were a confraternity. They were, ipso facto, banded together to lie and defeat the ends of justice.

The procureur-général made a long and elaborate address. The most telling part of his really brilliant, speech was an imaginary description of the details of the double crime. With vivid power of representation, he led his hearers from the vestibule to the stable, and there showed them what he pictured to himself as all the horrid details of the murder. The audience were intensely excited, and where the logician failed, the orator triumphed.

M. Gasc followed for the defence, turning the attention of the court to the celebrated Galas case. He laid special stress on the improbability, if not impossibility, that Léotade could have traversed all those long corridors and courts with his victim, without encountering a soul. Even during his speech he was more than once interrupted by M. de Labaume.

The procureur-général waived his right of reply, and the president demanded of the accused if he wished to add anything to his case?

“I have no wish,” he replied, “to prolong this discussion; but I declare again that I have said nothing false before the court. I have spoken with sincerity; and if there have been apparent inconsistencies in some of my depositions, made at different times, attribute them to the rigour of my solitary confinement. Ah, sirs, you little know what that solitude is! Let justice judge me as she will! I am innocent!”

By a majority of more than nine voices, the accused was found guilty, and condemned to the “travaux forcés” for life.

Léotade survived in the “Bagne” until 1850. His conduct was exemplary during his miserable imprisonment. He did much good among his fellow-prisoners, and even in the midst of the horrible wickedness of the hulks, induced many of them to lead a Christian life. They were hushed and awed when he lay on his deathbed. Some rough fellows who did not know, or did not respect, the dying monk, made some disturbance in the room:

“Hush!” whispered the rest “Be still. The frère is praying.”

Notes of Interrogation

All the Year Round, Volume 7, page 210

I have many reasons for growling at everything. I am rheumatic; I am a comfortless old bachelor; I am a disappointed barrister; I am a writer of epics that I cannot get published; I once stood for the Cheshire Hundreds, and lost the election – also two thousand pounds; I hate London, and yet am obliged to live in it; I detest government offices, and yet am in the Docket Office – an expensive establishment kept up to study how best, some years hence, to reduce the expense of government offices. I live with three cross old maid sisters, and am generally called “Diogenes” by my friends. When I growl at existing nuisances, I could spit at them all, and turn yellow with suppressed bile at daily seeing those Docket Office striplings who sneer over the newspaper at my spencer, my big umbrella, my gold spectacles, and my low brimmed, good substantial beaver hat.

I am become an incarnate mark of interrogation, from constantly asking who is it that prevents the removal of existing annoyances? It is of no use railing at the general public, for that is only kicking a feather bed; it is of no use going round to all the boards of guardians, and pulling their collective noses, for then I should get into prison, and there I should have to complain of felonsrsquo; luxuries and spurious philanthropy. Nor can I go and preach in the street, for then I shall be sure to be taken up as a vagrant zealous Christian. So, in default of all these different methods, I have determined, before this chronic liver complaint of mine becomes fatal, as I know it will one day, to draw up a sort of code of great and small grievances, taking them just as they rise in my mind.

To begin:

Why is it, when the Parisians and Americans have for years had lofty and comfortable omnibuses, that we, their notorious superiors (no one, I think, will deny this), have not loftier omnibuses, with two brass rods running along either side of the roof, to aid the passenger who has to enter and take his seat while the vehicle is still in motion, and who now treads on every one’s toes, and eventually wedges himself down into his place by sheer brute force? Why should I have to poke at the conductor’s ribs, and to make vain signals of my desire to be put down, when I might easily, as in America, have a means of communication with the driver, whom I could pay, and to whom I could give the signal for stopping? And why should there not be a regular ladder to the knife-board instead of two or three dangerous steps?

As London streets are always dirty and crowded – are daily becoming more and more miserable and impassable, and as to bore through Cheapside at noon is now a work of time, labour, and danger – why are not flying iron bridges thrown over the principal streets at the chief crossings, as once cleverly proposed? The result would be less delay, fewer accidents, fewer stoppages. And why, in the narrower streets, could not the ground floors be purchased, turned into covered paths, and thus the present pavement removed in order to widen the carriage way?

As nearly all our public statues are contemptible, and are erected to persons to whom the nation owes no gratitude, why should there not be a jury appointed to sit on them every twenty-five years; to order their removal, to arrange alterations to be made in them, or to decide on their permanence? Why should not, say, Garibaldi supersede the Duke of York? (famous for certain military jobbings;) and by all means put up a manlier Nelson, and give Mr Pox, in Bloomsbury Square, a sound washing.

Why is not the indescribable confusion of the coinage ended for ever by the decimal system, so entirely successful in France and America? And why does our Queen never get older on our coins than five-and-twenty?

How long is the wrangle about the relative superiority of Greek and Gothic architecture to continue? Is not every style good in its way for certain purposes? And can a style of building originally without windows, or a style devised by men at a time when glass windows were not used, be a good style lor dwelling houses here in the English climate? Must not the best style be an entirely new one, adapted for our new wants?

Why is it that our wise government complains of the want of sailors, when every workhouse in England is full of brave strong boys, who could easily be trained as naval recruits, and whose waxen minds a few lectures on a sailor’s life, or a few sea stories, would irresistibly urge to a profession full of adventure and romance?

As railway collisions, in spite of our greater experience, become annually more disastrous and more frequent, why should we not carry out an old, but excellent idea, and insist on one of the directors of each company accompanying every train? Why, also, since signals through the train, and a communication between every carriage has been found eminently successful in America, should it not be practised universally in England? Surely it is not difficult to run a jointed and removable wire through the roof of every carriage, and have it fixed at one end to a bell or dial on the engine, and at the other to a bell or dial in the guard’s carriage?

Why do not our medical boards examine, analyse, experiment with, and report on, every new quack medicine introduced? If it be useful and successful, let it be received at once into our Materia Medica; if noxious, useless, or a deception, let it be at once posted up in every druggist’s shop, and at every hospital in England, as an exposed and proved humbug.

As no one style of dress fits every lady’s face, complexion, and age, why should not every one devise his or her own dress? Why should our ugly, obsolete, black dress for men be retained as the only fit costume for evening parties? Why also should the ugliest hat ever worn in any age remain an unchangeable article of English costume, since it has been proved costly, fragile, hideous, an attraction to the wind, and no shelter against sun or rain?

As theatres are much less frequented than they might be – considering the intellectual and interesting nature of the drama, a love for which is rooted deep in human nature – because they are dirty, uncomfortable, unventilated, and in inconvenient neighbourhoods, why should not all these things be either quickly or gradually altered? Why does not the Lord Chamberlain, or whoever it is who is paid to meddle with such matters, refuse to license theatres that have no safe or sufficient means of exit in case of fire? Why should not those troublesome fruit women be kept in their proper place, which I take to be the refreshment room?

Why is it that we still retain that ridiculous custom of having red nosed mutes with black fire screens, to stand at death’s door? Why do people of small incomes, for the gratification of foolish pride – not of affection – keep up the ludicrous paraphernalia of a mediaeval baron’s funeral? Why, above all, do people send empty carriages to a friend’s funeral?

Why do people allow their servants to charge their visitors for beds, dinners, and petty services on visits of a day or two’s duration? And, since there is one universal groan going up from all “genteel” England about the badness of modern servants, why are not schools established, to which mothers could send children to be educated as thoughtful cooks and as mindful housemaids?

Since we know that the Greeks, and every truly great people, never educated the mind without educating the body – as the robust mind, however, morbidly active in some special faculty, can seldom exist in a weak body – why is it that children at forcing schools are allowed to kill themselves by premature study?

Why is it that England has no historical gallery of English painting, when she collects, at infinite pains and absurd cost, every fourth-rate bungle of the fourteenth century?

And here I conclude. In case of reference being wanted of my respectability, I may state that my name is Junius Quiller, Esq., 30, Montgomery Street, Dalston, where I can be found any day after six p.m. I am about sixty-three years old, slightly bald. I wear black gaiters, a spencer, and a claret-coloured tail-coat. Why shouldn’t I?

Suggestions

from a Maniac

All the Year Round, Volume 11, page 9

The communication here given to the readers of this periodical reached the office of its publication under circumstances of unparalleled singularity.

An immense package appeared on the table one morning, which had been left, as was stated ingenuously outside, “on approval.” It must be owned that the dimensions of the supposed manuscript were, to judge from the outside, rather alarming, but it was none the less determined that in this, as in other cases, justice should be done to the volunteer contributor. The parcel was opened. What was the surprise of “the management” to find nothing inside but an old and much worn copy of Goldsmith’s Abridgment of the History of England.

The book was about to be flung aside, when Mr. Thomas Idle, who was loitering in the office at the time, happening in sheer listlessness to turn over the pages of the volume, suddenly uttered the dissyllable “Hullo.” A general rush was made towards the spot from which this sound emanated, and it was then found that the volume of Goldsmith was covered, as to the flyleaves and the margins of the pages, with manuscript written in pencil, which, when it had been deciphered with much difficulty, came out in the form of the subjoined article.

All endeavours to trace the authorship of the paper have been made in vain. It had been left at the office – this was all the information that was to be got – by a stout good-natured-looking personage, with bushy whiskers, and dressed in a shooting jacket: who had handed the package in with a grin, and with the remark, “You won’t often get anything like that, I’ll be bound!”

The manuscript begins thus:

The straw with which my hair is decorated has failed lately to afford me the pleasure which it was wont to give. The lath which I have furbished up, and made into a sceptre, will not do, either. It was a great consolation to me at first, but it has ceased to be so now. Nothing will give me any satisfaction except the possession of pens, ink, and paper, by means of which to impart my rapidly flowing ideas to the public. Ideas! Flowing ideas! They crowd and rush into my brain, trampling on one another’s heels at such a rate that I can keep them in no sort of order – and they are such valuable ideas, that they would set the whole world to rights if the whole world only knew about them.

And the world shall know about them. I asked for pens, ink, and paper, and they would not let me have them; but, I’ve got a book – what’s it called? Goldsmith’s Abridgment of the History of England – and Struddles, the keeper, who is my dear friend, has lent me a pencil, and I can write all I want to say on the flyleaves and round the margins of the pages of this book, and then Struddles promises to take it away for me and to get it published. As to the pencil point, they won’t let me have a knife to cut it with, so when I’ve worked it down to the cedar (as if I was mad! Why see, I know what wood the lead of a pencil is set in), I give it to Struddles, and he cuts it for me; or if Struddles is out of the way, I bite the wood away, till there is lead enough bare to write with. But I must not waste my space. I want to get to my ideas at once. I am going to begin. Where shall I begin? Anywhere.

Why not raise your pavements up to the first floors of the houses. Not all the pavements in London at once (that would be a mad notion), but by degrees, and as opportunity offered?

Take Regent Street, for instance. Bless you, I know Regent Street well, and have often nearly been run over at that awful crossing at the Circus where it joins Oxford Street. Why not have an iron balcony the whole length of Regent Street on a level with the first floor windows, to be used as the promenade for foot passengers? You couldn’t do it at once, but by degrees you might, beginning at the Circus. Then might a suggestion made once by a dear friend of mine (Columbus Startles) be carried out completely. His idea was, that light iron bridges should be thrown up over the crossings at the Circus, and a capital idea it was. Well, my iron balcony would be like a continuation of these bridges, or the bridges would be a continuation of the iron balcony, and so you would be able to walk straight on when you came to the crossing, and take no account of the carriages; omnibuses, and carts, roaring along underneath you. But the wiseacres who think that I have not weighed all the difficulties of my plan will say, “And pray what is to become of the shops?” My answer is ready instantly. Raise them too, and let the shopfronts be on the first, instead of the ground floor, which should then be used for storehouses, or whatever the upper portions of the houses are used for now. Once more I repeat, you must do all this by degrees. That is the great secret. Do it gradually.

How pretty it would be as well as convenient! The balcony or iron pavement would be supported on pillars of the same metal, and would communicate with the carriage road by occasional staircases at the crossings. All the smaller streets would be left as they are. There is no difficulty in crossing over them; and supposing you were on my raised pavement in Regent Street, and wanted to turn into Conduit Street, for instance, you would descend the staircase at the corner, on which side you liked, and would proceed along the pavement of the latter thoroughfare exactly as usual. (The pavement, by the by, might remain just as it is under the iron arcade, and would be a pleasant refuge in rainy weather.)

Now something of this sort – I am not bigoted to my own scheme – but something of this sort will have to be done. Even when I was a gentleman at large, some two years ago now, I have waited and waited at some of the principal crossings in London for an opportunity of getting over, till my poor nerves got into such a state that I could hardly take advantage of the chance when it did come. Of course the thing is much worse now, and what will it be five years hence? Modern nerves are more delicate and susceptible than ancient nerves, and yet they are in some respects more severely tried. I am told that already people collect in groups at some of the London crossings waiting till the police come to their assistance. What will this come to, I ask again, five years hence?

So much for that idea. Now for the next. Let me see, what is the next?

When I kept house – an undertaking of such fearful difficulty, and surrounded with such severe mental trials, that my having anything to do with it is one of the causes of my being here, by mistake – when I kept house I observed, for my occupation led me to look out of window a good deal, that the street in which I resided was much frequented by a class of gentry with greasy hair, wearing caps instead of hats, with a general second-hand look about everything they had on, with villanous faces, and with bags or sacks slung over their shoulders. Sometimes these individuals carried workboxes or tea caddies in their hands: the boxes in question being held open, in order to show the splendour of their interiors. Now, I remarked that these men were always looking down into the areas, that they always appeared to be communicating by signs, or sometimes by word of mouth, with the servants, and that everything they did was done in a furtive and sheepish manner, very disagreeable to witness. Their communications with the servants would often terminate in a descent of the area steps, but it was always remarkable that no one of the individuals of whom I speak ever opened an area gate, or, indeed, did anything else without first glancing over his shoulder to right and left, looking first up the street and then down the street. On emerging from the area, that same look was repeated before the man would venture out into the street.

Sometimes it would happen, naturally enough, that one of these men would, in the course of his day’s work – what work? – arrive at the house then tenanted by me, and, little suspecting that I was hiding behind the wire blind and listening with all my might, would go through his usual manoeuvres in front of my dining room window. Watching till one of the servants chanced to approach the kitchen window, he would try to attract her attention by gently rattling a tea caddy against the railings, and then, attention once caught – it was easily done, Heaven knows – he would begin cajoling the women, and calling the cook “mum:” an offence in itself which ought to be visited with transportation.

“Want a nice workbox, mum – nice tea caddy, mum?” the sneak would begin.

The servants, I suppose, answered only by signals: at any rate, I could hear nothing of their replies. The sneak looked up and down the street again, and then crouched down so as to be nearer the kitchen window. He also swung the bag off his shoulder, to be able to get at its contents.

“Nice workbox or caddy, mum! very reasonable, mum. Nice ribbings of all colours! Bit of edging, ladies, for your caps.”

The telegraphing from below would seem to be in the negative, though not sufficiently so to discourage this wretched sneak. He got nearer to the gate, and again looked up and down the street.

“Make an exchange, mum, if you like! A old pair of gentleman’s boots, if you’ve got such a thing, mum, or a gentleman’s old ’at or coat, ladies. Take a’most anythink in change, ladies, if it was even so much as a humbrella, or an old weskit, or a corkscrew.”

And what business, pray, had my female servants with boots, hats, waistcoats, or corkscrews, in their possession? If these articles were given to that disgusting sneak, who, at the conclusion of the last sentence quoted, made his way furtively down the kitchen steps, where could they possibly come from? Women servants do not wear coats and waistcoats and hats, nor do they generally have corkscrews of their own in their possession.

Why are these area sneaks allowed? They may be identified by anybody, but by a policeman especially, at a single glance. Why are they allowed to pursue their avocations? My beloved friend Featherhead here, who has continual information from outside the walls, tells me that lately several robberies have been traced to these detestable creatures. Featherhead has a bee in his bonnet, poor fellow, but he is truth itself; I can depend implicitly upon what he tells me, and it really seems to me, that if you go on allowing these area-sneaks to spend their days in wandering about the less frequented streets, corrupting the servants, and making them as great thieves as they (the sneaks) are themselves, you must be much madder than any of us poor fellows who are living – well, in retirement.

I want to know, not that this has anything to do with the last subject – why should it? I suppose I may adopt a disjointed style if I choose – I want to know why, among you outside, the young men, the bachelors, are made so much more comfortable than they ought to be? You cannot keep them out of some of their luxuries and comforts, it is true. They live in central situations at trifling rents. They take their meals at clubs, where they are provided with such food as is hardly to be obtained anywhere else. They have no responsibilities, no anxieties worthy of the name. And, as if this was not enough, what else do you do to encourage them in celibacy? You allow them at any age to accept your hospitalities, and you expect no return, and you charge them twelve shillings only for the privilege of wearing a demi-griffin rampant on their little fingers, while the married man has to pay twenty-four. Now this, I say, is too bad. The bachelor is a selfish luxurious wretch, able to do more with three hundred a year than the family man can with three thousand. Tax him then – tax him heavily. He is young and strong, and able to endure – grind him down with taxation till he groans under the load, and then when he becomes a married man, and a worthy useful citizen, lighten his load instead of increasing it. And at the same time that we bully these selfish young dogs of bachelors, would it not be judicious to take a hint or two from them. How is it that they manage to get a maximum of enjoyment out of a minimum of expenditure? By combination. And why shouldn’t married people combine as well as bachelors? Not combine socially, I don’t mean that, but pecuniarily; as they already do to get their supplies of water, their gas, the books that they want to read. We ought to have club chambers for families. Great big handsome houses let off in floors. For want of these we have ruined our town; we have made metropolitan distances so vast that we want railways from one part of the town to another; we are involved, each one of us, in an enormous expenditure for which we only get the smallest amount of comfort. In the present state of society, the providing for families should be the work of a professional man. Why are you a householder, which is another name for a persecuted miserable swindled wretch? – why are you to be bothered with mysterious papers about gas rates, and water rates, and poor rates, and police rates, besides ten thousand other cares and botherations, which are at once vexatious and unworthy of your attention. Let it be the business – and a very profitable business it might be – of a professional man to take a house or houses, to attend to the rates, taxes, and repairs, and to superintend and watch its kitchen arrangements as carefully as such matters are looked after by the committee of a club.

“If you please, sir, the thor has set in and all the pipes is burst;” – “If you please, sir, the man ’ave called to see about the biler, and he says could he speak to you about it;” – “There’s a party in the ’all, sir, as wishes to see you about the gas meter, which he says a new one is wanted.” Such announcements as these, together with incessant intimations that, “A gentleman has called for the pore rate, and has been twice before,” are familiar to every British householder. What bliss to hear no more allusions to such matters, and to make over a cheque once a quarter to an individual who would take all such troublesome matters off your hands for ever!

I have no space to dwell longer on this particular suggestion. I was thinking just now of something else that I wanted to say – what was it? Oh, I remember:

Why don’t you improve your street conveyances? As to omnibuses, they are beyond hope. A faint attempt was made to do something with them, but it soon subsided, and you have lapsed back into your old grooves again. But don’t you think something might be done with the cabs? Why not follow the plan adopted on railways, and have first and second-class cabs. According to the present arrangement, you go to the play with your wife, in a vehicle which just before has been occupied by six drunken blackguards returning from a foot race, or even by worse customers. If there were first-class and second-class cabs, such objectionable people would hail the latter, on account of the difference in price. And keeping still to the cab question, why don’t you have some means of communicating with the driver without thrusting your head and half your body out of the window? Even by doing that, you can hardly make yourself heard, in a crowded thoroughfare, till you have got past the house you wanted to stop at, or the street up which you should have turned. By means of a flexible tube you might give your direction with ease, without stirring from your place, or bawling yourself hoarse. And would it be too much to ask that in close cabs there should always be a light inside after nightfall? As it is, you plunge into the interior of that dark receptacle for locomotive humanity, compelled to take your chance of plumping down upon a seat on which some inconsiderate person has just before deposited a pair of boots thickly encrusted with mud. There is a lamp outside the Hansom; why don’t you have a lamp inside the four-wheeler? And talking of Hansoms, how is it that the public puts up with that guillotine window? We have a very nice fellow in this establishment who once broke one of those windows with his nose – the feature is a large one, and the scar is upon it to this hour. If it is not possible to make a window altogether outside the cab, allowing a good space between it and the apron for ventilation, at least the window as at present existing might be left to the management of the individual inside the cab. The majority of persons who have sense enough to find their way into one of these vehicles, would probably be capable of the mental and bodily effort of dealing with the window. But it is a curious thing, and difficult to account for, that all persons who are professionally mixed up with horses and carriages always treat you as if in all matters connected with either you were a perfect baby. I must leave this subject of Hansoms and four-wheelers. I come to my most important suggestion. It is new. It is practical. It gets us – the country generally – the government – the people – out of a difficulty. It is economical.

I have to propose a new method of rewarding merit in this country: a new way of distinguishing those among our citizens who have earned a right to our approval, and on whom it is the general wish to confer some great public evidence of our respect and gratitude. Hitherto, when we have sought to do honour to a great man, or to render an illustrious name additionally illustrious, it has been our custom to erect a monument.

Now, my desire is to establish a system the very reverse of this. I propose that in grateful remembrance of every great man who arises among us, instead of putting up a statue, or other monument, we go to work with axe and hammer, and PULL ONE DOWN!

Here would be a stimulus to exertion! Gracious powers! who that loved his country – or rather his town – would not strain every nerve to excel in his own particular department, when the hope was before him of delivering his fellow creatures from one of those terrific monsters, the public statues! Once let the edict go forth, once let it be distinctly understood that any man who achieved greatness might not only feel secure himself from ever appearing in one of our public places with a scroll in one of his hands, and tights on both his legs, but that he would secure to himself the glory of abolishing a London statue – once let this be understood, and I believe there would be no end to our greatness as a nation. How would the flagging energies of a virtuous rising man revive as he passed the Duke of York’s Column, or George the Third’s Pigtail, or George the Fourth’s curly wig, and said to himself, “A little more labour, a little longer effort, and, thou monstrosity, I shall lay thee level with the dust.”

Some one has remarked that we are not a military nation. From the moment when this plan of mine is adopted – as of course it will be – we shall become so. What will a man not do, what hardship will he not encounter, what danger will he not face, with the thought deep down in the recesses of his heart, that he is not only combating his country’s foes, but that he is helping to lift that load of horror off the arch at the top of Constitution Hill!

From one end of our social scale to the other our whole community would feel this additional stimulus to exertion. Even the illustrious prince in whose presence it has never been my good fortune to bask, would be urged on in a glorious and virtuous career by the thought that one day the statue of his great-uncle might by his greatness be swept away from the surface of Trafalgar Square, or that his noble acts would remove another great-uncle from King William Street, where he interrupts the traffic by vainly offering a coil of rope for sale, and depresses the spirits of the passers-by in a perfectly inexcusable manner. All classes, I say, would feel this stimulus. The politician would look at Lord George Bentinck, and, shaking his fist at him, would mutter, “Thy days are numbered.” The medical man would think of Jenner, and sign his prescription with a bolder hand. “Fiat pilula, ruat Jennerum!”

And consider how remarkable it is that the bronze coinage should have come into existence just at the moment when we are likely to have so much bronze thrown upon our hands. What, unnumbered pennies there must be in the length and breadth of that fearful statue of the Duke of Wellington. Why, there must be change for a five-shilling-piece in his nose. The cocked hat would be a dowry for a princess. The stirrups but – the mind shrinks before the contemplation of such wealth.

Proposed Form

To His Excellency General Lord…,

Field-Marshal, &c. &c. &c.

My Lord,

We hasten to approach your lordship with our heartfelt congratulations on your safe arrival on these shores, and also on the success which has attended your arms in every action in which you have been engaged while defending the interests of that great country which you so adequately and nobly represent.

We are directed to convey to your lordship the acknowledgments of your gracious sovereign for the services rendered by you to your country, and we are further directed to add to the honourable titles which already adorn your name, those of: &c. &c. &c.

But a prouder distinction yet awaits your lordship; one which it will be more glorious to you to receive, and for us to confer.

It has been decided that such services as those by which you have recently so eminently distinguished yourself, are worthy of some more marked commemoration than any which mere titles, however illustrious, can afford. We have to announce to you that it is the intention of the sovereign of this country to confer upon you the highest honour which a monarch can give, or a subject receive.

It has, doubtless, not escaped the notice of one so well acquainted with our metropolis as your lordship, that in one of its principal thoroughfares, at the entrance to one of its principal parks, in the immediate vicinity of its clubs and its Tattersall’s, there exists a monster of noisome and appalling proportions, which, besides being the terror of the neighbourhood in which it is located, has disgraced the name of Britain in those foreign countries which the rumour of its existence has unfortunately reached.

This monster it has been your proud privilege to depose from his high place. An enemy to the fair name of this country, almost as much so as those other enemies over whom you have lately triumphed – that monster has fallen before your victorious approach, and beneath the spot which was once its lair may now be seen your lordship’s name, in bold characters, and underneath it the simple inscription – “OVERTHROWN BY THIS PUBLIC BENEFACTOR.”

As your lordship’s fellow-countrymen pass that inscription in their daily walks, not only will the remembrance of the numerous exploits with which your name is associated be kept continually before them, but their gratitude towards the man who has delivered his country from a terror and a shame, will be reawakened from day to day, and from hour to hour.

Feeling that nothing we could add would give any additional value to this tribute which we have thus the honour of offering to your lordship, we will now withdraw, wishing your lordship long life and health, and many a pleasant ride under that arch on Constitution Hill which will henceforth be always associated with your proudest triumphs and your most glorious achievements.

We are, &c. &c.

(Signed)

There! I’ve come to the end of the space at my disposal, and can say no more; but if you’ll only send me another big book – say Hansard’s Debates – I’ll annotate it with suggestions by the dozen.

By the by, does it strike you, or any of your readers, that Oliver Goldsmith was at all mad?

The Deadlock in Italy

A Letter

from an Englishman in Rome,

to an Italian in London

All the Year Round, Volume 14, page 510

“… You are visiting Rome for the fourth time. You have leisure at your command, you have eyes in your head, and your sympathies in the Italian question are on the liberal side. Rome is now on the eve of a change which may be felt all over Europe. Tell me, in my exile, how Rome looks.”

This very natural request of yours reaches me, my good friend, on the fifteenth of November. In one calendar month from that date, the French troops are bound, under the Convention, to leave the Pope and the People to settle their differences together. Must I tell you truly how Rome looks, under these circumstance? Prepare yourself to be astonished; prepare yourself to be disappointed. Rome looks as Rome looked when I was here last, nearly four years since – as Rome looked when I was here, for the second time, eleven years since – as Rome looked, when I was here, for the first time, twenty-eight years since. New hotels have been opened, in the interval, I grant you; the Pincian Hill has been improved; a central railway station has been made; an old church has been discovered at St Clemente; a new church has been built on the ruins ot the Basilica of St Paolo; Seltzer water is to be had; crinolines are to be seen; the hackney coachmen have been reformed. But, I repeat, nevertheless, the Rome that I first remember in ’38 is, in all essentials, the Rome that I now see in ’66. Nobody walking th rough the city, nobody looking at the people and the priests, would have the faintest suspicion of the change which you tell me is at hand, of the convulsion that may be coming in a month’s time.

What is the secret of this extraordinary apathy? I take the secret to be, that the Roman Catholic Religion sticks fast – and that the people stick fast with it. I may be quite wrong, but the impression produced on my mind by what I have seen and heard in Italy this time is – that the Pope’s position is, even yet, by no means the desperate position which the liberal newspapers represent it to be. I see three chances still for His Holiness and the Priest. First, the enormous religious influence at their disposal. Secondly, the miserable dearth (since Cavour’s death) of commanding ability in the civil and military administration of the Italian Kingdom. Thirdly, the inbred national defects of the Italian character.

Don’t crumple up my letter, and throw it into the fire! Don’t say, “The priests have got hold of him! My friend is nothing better than a reactionary and a Jesuit after all!” No Englishman living, is a heartier friend to the Italian cause than I am. No Englishman living, desires more earnestly than I do to see this nation great, prosperous, and free, from one end of the peninsula to the other. But, there are two sides to every question – the shady side, and the bright. Italian liberals and English liberals have agreed long enough (in my opinion) to look at Italian politics on the bright side only. Give the shady side its turn. “When an individual man is in a difficulty, it is universally admitted that his best preparation for getting out of it, is, to look the worst in the face. What is true of individuals, in this case, is surely true of nations – doubly true, I venture to think, of your nation. Suffer a barbarous Englishman to speak the rude truth. The very last thing you are any of you willing to do, is, to look the worst in the face. Give me your arm, and let us look at it together.

You have been twenty years in England; you are almost – though, fortunately for my chance of convincing you, not quite – an Englishman. Have you noticed, in the time during which you have inhabited my country, what the religious influence can do, applied to purely political and purely worldly objects? Why, even in my country, where Religion expressly assumes to leave thought free, and to let men decide for themselves – the so-called religious influence, applied to political and social ends, fights from a vantage ground in the minds of the masses of mankind equally above the reach of reason and of right.

If the (always so-called) religious influence can do this in England, what sort of enemy have you Italians to deal with, in the religious influence of Rome? You have a system against you here, which for generation after generation, and century after century, has put the priest before the people with his hand held out, and the one everlasting formula on his lips: “Let me think for you, and I will take you to heaven.” For generation after generation, and for century after century, the people have taken the priest’s hand on those terms. The greatest of human writers, the noblest of human beliefs – patience under worldly trials, consolation under afflictions, the most sacred domestic ties, the very ledge of immortality itself – have all been held through century after century, for millions and millions of your people, in the priest’s hand. In the priest’s hand they are held still – and you have got him against you.

Yes! here, in his central stronghold, the priest’s immovable composure has its old foundation, to this day, in the priest’s consciousness of his power. The political tyranny that he administers – the infamous misgovernment that he permits – has alienated you, and thousands of men like you. But he has got your wives and your daughters; he has got the influence of the mothers over the children, and the other stronger influence yet of the women over the men. Nay, to come to individual instances of note and mark, he has even got your King. It is notorious to everybody out of England – though it has been carefully concealed in England – that there is a religious side to Victor Emmanuel’s character, as well as a political side, and that he presents to this day the curiously anomalous phenomenon of a zealous Papist who is in disgrace with the Pope.

But I am drifting into general considerations, and am forgetting that it is my business to give you the results of my own personal observations, such as they are.

I have attended more than one of the Catholic church services on Sundays. I have walked again and again over those remoter quarters of Rome in which the life of the people shows itself most strikingly and unrestrainedly to strangers. Go where I may, I see no change in the congregations, since my first experience of them; I discover no such phenomenon as a threatening attitude among the people. Last Sunday morning, I went to a “solemn function” at the church of St Martin; then, to St Peter’s, to Vespers, and Catechism in the afternoon; then, all through the Trastevere, where all the people were out enjoying the lovely sunshine; then, back again, across the river, and round about another populous quarter, to another “solemn function.” In all this peregrination I looked carefully for any signs of a change anywhere, and saw none. The church ceremonies were as superb and as impressive as ever, and the congregations (the men included, mind) just as numerous and just as devout. Four years since, I saw the catechising at St Peter’s – the boys openly taught under one of the aisles, and the girls secretly taught behind a screen, under another. On that occasion I noticed that the girls all respectfully kissed the priest’s hand when they came out from the screen, and were dismissed. There was the whole thing, last Sunday, going on again as usual – the much-enduring boys kicking their legs on the forms, and the nicely trained girls crowding round the priest to kiss his hand as they went out. In the whole Trastevere, when I walked through it afterwards – in all that turbulent ultra-Roman quarter of Rome – I doubt if there were a soul indoors. Were the men cursing in corners, and the terrified women trying to moderate them? The men were playing the favourite Roman game of “morra” in corners – the men were smoking and laughing – the men were making love to their sweethearts – the men went out of the way into the mud, at a place where a cardinal’s carriage was standing as an obstacle on the drier ground, without a wry look or a savage word in any case. The women, in their Sunday best – the magnificent Roman women of the people – sat gossiping and nursing their children, as composedly as if they lived under the most constitutional monarchy in the world. If they had been English women, and had “known their blessings,” they could not have looked more comfortable nor, I will add (though it is treason in an Englishman to find any beauty out of his own country), could they have looked handsomer. Do you remember, when you were in Rome, devout female individuals stopping a cardinal out for his walk, to kiss the ring on his forefinger? I saw a devout female individual stop a cardinal, yesterday, for this extraordinary purpose, in a public thoroughfare. The cardinal took it as a matter of course, and the people took it as a matter of course, just as they did in your time.

Don’t misunderstand me, in what I am now writing. I am not foolish enough to deny that there is discontent in Rome, because I don’t find it coming to the surface. I don’t for a moment doubt that there is serious and savage discontent – though I firmly believe it to be confined to the class (the special class, here and everywhere) which is capable of feeling a keen sense of wrong. More than this, I am even ready to believe that “the Roman committee” can raise a revolution, if it please, on the day when the French leave Rome. But granted the discontent, and granted the revolution, I am afraid there is a power here which will survive the one, and circumvent the other. I see the certainty of possessing that power in reserve in the unchanged attitude of the priests; and I see the foundation on which the conviction of the priests rests, in the unchanged attitude of the people. You know the old story of the man who had been so long in prison that he had lost all relish of liberty, and who, when they opened the doors for him at last, declined to come out. When you open the door here, I hope – but I confess I find it hard to believe – that you will find the Roman people ready to come out.

So much for the first and foremost of the chances in favour of the Pope; the chance that the immense religious influence at his command will prove too strong for you. Observe (before we get on) how boldly and openly he is meeting you with that influence already, on your own ground. You know that the form of Christianity of which he is the head, is the one form that really adapts itself to the Italian temperament; and you leave the spiritual interests of the people at his sole disposal, while you take the material interests into your own hands. What does he do upon this? He declares, with the whole force of his authority and position, that his spiritual rights and his temporal rights are indivisible, and that respect for the one means respect for the other. View this declaration as a political assertion, and the absurdity of it is beneath notice. Pronounced by the Pope, it becomes an article of Faith. “You take your religion from Me,” says His Holiness. “That is part of your religion.” What is the answer to this from the life of the faithful – not in Rome only, but all over the civilised globe? The answer from hundreds of thousands of otherwise intelligent people, having their influence on public opinion, is – “Amen!”

The second of the chances in the Pope’s favour; the present dearth of commanding ability in the civil and military administration of the Italian Kingdom; needs no discussion here, for it admits of no denial. To enlarge on this part of the subject, after the events of the late war, would be almost equivalent to reproaching Italy with her misfortunes. God forbid I should do that! May you yet find the men who can lead your brave army and your brave navy as they deserve to be led! May you yet find the men who can hold out to the discontented, disunited, degraded people of the southern provinces the hand strong enough to help them up, the hand that can rule! Here, at least, we may hope for Italy, with some assurance that we are not hoping in vain. The nation that produced Cavour, the nation that possesses Garibaldi, must surely have its reserves of strength still left.

If you were not a northern Italian, I should feel some difficulty in approaching the last of the three points of view from which I look at the Papal Obstacle standing in your way. Fortunately for my purpose, you are not a Tuscan or a Roman – for it is precisely in the radical defects of the Tuscan and the Roman characters that I see the last of the three chances which the weakness of Italy still offers to the cause of the Pope.

The two striking defects of your countrymen, so far as a stranger can see them, appear to me to be: first, their apparent incapability of believing in truth; secondly, their want of moral fibre and nerve in the smaller affairs of life. The first of these defects presents the Italian to me in the aspect of a man who cannot be persuaded that I am telling the truth about the simplest matter conceivable, so long as he sees under the surface an object which I might gain by telling a lie. The second of these defects shows me my Italian fellow-pilgrim along the road of life, in the character of a man who, whenever he finds a stone in his path, skirts lazily round it, and leaves it to the traveller behind him, instead of lifting his foot and kicking it, once for all, out of the way. These are both (to my mind) dangerous national failings. The first lowers the public standard of honour, and does incalculable mischief in that way. The second leaves your countrymen without the invaluable check on all nuisances, abuses, and injustices, of a public opinion to discuss, and a public voice to resent them. There is gain, my friend, certain gain and certain strength here, for the cause of bad government all the world over.

Let me illustrate what I mean, by one or two examples, before I close my letter.

Not long ago, a certain mistake (the pure result of hurry and carelessness) was made in conducting the business of a certain English Legation. Some consternation was felt when the error was discovered, for it might have ended in awkward results. But the caprices of Chance are proverbial. An unforeseen turn of circumstance placed the Legation in the lucky position of having blundered, after all, in the right direction: a diplomatic advantage was thus accidentally gained, by a fortunate diplomatic error. A friend of mine (himself in the diplomatic service) was a few days afterwards in the company of several Italian gentlemen; all of them men of education and position; some of them men of note and mark in politics. On entering the room, my friend, to his astonishment, found himself eagerly surrounded, and complimented in the warmest terms on the extraordinary capacity of his Chief. It was almost a pleasure, your polite countrymen said, to be overreached in such an extremely clever manner. The Englishman, as soon as he could make himself heard, attempted to put the matter in its true light. It all originated, he declared, in a mistake. The Italians smiled, and shook their heads with the most charming courtesy and good humour. “Cave! cave!” they remonstrated. “You have outwitted us; but, my dear sir, we are not downright fools. The ‘mistake’ has done its work. You may drop the mistake!” The Englishman declared, on his word of honour, that the true explanation was the explanation he had given. The Italians bowed resignedly, and left him. To this day they are persuaded that the mistake was made on purpose. To this day they admire my friend as a master in the art of solemn false assertion for diplomatic ends.

This little incident is trivial enough in itself, I grant you; but pursue the inveterate belief in deceit that it exhibits, into the daily affairs of life, on the one hand, and into serious political emergencies on the other, and tell me if you do, or do not, see some of your domestic scandals and some of your ministerial complications under a new light.

Take your railroads again, as illustrating some of those other defects in the national character which I have ventured to point out. In Northern Italy, the railroad is excellently managed: in Northern Italy the railroad has taught the people the value of time. Advance through Tuscany, and go on to Rome, and I hardly know which would surprise and disgust you most – the absolute laziness of the official people in working the line, or the absolute submission of the passengers under the most inexcusable and the most unnecessary delays. I arrived at the capital of the kingdom of Italy by the train which they called an express. There were surprisingly few passengers, and there were only some six or eight barrow loads of luggage. The porters – and there were quite enough of them – occupied half an hour, by my watch, in transporting the baggage from the van to the receiving-room. I never saw men lounge as those Florentine porters lounged; I never saw inspectors stand and do nothing, as those Florentine inspectors stood and did nothing; and I never saw travellers take the exasperating and disgraceful indolence of the people paid to serve them, as the Italian travellers took it. Two men protested – two men were angry. One was a Frenchman, the other was your obedient servant.

Going on once more towards Rome (but not yet, mind, out of the kingdom of Italy), we were kept waiting three quarters of an hour for the arrival of a branch train. Three impatient men got out, and walked up and down the dominions of Victor Emmanuel, fuming. Again, the Frenchman; again, your obedient servant, and another Englishman. And what did the free Italians do? They sat talking and smoking in the sweetest of tempers. The perfect composure of the engine driver, the stoker, and the guards, was more than matched by the perfect composure of the native passengers. Late or early, in the train or out of the train, oh dolce far niente, how nice you are, and how dearly we love you! See the Frenchman grinding his teeth, and hear the Englishmen with their national “Damn!” What a fever is in the blood of these northern people, and what lives the poor guards and engine drivers must lead in those restless northern lands! Here comes the train, before the fourth quarter of an hour is out – what would you have more? Has any accident happened? Nothing has happened. We have somehow lost three quarters of an hour on the road, today; you somehow lost an hour on the road yesterday. Ma che? After all, we are going on to Rome. We go on. Night and darkness overtake us. The train stops, without a vestige of a station or a lamp visible anywhere in the starlight. A lonely little maid, with a little basket, appears, drifting dimly along the line, and crying “Medlars! medlars! buy my medlars!” Have we stopped to give this poor child a chance of picking up some coppers? Send her this way directly; let us buy the whole basket full, and give the little maid a kiss, and go on to Rome. My head is out of the window; my hand is in my pocket. A gendarme appears, and the little maid vanishes. “Be so obliging,” the gendarme says, “as to come out and be fumigated.” I tell him I have come from Florence; I tell him there is no cholera at Florence; I tell him I have got a clean bill of health from Florence. The gendarme waits till I have done, and replies, “Be so obliging as to come out and be fumigated.” Everybody else has already got out to be fumigated. I hear the Frenchman in the darkness; his language is not reproducible. First class, second class, third class, we grope our way, without artificial light of any sort to help us, up the side of a hill, and all tumble into a shed. A soldier closes the door on us; a white smoke rises from the floor, and curls feebly about the people who are near it. Human fustiness and chloride of lime contend for the mastery; human fustiness, if my nose be to be trusted, has the best of it. Half a minute (certainly not more) passes, and the door is suddenly opened again; we are all fumigated; we may go on to Rome. No, we may not. The passports must be examined next. In any other country in the world, one stoppage would have been made to serve the two purposes. In Italy, two stoppages take place. As we jog on again, I consult my official guide to find out when we are due in Rome. The guide says 9 p.m. An experienced traveller tells me the guide is wrong – the hour is 8 p.m. A second traveller produces another guide – the hour is so ill printed that nobody can read it. I appeal to a guard, when we stop at the next station. “In Heaven’s name, when do we get to Rome?” In the gentlest possible manner he replies, “Have patience, sir.” I catch the vice of patience from the guard, and it ends in our getting to Rome before midnight. Next morning I try to find out, in various well informed quarters, whether there is a public opinion of any sort or kind to resent and reform such absurdities as I have here, in all good humour, tried to describe. I can find out no such thing as a public opinion. I can find out no such thing as the nerve and fibre out of which a public opinion is made. Abuses which have nothing to do with politics, abuses which are remediable even under the Pope himself, encounter no public condemnation and no public resistance. Is it wonderful that the King of Naples still persists in waiting for his turn of luck? Can you call the “Catholic party” absolutely demented, if the “Catholic party” believe that the cards may yet change hands?

My letter is ended. All that is to be written and said, on the other side of the question, has been written and said, over and over again, already. The ungracious task of finding out your faults, and of stopping to look for the pitfalls that lie in your way, is now, to the best of my ability and within my narrow limits, a task performed. For the rest, time will show how far I am right, and how far I am wrong.

Meanwhile, I beg you will not do me the injustice to suppose that I have lost hope in the future of Italy. I have said what I have ventured to say, because I believe in the sincere resolution of the best among you to rouse the worst among you, and to show them, if it lie in human power, the way to advancement and reform. A man who honestly tells another man of his faults has some hope in that man, or he would hold his tongue. Distrust the flatterers and the enthusiasts – see the difficulties still before you, as the difficulties really are. When your people have had their Venetian holiday, send them mercilessly to school. For the future, let us have less throwing up of caps, and more throwing up of arable land – less illumination of houses, and more illumination of brains – the industry of an united people (which you have not got yet), in place of the acclamations of an united people (of which you have had more than enough). In plainer English still, do the work first, and shout over it afterwards. On the day when Italy has learnt that lesson, you will be too strong for the Pope, and you will be a free people.

Endnote and Annotations

[1] The ink was hardly dry on these lines, when the writer received the news of this admirable painter’s death. Insufficient though it be, let the little tribute in the text to one only of Mr.Leslie’s many great qualities as an artist, remain unaltered; and let a word of sincere sorrow for the loss of him be added to it here. No man better deserved the affectionate regard which all his friends felt for him. He was unaffectedly kind and approachable to his younger brethren, and delightfully genial and simple-minded in his intercourse with friends of maturer years. As a painter, he had no rival within his own range of subjects; and he will probably find no successor now that he is lost to us. In the exact knowledge of the means by which his art could illustrate and complete the sister art of the great humorists – in the instinctive grace, delicacy, and refinement which always guided his brush – in his exquisite feeling for ease, harmony, and beauty, as applied to grouping and composition – he walked on a road of his own making, following no man himself, and only imitated at an immeasurable distance by those who walked after him. Another of the genuinely original painters of the English School has gone, and has made the opening for the new generation wider and harder to fill than ever.

[2] An obsolete brass instrument replaced by the tuba.

[3] Probably apteryx, a kiwi.

Colophon

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Version 1  August 2015

Table of Contents

Cover page

Title page

Copyright page

About this ebook

Sure to be Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

The Good Qualities of Gout

The Royal Academy in Bed

Pray Employ Major Namby!

Portrait of an Author Painted by a Publisher

The Second Sitting

The Bachelor Bedroom

New View of Society

My Boys

My Girls

Vidocq, French Detective: Portion the first

Vidocq, French Detective: Portion the second

Boxing Day

Memoirs of an Adopted Son

The Cauldron of Oil

A Night in the Jungle

A Trial at Toulouse

Notes of an Interrogation

Suggestions from a Maniac

The Deadlock in Italy

Endnote and annotations

Colophon