m i
 
 ^ % 
 

 
 CHAPTERS 
 FROM SOME MEMOIRS
 
 CHAPTERS 
 
 FROM 
 
 SOME MEMOIRS 
 
 BY 
 
 ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE 
 
 Hontoon 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 . AND NEW YORK 
 1894 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 TO 
 GEORGE AND ELIZABETH MURRAY SMITH 
 
 THESE CHAPTERS 
 (AND HOW MANY NOT WRITTEN HERE) 
 
 ARE DEDICATED 
 IN AFFECTION AND FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 THE END HOUSE, WIMBLEDON, 
 \\th February 1894.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MY POET i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MY MUSICIAN . . . . . . 14 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH ..... 29 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 MY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY . . . .42 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 MY WITCHES' CALDRON . . . . -53 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 MY WITCHES' CALDRON II . . . .67 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 IN ST. MARY ABBOTS . . . . .83 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 To WEIMAR AND BACK . . . . .103
 
 viii Chapters from some Memoirs 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ViA WILLIS'S ROOMS TO CHELSEA . . . .123 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 IN VlLLEGIATURA ...... 145 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 TOUT CHEMIN ...... 173 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 MRS. KEMBLE . . . . ' . . 194
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MY POET 
 
 MY father lived in good company, so that even 
 as children we must have seen a good many 
 poets and remarkable people, though we were 
 not always conscious of our privileges. Things 
 certainly strike children oddly, partially, and 
 for unexpected reasons. They are so busy in 
 early life with all that is going on on every side, 
 that one person or another person, the visitor 
 in the drawing-room, the tortoise-shell cat on 
 the garden wall, the cook's little boy who has 
 come in to partake of cold pudding, all seem 
 very nearly as important one as the other. 
 Perhaps I should not have been so much 
 impressed by my first conscious sight of a poet, 
 if I had then realised all the notabilities who 
 came to our house from time to time. My 
 * B
 
 2 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 special poet was a Frenchman. I first heard 
 his name in London, at a class which I attended 
 in company with a good many other little girls, 
 my contemporaries which class indeed still 
 continues, and succeeding generations receive 
 the decorations, the prsidences and the sous 
 prtsidences, I fear I personally never attained to. 
 My poet was a hairdresser by profession 
 and a barber as well. His name was Jasmin 
 (Jaquou Jansemin in the langue (fOc). He 
 was born in 1798 at Agen in the south of 
 France; "born," he writes, "of a humpback 
 father and a halting mother in the corner of an 
 old street, in a crowded dwelling, peopled by 
 many rats, on Holy Thursday, at the hour 
 when pancakes are tossed." The humpback 
 father was also a poet in his way, and composed 
 songs for the itinerant players of the neighbour- 
 hood. So soon as Jasmin could walk he used 
 to accompany his father to the booths, but what 
 he liked better still was gathering faggots in 
 the little islands of the Garonne. " Bare- 
 headed, bare-footed," he writes, "we rowed 
 across the stream. I was not alone, there 
 were twenty of us there were thirty of us.
 
 i My Poet 3 
 
 We started at the stroke of the mid-day hour, 
 singing in choir." In the evening the children 
 returned as they had left, "thirty voices 
 chaunting the same cadence, and thirty faggots 
 dancing on thirty heads." They were so poor 
 that Jacques felt it bitterly, because his parents 
 could not afford to send him to school. One 
 day he was playing in the market-place when 
 he saw his grandfather carried by to the hospital. 
 It was there the Jasmins were in the habit of 
 dying. But a cousin taught him to read ; he 
 became apprenticed to a barber, he rose to be 
 a hairdresser, and prospered in his vocation ; 
 so that he was able to save his father from the 
 usual fate of the Jasmins. 
 
 The young hairdresser christened his first 
 poemsLes Papillotesim. honour of his profession ; 
 "which songs, "says he, " brought a silver stream- 
 let through my shop " ; and upon this streamlet 
 he floated to better fortunes than were usual to 
 the Jasmin family. One day in a fit of poetic 
 ardour he broke the terrible arm-chair in which 
 they had all been in the habit of being carried to 
 the hospital. Jasmin after he became celebrated 
 would never abandon his home or his little shop,
 
 4 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 but from time to time he went for a journey ; 
 sometimes he would come to Paris, where he was 
 kindly recognised by other authors more fortun- 
 ate in their worldly circumstances, and he would 
 be made to repeat his own songs by the great 
 ladies who took him up. Chief among them 
 was Lady Elgin, who lived in Paris then, and 
 who was a good friend to all literary aspirants. 
 Longfellow was also among Jasmin's admirers, 
 and translated some of his works. Much of all 
 this I have since read in the Biographie 
 Nationale. As children at our French class we 
 had only learnt some of his lines by heart. I 
 used to break down in utter confusion when my 
 turn came to recite ; but at the same time I 
 believe I took in a great deal more than I had 
 any idea of, as I sat there incompetent, wool- 
 gathering. In that long, bare room, only 
 ornamented by a few large maps and with a 
 flowing border of governesses, there came to 
 one many of those impressions which are not 
 dates or facts, and which don't, alas ! count for 
 good marks, but which nevertheless are very 
 useful and agreeable possessions in after days. 
 We used to have delightful French lessons in
 
 i My Poet 5 
 
 literature and poetry, and I still remember the 
 dazzling visions of troubadours evoked by our 
 teacher, troubadours amid the golden land- 
 scapes of the south of France; the poems 
 themselves as he quoted them almost seemed 
 to have wings and to come flying out of the 
 well-thumbed Recueil ! 
 
 We had lessons in morality and in ex- 
 perience as well as in literature. I can still 
 hear M. Roche in his melodious voice quot- 
 ing "de tout laurier un poison est 1'essence," 
 and praising the philosophical aptness of the 
 illustration, which seemed to me so splendid 
 that I was quite overpowered by it as I went 
 home with my governess along South Audley 
 Street. There was another heart-rending poem 
 about an angel standing by a cradle and con- 
 templating its own image in the face of the 
 infant, "reflected as in a stream." The angel 
 finally carries away the poor baby, and the 
 mother kneels weeping by the empty cradle. 
 It was a sort of Christmas-card of a poem well 
 suited to the sentimental experience of a little 
 girl of twelve or thirteen years old ; and I then 
 and there determined that Reboul was my
 
 6 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 favourite author of all. But there were many 
 others besides Reboul. Poor Andr6 Chenier 
 we were all in love with, and Jasmin aforesaid 
 held his own among the worthy recipients of 
 that golden flower of poesy which played such 
 an important part in our early education, and 
 which was (so we learnt) yearly bestowed by 
 the inhabitants of Toulouse upon the most 
 successful competitors in the art. I used to 
 picture the flower itself as a radiant quivering 
 object covered with delicate, glittering work- 
 manship. Perhaps nowadays I realise that 
 golden flowers of poesy are also bestowed in 
 the south of England, in Waterloo Place, or 
 Bedford Street, Covent Garden, shall we say ? 
 round golden tokens which are not without 
 their own special graces. 
 
 But to return to my memoirs. Our life was 
 divided between London and Paris, where our 
 grandparents dwelt, and where we spent a part 
 of every year ; and all my recent studies and 
 experiences rushed into my mind one day, soon 
 after our return to France, when my grand- 
 mother told me that she had been asked to a 
 party at Lady Elgin's to meet a poet, that his
 
 i My Poet 7 
 
 name was Jasmin, and that she was going to 
 take me with her ! My heart leapt with excite- 
 ment ; Jasmin the South golden flowers 
 pr'esidences a grown-up party the portals of 
 life seemed to fly open with those of our porte- 
 cochere as the carriage, containing my grand- 
 mother and me in our Sunday best, drove off 
 into the dark streets. We were escorted down- 
 stairs by the cook, with an extra lantern, I re- 
 member, and my grandfather in his little black 
 silk toque waved farewell over the staircase. 
 We started expectant, rolling over the rattling 
 stones ; we crossed the bridge and saw the 
 dark river below us reflecting the lights I 
 remember no stars, but a damp and drizzly 
 darkness overhead, which for some reason 
 added to my excitement. We reached the 
 ancient faubourg before very long, where the 
 oil-lamps swung by chains across the streets ; 
 we turned into the Rue de Varennes where 
 Lady Elgin lived, and the coachman rapped at 
 the great closed gates of the house, which 
 opened with a grinding sound, and we walked 
 across the courtyard. The apartment was on 
 the ground-floor of a fine melancholy old house.
 
 8 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 I followed my grandmother in her brown 
 velvet gown and her diamond brooch into the 
 reception-room. I remember being surprised 
 to find the gay world so dark on the whole, and 
 talking in such a confused and subdued murmur. 
 I had expected chandeliers, bursts of laughter, 
 people in masks and dominoes. I had taken 
 my ideas from bonbon boxes and crackers. 
 But it was evidently all right, my grandmother 
 looked greatly pleased and animated. I saw 
 her speaking to one person and to another in 
 her dignified way her manners were true 
 grandmother's manners, kind, but distant and 
 serious. We considered our grandmother a 
 very important personage, and I remember 
 feeling not a little proud of her beauty and 
 dignity as we moved along. She was not one 
 of your " remains " ; she was a very noble- 
 looking old lady, holding her head high, and 
 her diamond cap-pin flashed as she moved 
 across the room. 
 
 My grandmother, as I have said, looked 
 pleased and animated, and when her friends 
 came up to speak to her she introduced me to 
 some of them. Almost the very first person
 
 i My Poet 9 
 
 she greeted, but to whom she did not introduce 
 me, was a handsome, rather romantic, fashion- 
 able-looking gentleman, with a quantity of dark 
 hair, and a glass in one eye, leaning against the 
 wall by the door as we entered. She said a 
 few words as we passed ; I heard something 
 about " Lady Charlotte," and then we walked 
 on, and presently we came upon another girl, 
 younger than myself and very distinguished- 
 looking, in a plaid frock, with beautiful shining 
 braids of thick hair, who seemed quite at home 
 and used to the house ; she was with her mother, 
 a regal-looking little woman with a profile and 
 a gold crown ; I can still see her in a long green 
 velvet robe slowly crossing the room ; she was 
 a well-known person, Mrs. Chapman, the cele- 
 brated Abolitionist,- the little girl was her 
 youngest daughter. While Mrs. Chapman 
 and my grandmother were talking to one 
 another, little Anne Chapman, who seemed to 
 know most of the people, began telling me who 
 they all were. A great many pages out of M. 
 Roche's Recueil were present. There were all 
 sorts of notable folks murmuring to one another 
 in the big rooms. "Who was the gentleman
 
 io Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 in the doorway ? " " Oh, he is Mr. Locker," said 
 little Anne, " he is married to Lady Charlotte 
 Lady Elgin's daughter; didn't I know? they had 
 only come over from England the day before." 
 "And which is the poet?" said I eagerly. 
 "There he is, in the middle of the room," said 
 the little girl. "Oh, where?" said I. "Oh, 
 not that!" For suddenly, just under the 
 swinging chandelier, I see a head, like the 
 figure-head of a ship a jolly, red, shiny, 
 weather-beaten face, with large round prominent 
 features, ornamented with little pomatumy wisps 
 of hair, and a massive torso clothed in a mag- 
 nificent frilled shirt over a pink lining. . . 
 " That the poet ? not that," I falter, gazing at 
 Punchinello, high-shouldered, good-humoured ! 
 " Yes, of course it is that," said the little girl, 
 laughing at my dismay ; and the crowd seems 
 to form a circle, in the centre of which stands 
 this droll being, who now begins to recite in a 
 monotonous voice. 
 
 I can understand French well enough, but 
 not one single word of what he is saying. It 
 sounds perfectly unintelligible, something like 
 chi, ckou, cha, atchiou, atchiou, atchiou! And
 
 i My Poet 1 1 
 
 so it goes on, and on, and on. The shirt frill 
 beats time, the monotonous voice rises and 
 falls. It leaves off at last, the poet wipes the 
 perspiration from his brow ; there is a moment's 
 silence, then a murmur of admiration from the 
 crowd which closes round him. I see the 
 Punchinello being led up to somebody to be 
 thanked and congratulated ; my heart goes 
 down, down ; more murmurs, more exclama- 
 tions. The little girl is gone, I am all alone 
 with my disappointment, and then my grand- 
 mother calls me to her side and says it is time 
 to come away. As we move towards the door 
 again, we once more pass Mr. Locker, and he 
 nods kindly, and tells me he knows my father. 
 " Well, and what do you think of Jasmin ? " he 
 asks ; but I can't answer him, my illusions are 
 dashed. 
 
 As we drive off through the streets the rain 
 is still falling, the oil-lamps are swinging ; we 
 cross the bridge once more, but how dull, how 
 dark, how sad it all seems ! My grandmother, 
 sitting upright in the dark carriage, says she 
 has spent a very pleasant evening, and that 
 she is delighted with Jasmin's simplicity and
 
 12 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 originality. I who had longed to see a poet! 
 who had pictured something so different! I 
 swallowed down as best I could that gulp of 
 salt water which is so apt to choke us when we 
 first take our plunge into the experience of life. 
 " He didn't look much like a poet, and I 
 couldn't understand what he said," I faltered. 
 
 " Of course you could not understand the 
 patois, but have you not enjoyed your even- 
 ing ? " said my grandmother, disappointed. I 
 had the grace to try to speak cheerfully. " I 
 liked the little girl very much, and and and I 
 liked talking to Mr. Locker, but then he isnt a 
 poet," said I. 
 
 I can't help laughing even now as I conjure 
 up the absurd little dream of the past and the 
 bitterness of that childish disappointment. 
 How little do we mortals recognise our good 
 fortune that comes to us now and again in a 
 certain humorous disguise. Why, I had been 
 in a world of poets ! A poet had greeted me, 
 a poet had sung to me, I had been hustled by 
 poets ; there in the crowd (for all I know to the 
 contrary) were Lamartine and Chateaubriand 
 and Girardin and Merimee, so at least some
 
 i My Poet 1 3 
 
 one who was present on this occasion reminds 
 me. And as for Frederick Locker, does not 
 his caged music like that of the bird of Wood 
 Street echo along the arid pavements with 
 sweetest and most welcome note to charm the 
 passers-by as the echoes of London Lyrics fall 
 upon the listening ear ? And the red face was 
 also that of a true poet, born to sing his sweet 
 unpretending song from a true heart, and to 
 bring music into humble places. "A poet of 
 the people, writing in his dialect, celebrating 
 public occasions and solemnities," says Sainte- 
 Beuve, " which somehow remind one of the 
 Middle Ages ; belonging " (so he continues) 
 "to the school of Horace and to the school of 
 Theocritus and to that of Gray, and to that of 
 all those charming ^studious inspirations which 
 aim at perfection in all their work."
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MY MUSICIAN 
 
 ONE'S early life is certainly a great deal more 
 amusing to look back to than it used to be 
 when it was going on. For one thing, it isn't 
 nearly so long now as it was then, and remem- 
 bered events come cheerfully scurrying up one 
 after another, while the intervening periods are 
 no longer the portentous cycles they once used 
 to be. And another thing to consider is that 
 the people walking in and out of the bygone 
 mansions of life were not, to our newly-opened 
 eyes, the interesting personages many of them 
 have since become ; then they were men 
 walking as trees before us, without names or 
 histories, now some of the very names mean 
 for us the history of our time. Very young 
 people's eyes are certainly of more importance
 
 My Musician 1 5 
 
 to them than their ears, and they all see the 
 persons they are destined to spend their lives 
 with long before the figures begin to talk and 
 to explain themselves. 
 
 My grandmother had a little society of her 
 own at Paris, in the midst of which she seemed 
 to reign from dignity and kindness of heart ; 
 her friends, it must be confessed, have not as 
 yet become historic, but she herself was well 
 worthy of a record. Grandmothers in books 
 and memoirs are mostly alike, stately, old- 
 fashioned, kindly, and critical. Mine was no 
 exception to the general rule. She had been 
 one of the most beautiful women of her time ; 
 she was very tall, with a queenly head and 
 carriage ; she always moved in a dignified way. 
 She had an odd taste In dress, I remember, and 
 used to walk out in a red merino cloak trimmed 
 with ermine, which gave her the air of a retired 
 empress wearing out her robes. She was a 
 woman of strong feeling, somewhat imperious, 
 with a passionate love for little children, and 
 with extraordinary sympathy and enthusiasm 
 for any one in trouble or in disgrace. How 
 benevolently she used to look round the room
 
 1 6 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 at her many protege's, with her beautiful gray 
 eyes ! Her friends as a rule were shorter than 
 she was and brisker, less serious and emotional. 
 They adopted her views upon politics, religion 
 and homoeopathy, or at all events did not 
 venture to contradict them. But they certainly 
 could not reach her heights, and her almost 
 romantic passion of feeling. 
 
 A great many of my earliest recollections 
 seem to consist of old ladies, regiments of old 
 ladies, so they appear to me, as I look back 
 through the larger end of my glasses to the 
 time when my sister and I were two little girls 
 living at Paris. I remember once that after a 
 long stay in England with our father, the old 
 ladies seemed changed somehow to our more 
 experienced eyes. They were the same, but 
 with more variety ; not all alike as they had 
 seemed before, not all the same age ; some 
 were younger, some were older than we had 
 remembered them one was actually married ! 
 Our grandmother looked older to us this time 
 when we came back to Paris. We were used to 
 seeing our father's gray hair, but that hers 
 should turn white too seemed almost unnatural.
 
 My Musician 1 7 
 
 The very first day we walked out with her 
 after our return, we met the bride of whose 
 marriage we had heard while we were away. 
 She was a little, dumpy, good-natured woman 
 of about forty-five, I suppose, shall I ever 
 forget the thrill with which we watched her 
 approach, hanging with careless grace upon her 
 husband's arm? She wore light, tight kid 
 gloves upon her little fat hands, and a bonnet 
 like a bride's-cake. Marriage had not made 
 her proud as it does some people ; she 
 recognised us at once and introduced us to 
 the gentleman. "Very 'appy to make your 
 acquaintance, miss," said he. " Mrs. C. 'ave 
 often mentioned you at our place." 
 
 Children begin by being Philistines. As we 
 parted I said to my*grandmother that I had 
 always known people dropped their h's, but 
 that I didn't know one ever married them. 
 My grandmother seemed trying not to laugh, 
 but she answered gravely that Mr. and Mrs. C. 
 looked very happy, h's or no h's. And so they 
 did, walking off along those illuminated Elysian 
 fields gay with the echoes of Paris in May, 
 while the children capered to itinerant music, 
 
 c
 
 1 8 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 and flags were flying and penny trumpets ring- 
 ing, and strollers and spectators were lining the 
 way, and the long interminable procession of 
 carriages in the centre of the road went rolling 
 steadily towards the Bois de Boulogne. As we 
 walked homewards evening after evening the 
 sun used to set splendidly in the very centre of 
 the great triumphal arch at the far end of the 
 avenue, and flood everything in a glorious tide 
 of light. What, indeed, did an aspirate more or 
 less matter at such a moment ! 
 
 I don't think we ever came home from one 
 of our walks that we did not find our grand- 
 father sitting watching for our grandmother's 
 return. We used to ask him if he didn't find 
 it very dull doing nothing in the twilight, but 
 he used to tell us it was his thinking-time. My 
 sister and I thought thinking dreadfully dull, 
 and only longed for candles and Chambers s 
 Miscellany. A good deal of thinking went on 
 in our peaceful home, we should have liked more 
 doing. One day was just like another; my 
 grandmother and my grandfather sat on either 
 side of the hearth in their two accustomed 
 places ; there was a French cook in a white cap,
 
 My Musician 19 
 
 who brought in the trays and the lamp at the 
 appointed hour ; there was Chambers on the 
 book-shelf, Pickwick, and one or two of my 
 father's early books, and The Listener, by 
 Caroline Fry, which used to be my last 
 desperate resource when I had just finished all 
 the others. We lived in a sunny little flat on a 
 fourth floor, with windows east and west and a 
 wide horizon from each, and the sound of the 
 cries from the street below, and the confusing 
 roll of the wheels when the windows were open 
 in summer. In winter time we dined at five 
 by lamplight at the round table in my grand- 
 father's study. After dinner we used to go into 
 the pretty blue drawing-room, where the peat 
 fire would be burning brightly in the open grate, 
 and the evening papef would come in with the 
 tea. I can see it all still, hear it, smell the peat, 
 and taste the odd herbaceous tea and the French 
 bread and butter. On the band of the Con- 
 stitutional newspaper was printed " M. le Major 
 Michel Eschmid." It was not my grandfather's 
 name or anything like it, but he would gravely 
 say that when English people lived in France 
 they must expect to have their names gallicised,
 
 2O Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 and his paper certainly found him out evening 
 after evening. While my grandmother with 
 much emphasis read the news (she was a 
 fervent republican, and so was my grandfather), 
 my sister and I would sit unconscious of politics 
 and happy over our story-books, until the fatal 
 inevitable moment when a ring was heard at 
 the bell and evening callers were announced. 
 Then we reluctantly shut up our books, for we 
 were told to get our needlework when the 
 company came in, and we had to find chairs 
 and hand tea-cups, and answer inquiries, and 
 presently go to bed. 
 
 The ladies would come in in their bonnets, 
 with their news and their comments upon the 
 public events, which, by the way, seemed to go 
 off like fireworks in those days expressly for our 
 edification. Ours was a talkative, economical, 
 and active little society, Cranford en Voyage 
 is the impression which remains to me of those 
 early surroundings. If the ladies were one and 
 all cordially attached to my grandmother, to my 
 grandfather they were still more devoted. A 
 Major is a Major. He used to sign their 
 pension papers, administer globules for their
 
 My Musician 2 1 
 
 colds, give point and support to their political 
 opinions. I can see him still sitting in his arm- 
 chair by the fire with a little semicircle round 
 about the hearth. Ours was anything but a 
 meek and disappointed community. We may 
 have had our reverses, and very important 
 reverses they all seem to have been, but we 
 had all had spirit enough to leave our native 
 shores and settle in Paris, not without a certain 
 implied disapproval of the other people who 
 went on living in England regardless of expense. 
 My father did not escape this criticism. Why, 
 they used to say, did he remain in that nasty 
 smoky climate, so bad for health and spirits ? 
 Why didn't he settle in Paris and write works 
 upon the French ? Why didn't I write and 
 coax him to come, ancl tell him that it was our 
 grandmother's wish that he should do so, that 
 the speaker, Mademoiselle Trotkins (or who- 
 ever it might be), had told me to write? I 
 remember going through an early martyrdom 
 at these friendly hands, and bitterly and silently 
 resenting their indignation with any one who 
 could prefer that black and sooty place London 
 to Paris. At the same time they allowed that
 
 22 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 the loyers were becoming more exorbitant every 
 day, and as for the fruitiere at the corner she 
 was charging no less than forty sous for her 
 Isyngny. We always talked in a sort of sand- 
 wich of French and English. Oddly enough, 
 though we talked French, and some of us even 
 looked French, we knew no French people. 
 From time to time at other houses I used to 
 hear of real foreigners, but I don't remember 
 seeing any at ours, except a pasteur who some- 
 times came, and a certain Vicomte de B. (I had 
 nearly written Bragelonne), whose mother, I 
 believe, was also English. Jeunes filles, jeunes 
 fleurs, he used to say, bowing to the younger 
 ladies. This was our one only approach to an 
 introduction to French society. But all the 
 same, one cannot live abroad without imbibing 
 something of the country, of the air and the 
 earth and the waters among which one is living. 
 Breath and food and raiment are a part of one's 
 life, after all, and a very considerable part ; and 
 all the wonderful tide of foreign sunshine and 
 the cheerful crowds and happy voices outside, 
 and the very click of pots and pans in the little 
 kitchen at the back seemed to have a character
 
 My Musician 23 
 
 of their own. And so, though we knew nothing 
 of the French, we got to know France and to 
 feel at home there beneath its blue sky ; and I 
 think to this day a holiday abroad is ten times 
 more a holiday than a holiday at home. From 
 mere habit one seems to be sixteen again, and 
 one's spirits rise and one's exigencies abate. 
 Besides the dwellers in the appartements and 
 the regular customers of the extortionate 
 fruitiere, there used to be passing friends and 
 acquaintances who visited us on their way to 
 other resorts to Italy, to the German baths. 
 Some stopped in Paris for a week or two at a 
 time, others for a few days only. 
 
 I remember three Scotch ladies, for whom 
 my grandmother had a great regard, who were 
 not part of our community, but who used to 
 pass through Paris, and always made a certain 
 stay. ... I was very much afraid of them, 
 though interested at the same time as girls are 
 in unknown quantities. They were well con- 
 nected and had estates and grand relations in 
 the distance, though they seemed to live as 
 simply as we did. One winter it was announced 
 that they had taken an apartment for a few
 
 24 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 weeks, and next morning I was sent with a 
 note to one of them by my grandmother. 
 They were tall, thin ladies, two were widows, 
 one was a spinster ; of the three the unmarried 
 one frightened me most. On this occasion, 
 after reading the note, one of the widow ladies 
 said to the spinster Miss X., who had her 
 bonnet on, "Why, you were just going to call 
 on the child's grandmother, were you not ? 
 Why don't you take her back with you in the 
 carriage ? " "I must first go and see how he 
 is this morning," said Miss X., somewhat 
 anxiously, " and then I will take her home, of 
 course. Are the things packed ? " A servant 
 came in carrying a large basket with a variety 
 of bottles and viands and napkins. I had not 
 presence of mind to run away as I longed to do, 
 and somehow in a few minutes I found myself 
 sitting in a little open carriage with the Scotch 
 lady, and the basket on the opposite seat. 
 I thought her, if possible, more terrible than 
 ever she seemed grave, preoccupied. She 
 had a long nose, a thick brown complexion, 
 grayish sandy hair, and was dressed in scanty 
 cloth skirts, gray and sandy too. She spoke to
 
 My Musician 25 
 
 me, I believe, but my heart was in my mouth ; 
 I hardly dared even listen to what she said. 
 We drove along the Champs Elysees towards 
 the Arc, and then turned into a side street, and 
 presently came to a house at the door of which 
 the carriage stopped. The lady got out, care- 
 fully carrying her heavy basket, and told me to 
 follow, and we began to climb the shiny stairs 
 one, two flights I think ; then we rang at a 
 bell and the door was almost instantly opened. 
 It was opened by a slight, delicate-looking man 
 with long hair, bright eyes, and a thin, hooked 
 nose. When Miss X. saw him she hastily put 
 down her basket upon the floor, caught both 
 his hands in hers, began to shake them gently, 
 and to scold him in an affectionate reproving 
 way for having come to the door. He laughed, 
 said he had guessed who it was, and motioned 
 to her to enter, and I followed at her sign with 
 the basket, followed into a narrow little room, 
 with no furniture in it whatever but an upright 
 piano against the wall and a few straw chairs 
 standing on the wooden shiny floor. He made 
 us sit down with some courtesy, and in reply to 
 her questions said he was pretty well. Had he
 
 26 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 slept ? He shook his head. Had he eaten ? 
 He shrugged his shoulders and then he pointed 
 to the piano. He had been composing some- 
 thing I remember that he spoke in an abrupt, 
 light sort of way would Miss X. like to hear 
 it ? " She would like to hear it," she answered, 
 "of course, she would dearly like to hear it; 
 but it would tire him to play ; it could not be 
 good for him." He smiled again, shook back 
 his long hair, and sat down immediately ; and 
 then the music began, and the room was filled 
 with continuous sound, he looking over his 
 shoulder now and then to see if we were liking 
 it. The lady sat absorbed and listening, and 
 as I looked at her I saw tears in her eyes 
 great clear tears rolling down her cheeks, while 
 the music poured on and on. I can't, alas, 
 recall that music ! I would give anything to 
 remember it now ; but the truth is, I was so 
 interested in the people that I scarcely listened. 
 When he stopped at last and looked round, the 
 lady started up. " You mustn't play any more," 
 she said ; "no more, no more, it's too beautiful," 
 and she praised him and thanked him in a 
 tender, motherly, pitying sort of way, and then
 
 My Musician 27 
 
 hurriedly said we must go ; but as we took 
 leave she added almost in a whisper with a 
 humble apologising look, " I have brought 
 you some of that jelly, and my sister sent some 
 of the wine you fancied the other day ; pray, 
 pray, try to take a little." He again shook his 
 head at her, seeming more vexed than grateful. 
 "It is very wrong ; you shouldn't bring me 
 these things," he said in French. " I won't 
 play to you if you do," but she put him back 
 softly, and hurriedly closed the door upon him 
 and the offending basket, and hastened away. 
 As we were coming downstairs she wiped her 
 eyes again. By this time I had got to under- 
 stand the plain, tall, grim, warm-hearted 
 woman ; all my silly terrors were gone. She 
 looked hard at me as we drove away. " Never 
 forget that you have heard Chopin play," she 
 said with emotion, " for soon no one will ever 
 hear him play any more." 
 
 Sometimes reading the memoirs of the great 
 musician, the sad story of his early death, of his 
 passionate fidelity, and cruel estrangement from 
 the companion he most loved, I have remem- 
 bered this little scene with comfort and pleasure,
 
 28 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP, n 
 
 and known that he was not altogether alone in 
 life, and that he had good friends who cared for 
 his genius and tended him to the last. Of 
 their affection he was aware. But of their 
 constant secret material guardianship he was 
 unconscious; the basket he evidently hated, 
 the woman he turned to with most grateful 
 response and dependence. He was to the very 
 end absorbed in his music, in his art, in his 
 love. He had bestowed without counting all 
 that he had to give : he poured it forth upon 
 others, never reckoning the cost : and then 
 dying away from it all, he in turn took what 
 came to him as a child might do, without 
 pondering or speculating overmuch.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH 
 
 I BEGAN life at four or five years old as a fervent 
 Napoleonist. The great Emperor had not 
 been dead a quarter of a century when I was a 
 little child. He was certainly alive in the 
 hearts of the French people and of the children 
 growing up among them. Influenced by the 
 cook we adored his memory, and the concierge 
 had a clock with a laurel wreath which for some 
 reason kindled all our enthusiasm. 
 
 As a baby holding my father's finger I had 
 stared at the second funeral of Napoleon sweep- 
 ing up the great roadway of the Champs 
 Elyse"es. The ground was white with new- 
 fallen snow, and I had never seen snow before ; 
 it seemed to me to be a part of the funeral ; a 
 mighty pall indeed, spread for the obsequies of
 
 3O Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 so great a warrior. It was the snow I thought 
 about, though I looked with awe at the black 
 and glittering carriages which came up like 
 ships sailing past us, noiselessly one by one. 
 They frightened me, for I thought there was a 
 dead emperor in each. This weird procession 
 gave a strange importance to the memory of 
 the great Emperor, and also to the little marble 
 statuette of him on the nursery chimney-piece. 
 It stood with folded arms contemplating the 
 decadence of France, black and silent and 
 reproachful. France was no longer an empire, 
 only a kingdom just like any other country ; this 
 fact I and the cook bitterly resented. Besides 
 the statuette there was a snuff-box, belonging I 
 know not to whom, that was a treasure of 
 emotional awe. It came out on Sundays, and 
 sometimes of an evening just before bed-time. 
 At first as you looked you saw nothing but the 
 cover of a wooden box ornamented by a drawing 
 in brown sepia, the sketch of a tomb-stone and 
 a weeping willow-tree, nothing more. Then 
 if you looked again, indicated by ingenious 
 twigs and lines there gradually dawned upon 
 you the figure, the shadowy figure of him who
 
 in My Triumphal Arch 31 
 
 lay beneath the stone. Napoleon, pale and 
 sad, with folded arms, with his cocked hat 
 crushed forward on his brow, the mournful 
 shade of the conqueror who had sent a million 
 of other men to Hades before him. 
 
 As we gazed we hated the English. It is 
 true, I was very glad they always conquered 
 everybody, and that my grandpapa was a major 
 in their army ; but at the same time the cook 
 and I hated the perfidious English, and we felt 
 that if Napoleon had not been betrayed he 
 would still have been reigning over us here in 
 Paris. 
 
 Every day we children used to go with our 
 bonne to play round about the Arc de Triomphe, 
 near which we lived, and where, alternating 
 with ornamental rosettes, the long lists of 
 Napoleon's battles and triumphs were carved 
 upon the stone. The bonne sat at work upon 
 one of the stone benches which surround the 
 Arc, we made gravel pies on the step at her 
 feet and searched for shells in the sand, or when 
 we were not prevented by the guardian, swung 
 on the iron chains which divide the inclosure 
 from the road. We paid no attention whatever
 
 32 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 to the inscriptions, in fact we couldn't read very 
 well in those days. We hardly ever looked at 
 the groups of statuary, except that there was 
 one great arm carrying a shield, and a huge leg 
 like the limb in the Castle of Otranto which 
 haunted us, and which we always saw, though 
 we tried not to see it. I never remember being 
 very light-hearted or laughing at my play up 
 by the Arc, a general sense of something grim 
 and great and strange and beyond my small 
 ken impressed itself upon me as we played. 
 When I had nightmares at night, the Arc de 
 Triomphe, with its writhing figures, was always 
 mixed up with them. One day the guardian 
 in his brass buttons, being in a good humour, 
 allowed us all to climb up without paying, to 
 the flat lead terrace on the top. There were 
 easy steps inside the walls, and slits for light 
 at intervals ; and when we climbed up the last 
 steep step and came out upon the summit we 
 saw the great view, the domes and the pinnacles 
 and gilt weathercocks of the lovely city all 
 spreading before us, and the winding river, and 
 the people looking like grains of sand blown by 
 the wind, and the carriages crawling like insects,
 
 in My Triumphal Arch 33 
 
 and the palace of the Tuileries in its lovely old 
 gardens shining with its pinnacles. But some- 
 how the world from a monumental height is 
 quite different from what it seems from a curb- 
 stone, where much more human impressions are 
 to be found ; and that disembodied Paris, spread- 
 ing like a vision, never appeared to me to be 
 the same place as the noisy, cheerful, beloved 
 city of my early childish recollections. 
 
 The first house in which we lived at Paris 
 was an old house in an old avenue enclosed 
 by iron gates which were shut at night. It 
 was called the Avenue Sainte- Marie, and led 
 from the Faubourg du Roule to the Arc de 
 Triomphe. The avenue was planted with shady 
 trees ; on one side of it there were houses, 
 on the other convent* walls. At the door of 
 one of the houses an old man sat in his chair, 
 who used to tell us as we passed by that in a 
 few months he would be a hundred years old, 
 and then they would put him into the papers. 
 I used to play in the courtyard belonging to 
 the house in which we lived. There was a 
 pump, and there was a wall with a row of 
 poplar trees beyond it. There was a faded 
 
 D
 
 34 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 fresco painted on the wall, a dim fountain, a 
 pale Italian garden, a washed-out bird flying 
 away with a blue tail across long streaks of 
 mildew that had come from the drippings of 
 the trees. Frescoes must have been in fashion 
 at the time when the Avenue Sainte-Marie 
 was built, for there was also a dim painting on 
 the convent wall opposite our porte cochere, 
 representing a temple in a garden and clouds, 
 and another bird with outstretched wings. 
 From beyond this wall we used to hear the 
 bells and the litanies of the nuns. One night I 
 dreamt that I was walking in the convent 
 garden, and that my father came out of the 
 temple to fetch me home, and that the bird 
 flapped its wings with a shrill cry. I used to 
 dream a great deal when I was a little child, 
 and then wake up in my creaking wooden bed, 
 and stare at the dim floating night-light like a 
 little ship on its sea of oil. Then from the 
 dark corners of the room there used to come 
 all sorts of strange things sailing up upon the 
 darkness. I could see them all looking like 
 painted pictures. There were flowers, birds, 
 dolls, toys, shining things of every description.
 
 in My Triumphal Arch 35 
 
 I have since heard that this seeing of pictures 
 in the dark is not an uncommon faculty among 
 children. My chief playmate in those days 
 was the concierge's niece, who used to go to 
 school at the convent. She used to wear a 
 black stuff pinafore and a blue riband with the 
 image of the Virgin round her neck. As we 
 played we could hear other music than that of 
 the nuns, the brilliant strains of Monsieur 
 Ernest's piano in the apartment over ours. He 
 was a kind young man, very fond of children, 
 who used to open the window and play to us 
 brilliant dances and marches which we delighted 
 in ; when he ceased we went back to our games. 
 It was later in life that with the help, either 
 of Justine or another relation of the family, I 
 tried to polish up the stairs as a surprise for the 
 porter on his return from an errand. We got 
 the long brooms and sticks out of the lodge, 
 where there was nobody to be seen, only an 
 odd smell and a great pot simmering by the 
 fire. One of us carried a feather broom, the 
 other a brush with a strap to it and a great stick 
 with a bit of wax at one end. Then we set 
 to work, not forgetting the hissing sound.
 
 36 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 Justine flapped about with the feather broom 
 and duster ; I tried to work my foot with the 
 heavy brush, but the brush flies off, the broom 
 clatters echoing down the stairs, the waxed stick 
 falls over the banisters, some one screams, 
 doors open, voices are heard ; I have thumped 
 my nose, bumped my forehead, but I do not 
 mind the pain, the disgrace and ignominy of 
 failure are far more terrible. 
 
 I cannot clearly remember when I became 
 an Orleanist, but I think I must have been 
 about six years old at the time, standing tip-toe 
 on the aforesaid curb-stone. My grandmother 
 had changed her cook and her apartment, and I 
 had happened to hear my grandfather say that 
 Napoleon was a rascal who had not been be- 
 trayed by the English. Then came a day 
 shall I ever forget it ? when a yellow carriage 
 jingled by with a beautiful little smiling boy at 
 the window, a fair-haired, blue-eyed prince. It 
 was the little Comte de Paris, who would be a 
 king some day they told me, and who was smil- 
 ing and looking so charming that then and there 
 I deserted my colours and went over to the camp 
 of the Orleans. Alas ! that the lilies of France
 
 in My Triumphal Arch 37 
 
 should have been smirched and soiled by base 
 and vulgar intrigues, and that my little prince 
 should have stepped down unabashed, as a 
 gray-headed veteran, from the dignified shrine 
 of his youth. I remember once hearing my 
 father say of the Due d'Aumale, "He has 
 everything in his favour, good looks, dignity, 
 fine manners, intellect, riches, and above all 
 misfortune " ; and with all of these I invested 
 the image of my own particular little prince. 
 
 One mi-carme, on that mysterious pagan 
 feast of the butchers, when the fat ox, covered 
 with garlands and with gilded horns, is led to 
 sacrifice through the streets of Paris, I also to 
 my great satisfaction was brought forth to join 
 the procession by a ^couple of maids, one of 
 whom carried a basket. I remember finding 
 my stumpy self in a court of the Tuileries, the 
 fairy ox having been brought thither for the 
 benefit of the King, and I was hustled to the 
 front of a crowd and stood between my two 
 protectors looking up at a window. Then 
 comes an outcry of cheering, and a venerable, 
 curly-headed old gentleman, Louis Philippe 
 himself, just like all his pictures, appears for an
 
 38 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 instant behind the glass, and then the people 
 shout again and again, and the window opens 
 and the King steps out on to the balcony 
 handing out an old lady in a bonnet and frizzed 
 white curls, and, yes, the little boy is there too. 
 Hurrah, hurrah ! for all the kings and queens ! 
 And somebody is squeezing me up against the 
 basket, but I am now an Orleanist and ready 
 to suffer tortures for the kind old grandpapa 
 and the little boy. Now that I am a gray- 
 headed woman I feel as if I could still stand 
 in the crowd and cry hurrah ! for honest men 
 who, with old Louis Philippe, would rather 
 give up their crowns than let their subjects 
 be fired upon ; and if my little prince, instead 
 of shabbily intriguing with adventurers, had 
 kept to his grandfather's peaceful philosophy 
 I could have cried hurrah ! for him still with 
 all my heart. 
 
 I suppose we have most of us, in and out of 
 our pinafores, stood by triumphal archways put 
 up for other people, and moralised a little bit 
 before proceeding to amuse ourselves with our 
 own adventures further on. As I have said, 
 the Arc de Triomphe seems mixed up with all
 
 in My Triumphal Arch 39 
 
 my early life. I remember looking up at it on 
 my way to my first school in an adjoining street, 
 crossing the open space, and instead of stopping 
 to pick up shells as usual, casting, I daresay, 
 a complaisant glance of superiority at the gods 
 of war in their stony chariots, who, after all, 
 never had much education. I was nicely dressed 
 in a plaid frock, and wore two tails of hair tied 
 with ribbons, a black apron, and two little black 
 pantalettes. It was the admired costume of all 
 the young ladies of the school to which I was 
 bound. On this occasion the stony gods 
 witnessed my undue elation and subsequent 
 discomfiture unmoved. The triumphal arch 
 was certainly not intended for my return ; I was 
 led home that evening, after a day mostly spent 
 
 ** 
 
 in the corner, crestfallen and crushed by my 
 inferiority to all the other young ladies of the 
 school in their black pinafores and pantalettes. 
 But the images round about the Arc are not 
 all of discomfitures and funerals and terrible 
 things. There were also merry-makings to be 
 remembered. Did not the Siamese Twins 
 themselves set up their booths in its shadow 
 in company with various wild Bedouins their
 
 4O Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 companions ? I thought it cruel of the nurse 
 not to take me in to see the show ; and indeed 
 on one occasion I ran away from home to visit 
 it on my own account. The expedition was not 
 a success, but Siam has always seemed to me an 
 interesting country ever since. Besides the 
 Twins and their booth there were cafes and 
 resting-places in those days all round about the 
 Arc, and people enjoying themselves after their 
 day's work with song and laughter. Wild 
 flowers were still growing at the upper end of 
 the Champs Elysees on a green mound called 
 the Pelouse. 
 
 In the year '48, when we walked out with 
 our grandparents, the Pelouse had been dug 
 up and levelled, I think to give work to the 
 starving people. It was a year of catastrophes 
 and revolutions a sort of "General Post" 
 among Kings and Governments. Many of 
 the promenaders (my grandparents among 
 them) used to wear little tricolour rosettes to 
 show their sympathies with the Republic. 
 Shall I ever forget the sight of the enthusiastic 
 crowds lining the way to see the President 
 entering Paris in a cocked hat on a curveting
 
 in My Triumphal Arch 41 
 
 Arabian steed at the head of his troops ? to 
 be followed in a year or two by the still more 
 splendid apparition of Napoleon III. riding 
 into Paris along the road the great Emperor's 
 hearse had taken a new Emperor, glittering 
 and alive once more, on a horse so beautiful 
 and majestic that to look upon it was a martial 
 education ! 
 
 The pomp and circumstance of war were 
 awakened again, and troops came marching up 
 the avenues as before, and then, what is even 
 more vivid to my mind, a charming Empress 
 presently rose before us, winning all hearts by 
 her grace and her beautiful toilettes. My sister 
 and I stood by the roadside on her wedding 
 day and watched her carriage rolling past the 
 Arc to St. Cloud ; the morning had been full 
 of spring sunshine, but the afternoon was bleak 
 and drear, and I remember how we shivered 
 as we stood. Some years later, when we were 
 no longer little girls but young ladies in crino- 
 lines, we counted the guns fired for the birth of 
 the Prince Imperial at the Tuileries.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 MY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY 
 
 OUR father was away in America, and we were 
 living once more with our grandparents. We 
 were children no longer, but young ladies sup- 
 posed to be finishing our education. It will be 
 seen that it was of a fitful and backward descrip- 
 tion. Macaulay's Essays, Ivanhoe and the Talis- 
 man, Herodotus, Milman's History of the Jews, 
 and one or two stray scraps of poetry, repre- 
 sented our historical studies. Then came a 
 vast and hopeless chaos in our minds reaching 
 as far back as the times of Charlemagne and 
 Clovis, and Bertha with the long foot, and 
 Fredegonde who was always plunging her 
 dagger into somebody's back. The early 
 Merovingians will for me ever be associated 
 with a faint smell of snuff and a plaid linen
 
 CHAP, iv My Professor of History 43 
 
 pocket-handkerchief carefully folded ; with a 
 little, old, short, stumpy figure, in a black cap 
 and dressed in a scanty black skirt. The figure 
 is that of my Professor of History. An old, 
 old lady, very short, very dignified, uttering 
 little grunts at intervals, and holding a pair of 
 spectacles in one hand and a little old black fat 
 book in the other, from which, with many 
 fumblings and snuff-takings, the good soul 
 would proceed to read to us of murder, 
 battle, rapine, and sudden death, of kings, 
 crowns, dynasties, and knights in armour, 
 while we her pupils listened, trying not to 
 laugh when she turned two pages at once, 
 or read the same page twice over with great 
 seriousness. 
 
 ** 
 
 My dear grandmother, who was always in- 
 venting ways of helping people, and who firmly 
 believed in all her proteges, having visited our 
 Madame once or twice and found her absorbed 
 in the said history book, had arranged that a 
 series of historical lectures, with five-franc 
 tickets of admission to the course, should be 
 given by her during the winter months ; and 
 that after the lecture, which used to take place
 
 44 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 in our sitting-room, and was attended by a 
 certain number of ladies, we should all adjourn 
 for tea to the blue drawing-room, where the 
 Major meanwhile had been able to enjoy his 
 after-dinner nap in quiet. He refused to attend 
 the course, saying, after the first lecture, that he 
 found it difficult to follow the drift of Madame's 
 arguments. There used to be a class of four 
 girls, my sister and myself, our cousin Amy 
 and Laura C., a friend of my own age and 
 then the occasional ladies, in bonnets, from up- 
 stairs and downstairs and next door. The 
 lecture lasted an hour by the clock ; then the 
 meeting suddenly adjourned, and by the time 
 the golden flower-vase pendule in the drawing- 
 room struck ten everybody was already walking 
 down the shiny staircase and starting for home. 
 Paris streets at night may be dark and muddy, 
 or freezing cold, but they never give one that 
 chill, vault-like feeling which London streets 
 are apt to produce when one turns out from a 
 warm fireside into the raw night. The ladies 
 thought nothing of crossing the road and 
 walking along a boulevard till they reached 
 their own doors. Good old Madame used to
 
 iv My Professor of History 45 
 
 walk off with those of her pupils who lived her 
 way ; they generally left her at the bright 
 chemist's shop round the corner, where Madame 
 Marton, the chemist's wife, would administer 
 an evening dose of peppermint-water to keep 
 out the cold so we used to be told by Madame. 
 The old lady lived in one of the tall, shabby 
 houses at the top of the Faubourg, just behind 
 the Arc. We used to find her sitting in a small 
 crowded room, with a tiny ante-room, and an 
 alcove for her bed. There she lived with her 
 poodle, Bibi, among the faded treasures and 
 ancient snuff-boxes and books and portraits 
 and silhouettes of a lifetime ; grim effigies of a 
 grim past, somewhat softened by dust and time. 
 
 In the midst of all the chaos one lovely minia- 
 
 * 
 ture used to hang, shining like a star through 
 
 the clouds of present loneliness and the spiders' 
 webs of age and poverty. This was the portrait 
 of the beautiful Lady Almeria Carpenter, the 
 friend of Sir Joshua, with whom in some mysteri- 
 ous romantic way Madame was connected. 
 Another equally valued relic was a needlebook 
 which had been used by the Duchesse de Praslin 
 on the day when her husband murdered her.
 
 46 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 Madame's sister had been governess there for 
 many years, and had loved the Duchess dearly 
 and been valued by her, and many and mysteri- 
 ous were the confidences poured into my grand- 
 mother's ear concerning this sad tragedy. Our 
 cheery, emphatic, mysterious old lady was very 
 popular among us all. One of her kindest 
 friends was my father's cousin, Miss R., who 
 had lived in Paris all her life, and whose visit- 
 ing-list comprised any one in trouble or poor or 
 lonely and afflicted. I think if it had not been 
 for her help and that of my grandmother our 
 good old friend would have often gone through 
 sore trials. When my father himself came to 
 Paris to fetch us away, he was interested in the 
 accounts he heard of the old lady from his 
 mother and cousin. And Madame is the 
 heroine of a little story which I have seen in 
 print somewhere, and which I know to be true ; 
 for was I not sent one day to search for a certain 
 pill-box in my father's room, of which he pro- 
 ceeded to empty the contents into the fireplace, 
 and then drawing a neat banker's roll from his 
 pocket, he filled up the little cube with a certain 
 number of new napoleons; packing them in
 
 iv My Professor of History 47 
 
 closely up to the brim. After which, the cover 
 being restored, he wrote the following prescrip- 
 tion in his beautiful even handwriting : Madame 
 P . . . . To be taken occasionally when required. 
 Signed Dr. W. M. T." Which medicine my 
 grandmother, greatly pleased, promised to ad- 
 minister to her old friend after our departure. 
 
 The remembrance of this pill-box and of my 
 father's kind hands packing up the napoleons 
 came to me long after, at a time when mis- 
 fortunes of every kind had fallen upon the 
 familiar friends and places of our early youth, 
 when the glare of burning Paris seemed to 
 reach us far away in our English homes, and 
 we almost thought we could hear the thunders 
 breaking on the unhappy city. We thought of 
 our poor old lady, alone with her dear Bibi, in 
 the midst of all this terror and destruction. As 
 we sat down to our legs of mutton we pictured 
 the horrible salmis and fricandeaus of rats and 
 mice to which our neighbours were reduced, the 
 sufferings so heroically borne. Every memory 
 of the past rose up to incite us to make some 
 effort to come to the assistance of our poor old
 
 48 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 friend ; and at last it occurred to me to ask 
 Baroness Meyer de Rothschild, who was always 
 ready with good help for others, whether it 
 would be possible to communicate with my 
 besieged old lady. 
 
 I do not know by what means perhaps if I 
 knew, I ought not to say how it was that com- 
 munications had been established between the 
 English Rothschilds and those who were still in 
 Paris. Some trusty and devoted retainer, some 
 Porthos belonging to the house, had been able 
 to get into Paris carrying letters and messages 
 and food, and he was, so the Baroness now told 
 me, about to return again. By this means I was 
 told that I might send my letters and a draft on 
 the bank in Paris, so that poor Madame could 
 obtain a little help, of which she must be in 
 cruel need ; and this being accomplished, the 
 letter written and the money sent off, I was able 
 with an easier mind to enjoy my own share of 
 the good things of life. Time passed, the siege 
 was raised, and then came a day when, urged 
 by circumstances, and perhaps also by a certain 
 curiosity, I found myself starting for Paris with 
 a friend, under the escort of Mr. Cook, arriving
 
 iv My Professor of History 49 
 
 after a night's journey through strange and 
 never-to-be-forgotten experiences at the Gare 
 du Nord a deserted station among streets all 
 empty and silent. Carriages were no longer to 
 be seen, every figure was dressed in black, and 
 the women's sad faces and long, floating crape 
 veils seemed strangely symbolical and visionary, 
 as I walked along to the house of my father's 
 cousin, Charlotte R., who had been my friend 
 ever since I could remember. She was expect- 
 ing me in her home, to which she had only been 
 able to return a few days before. It is not my 
 purpose here to describe the strange and 
 pathetic experiences and the sights we saw to- 
 gether during that most eventful week ; the 
 sunshine of it all, the smoking ruins, the piteous 
 histories, the strange rebound of life even in 
 the midst of its ashes : the Arc itself was 
 wrapped in sackcloth to preserve the impassive 
 gods from the injuries of war. The great legs 
 and arms were packed in straw and sawdust to 
 protect them. One of my first questions was 
 for Madame. " She is particularly well," said 
 my cousin, smiling. " She has added many 
 thrilling histories to her repertoire, Madame 
 
 E
 
 50 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 Martin's escape from the obus, Bibi's horror of 
 the Prussians you must come and see her, 
 and hear it all for yourself." " I particularly 
 want to see her," said I. I was in a self-satisfied 
 and not unnatural frame of mind, picturing my 
 old lady's pleasure at the meeting, her eloquent 
 emotion and satisfaction at the trouble I had 
 taken on her behalf. I hoped to have saved 
 her life ; at all events, I felt that she must owe 
 many little comforts to my exertions, and that 
 her grateful benediction awaited me ! 
 
 Dear old Madame was sitting with her 
 poodle on her knees in the same little dark and 
 crowded chamber. She put down her spectacles, 
 shut up her book I do believe it was still the 
 little black History of France. She did not 
 look in the least surprised to see me walk in. 
 The room smelt of snuff just as usual ; Bibi 
 leapt up from her lap, barking furiously. " Ah ! 
 my dear child," said the old lady calmly, "how 
 do you do? Ah, my dear Miss R., I am 
 delighted to see you again ! Only this day I 
 said to Madame Martin, ' I think Miss R. will be 
 sure to call this afternoon, it is some day since 
 she come.' ' Then turning to me, " Well, my
 
 iv My Professor of History 51 
 
 dear A., and how do you, and how do you all ? 
 Are you come to stay in our poor Paris ? Are 
 Mr. and Mrs. S. with you? Oh! oh! Oh, 
 those Prussians ! those abominable monsters ! 
 My poor Bibi, he was ready to tear them to 
 pieces ; he and I could not sleep for the guns. 
 Madame Martin, she say to me, ' Oh ! Madame, 
 can you believe such wickedness ? ' I say to 
 her, ' It is abominable.' Oh ! there is no word 
 for it ! " 
 
 All this was oddly familiar, and yet strangely 
 thrilling and unreal as was all the rest. There 
 is no adequate expression for the strange wak- 
 ing nightmare which seems to seize one when 
 by chance one meets a whole country suffering 
 from one overpowering idea, and when one 
 hears the story of each individual experience 
 in turn repeated and repeated. 
 
 At last, my own personal interests rising up 
 again, I said, not without some curiosity : " And 
 now I want to ask you, did you get my letter, 
 Madame, and did you receive the money safely 
 from Messrs. Rothschilds' bank ? " 
 
 " I thank you, my dear child. I received it 
 I was about to mention the subject I knew
 
 52 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP, iv 
 
 you would not forget your old friend," said 
 Madame solemnly. " I needed the money very 
 much," with a shake of the head. " I was all 
 the more grateful that it came at the time it did. 
 You will be gratified, I know, to learn the use 
 to which I put it. They had come round to 
 every house in the street only that morning. 
 Madame Martin was with me." Here Madame 
 took a pinch of snuff very seriously. " She go 
 to the banker's for me, and she took the money 
 at once and inscribe my name on the list." 
 
 " The list ! " said I, much bewildered. 
 
 " I subscribe it," said Madame, " to the 
 cannon which was presented by our quartier 
 to the city of Paris." 
 
 "What, all of it? "said I. 
 
 " Yes, all of it," said she. " Do you suppose 
 I should have kept any of it back ? "
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 MY WITCHES' CALDRON 
 
 IT happily does not always follow that one cares 
 for an author in exact proportion to the sale of 
 his books, or even to the degree of their merit ; 
 otherwise some authors might be overpowered 
 by friends, and others remain solitary all their 
 lives long. It also does not always follow that 
 people who write books are those who see 
 
 ** 
 
 most of one another. On the contrary, 
 authors as a rule, I think, prefer playmates of 
 other professions and don't keep together in 
 the same way that soldiers do, for instance, 
 or dandies, or doctors, or lawyers, or members 
 of Parliament. Lawyers, politicians, soldiers, 
 and even doctors, do a great deal of their work 
 together in one another's company ; but the 
 hours don't suit for literary people, and one
 
 54 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 rarely hears of five or six authors sitting down 
 in a row to write books in company. They are 
 generally shut up apart in different studies, with 
 strict orders given that nobody is to be shown 
 in. 
 
 This was my father's rule, only it was 
 constantly broken ; and many persons used to 
 pass in and out during his working-times, 
 coming to consult him or to make suggestions ; 
 some came to call, others brought little poems 
 and articles for the Cornhill. . . . As I write 
 on, it seems to me that my memory is a sort of 
 Witches' Caldron, from which rise one by one 
 these figures of the past, and they go by in 
 turn and vanish one by one into the mist, 
 some are kings and queens in their own right, 
 some are friends, some are dependents. From 
 my caldron rise many figures, some of whom I 
 have looked upon once only, and then 
 realised in after life from a different point of 
 view. Now perhaps looking back, one can tell 
 their worth better than at the time ; one knows 
 which were the true companions, which were 
 the teachers and spiritual pastors, which were 
 but shadows after all. The most splendid
 
 v My Witches Caldron 55 
 
 person I ever remember seeing had a little 
 pencil sketch in his hand, which he left behind 
 him upon the table. It was a very feeble 
 sketch ; it seemed scarcely possible that so 
 grand a being should not be a bolder draughts- 
 man. He appeared to us one Sunday morning 
 in the sunshine. I came down to breakfast, 
 found him sitting beside my father at the table, 
 with an untasted cup of tea before him ; he 
 seemed to fill the bow-window with radiance as 
 if he were Apollo ; he leant against his chair 
 with one elbow resting on its back, with shining 
 studs and curls and boots. We could see his 
 horse looking in at us over the blind. It was 
 indeed a sight for little girls to remember all 
 their lives. I think my father had a certain 
 weakness for dandfes, those knights of the 
 broadcloth and shining fronts. Magnificent 
 apparitions used to dawn upon us in the hall, 
 glorious beings ascended the stairs on their 
 way to the study, but this one outshone them 
 all. Our visitor was Count D'Orsay, of whom 
 Lord Lamington says : 
 
 When he appeared in the perfection of dress (for the 
 tailor's art had not died out with George IV.), with that
 
 56 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 expression of self-confidence and complacency which the 
 sense of superiority gives, he was the observed of all ! In 
 those days men took great pains with themselves, they did 
 not slouch and moon thro' life. ... I have frequently 
 ridden down to Richmond with Count D'Orsay ; a striking 
 figure he was ; his blue coat, thrown well back to show the 
 wide expanse of snowy shirt-front, his buff waistcoat, his 
 light leathers and polished boots, his well-curled whiskers 
 and handsome countenance; a wide-brimmed glossy hat, 
 and spotless white gloves. 
 
 Mr. Richard Doyle, too, used to tell us a 
 little story of a well-known literary man who 
 was so carried away by the presence of the 
 brilliant D'Orsay at some City banquet, that 
 in his enthusiasm he was heard to call aloud, 
 above the din of voices, in a sort of burst of 
 enthusiasm, "Waiter! for heaven's sake, bring 
 melted butter for the Flounder of the Count ! " 
 The Count must have been well used to melted 
 butter as he proceeded on his triumphant road, 
 nor did his genius fail him to the last. I have 
 read somewhere a curious description of the 
 romantic sarcophagus he finally devised for 
 himself in a sort of temple, a flight of marble 
 steps leading to a marble shrine where he was 
 duly laid when he died, not long after his return 
 to his own country and to the land of his
 
 v My Witches Caldron 57 
 
 fathers. He is of that race with Byron who lived 
 in the beginning of the century, magnificent 
 performers of life's commonplaces. There is a 
 certain absence of the florid, a frozen coldness 
 in the fashion of to-day which strikes those 
 who remember the more flamboyant generation. 
 I remember a visit from another hero of 
 those times. We were walking across Ken- 
 sington Square early one morning, when we 
 heard some one hurrying after us and calling 
 my father by his name. This was also one of 
 Byron's friends. A bright-eyed, active old 
 man, with long wavy white hair and a pictur- 
 esque cloak flung over one shoulder. I can see 
 him still, as he crossed the corner of the square 
 and followed us with a light rapid step. My 
 father, stopping short, turned back to meet 
 him, greeting him kindly and bringing him 
 home with us to the old brown house at the 
 corner where we were then living. There was 
 a sort of eagerness and vividness of manner 
 about the stranger which was very impressive. 
 You could not help watching him and his cloak, 
 which kept slipping from its place, and which 
 he caught at again and again. We wondered
 
 58 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 at his romantic, foreign looks, and his gaiety 
 and bright eager way. Afterwards we were 
 told that this was Leigh Hunt. We knew his 
 name very well, for on the drawing-room table 
 in company with various Ruskins and Punches 
 lay a pretty shining book called A Jar of 
 Honey from Mount Hybla, from which, in that 
 dilettante childish fashion which is half- play 
 half-impatience and search for something else, 
 we had contrived to extract our own allowance 
 of honey. It was still an event to see a real 
 author in those days, specially an author with a 
 long cloak flung over his shoulder ; though, for 
 the matter of that, it is still and always will be 
 an event to see the faces and hear the voices of 
 those whose thoughts have added something 
 delightful to our lives. Not very long after- 
 wards came a different visitor, still belonging 
 to that same company of people. I had thrown 
 open the dining-room door and come in looking 
 for something, and then I stopped short, for the 
 room was not empty. A striking and some- 
 what alarming -looking person stood alone by 
 the fire-place with folded arms ; a dark 
 impressive-looking man, not tall, but broad and
 
 v My Wit ekes Caldron 59 
 
 brown and weather-beaten, gazing with a sort 
 of scowl at his own reflection in the glass. As 
 I entered he turned slowly and looked at me 
 over his shoulder. This was Trelawny, who 
 had come to see my father. He frowned, 
 walked deliberately and slowly from the room, 
 and I saw him no more. 
 
 As I have said, all these people now seem 
 almost like figures out of a fairy tale. One 
 could almost as well imagine Sinbad, or Prince 
 Charming, or the Seven Champions of 
 Christendom dropping in for an hour's chat. 
 But each generation, however matter-of-fact it 
 may be, sets up fairy figures in turn, to wonder 
 at and delight in. I had not then read any of 
 
 the books which have since appeared, though I 
 
 ** 
 had heard my elders talking, and I knew from 
 
 hearsay something of the strange, pathetic, 
 irrational histories of these bygone wanderers 
 searching the world for the Golden Fleece and 
 the Enchanted Gardens. These were the only 
 members of that special, impracticable, romantic 
 crew of Argonauts I ever saw, though I have 
 read their histories and diaries so that I seem to 
 know them all, and can almost hear their voices.
 
 60 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 One of the most notable persons who ever 
 came into our old bow-windowed drawing-room 
 in Young Street is a guest never to be for- 
 gotten by me, a tiny, delicate, little person, 
 whose small hand nevertheless grasped a 
 mighty lever which set all the literary world of 
 that day vibrating. I can still see the scene 
 quite plainly ! the hot summer evening, the 
 open windows, the carriage driving to the door 
 as we all sat silent and expectant ; my father, 
 who rarely waited, waiting with us ; our 
 governess and my sister and I all in a row, and 
 prepared for the great event. We saw the 
 carriage stop, and out of it sprang the active, 
 well-knit figure of young Mr. George Smith, 
 who was bringing Miss Bronte to see our 
 father. My father, who had been walking up 
 and down the room, goes out into the hall to 
 meet his guests, and then after a moment's 
 delay the door opens wide, and the two gentle- 
 men come in, leading a tiny, delicate, serious, 
 little lady, pale, with fair straight hair, and 
 steady eyes. She may be a little over thirty ; 
 she is dressed in a little barege dress with a 
 pattern of faint green moss. She enters in
 
 v My Witches Caldron 61 
 
 mittens, in silence, in seriousness ; our hearts 
 are beating with wild excitement. This then 
 is the authoress, the unknown power whose 
 books have set all London talking, reading, 
 speculating ; some people even say our father 
 wrote the books the wonderful books. To 
 say that we little girls had been given Jane 
 Eyre to read scarcely represents the facts of the 
 case ; to say that we had taken it without leave, 
 read bits here and read bits there, been carried 
 away by an undreamed-of and hitherto un- 
 imagined whirlwind into things, times, places, 
 all utterly absorbing and at the same time 
 absolutely unintelligible to us, would more 
 accurately describe our states of mind on that 
 summer's evening as we look at Jane Eyre 
 the great Jane Eyre the tiny little lady. The 
 moment is so breathless that dinner comes as a 
 relief to the solemnity of the occasion, and we 
 all smile as my father stoops to offer his arm ; 
 for, genius though she may be, Miss Bronte 
 can barely reach his elbow. My own personal 
 impressions are that she is somewhat grave and 
 stern, specially to forward little girls who wish 
 to chatter ; Mr. George Smith has since told
 
 62 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 me how she afterwards remarked upon my 
 father's wonderful forbearance and gentleness 
 with our uncalled-for incursions into the con- 
 versation. She sat gazing at him with kindling 
 eyes of interest ; lighting up with a sort of 
 illumination every now and then as she answered 
 him. I can see her bending forward over the 
 table, not eating, but listening to what he said 
 as he carved the dish before him. 
 
 I think it must have been on this very 
 occasion that my father invited some of his 
 friends in the evening to meet Miss Bronte 
 for everybody was interested and anxious to 
 see her. Mrs. Crowe, the reciter of ghost- 
 stories, was there. Mrs. Brookfield, Mrs. 
 Carlyle, Mr. Carlyle himself was present, so I 
 am told, railing at the appearance of cockneys 
 upon Scotch mountain sides ; there were also 
 too many Americans for his taste, "but the 
 Americans were as gods compared to the 
 cockneys," says the philosopher. Besides the 
 Carlyles, there were Mrs. Elliott and Miss 
 Perry, Mrs. Procter and her daughter, most of 
 my father's habitual friends and companions. 
 In the recent life of Lord Houghton I was
 
 v My Witches Caldron 63 
 
 amused to see a note quoted in which Lord 
 Houghton also was convened. Would that he 
 had been present ! perhaps the party would 
 have gone off better. It was a gloomy and a 
 silent evening. Every one waited for the 
 brilliant conversation which never began at all. 
 Miss Bronte retired to the sofa in the study, 
 and murmured a low word now and then 
 to our kind governess, Miss Truelock. The 
 room looked very dark, the lamp began to 
 smoke a little, the conversation grew dimmer 
 and more dim, the ladies sat round still ex- 
 pectant, my father was too much perturbed by 
 the gloom and the silence to be able to cope 
 with it at all. Mrs. Brookfield, who was in the 
 doorway by the study, near the corner in which 
 Miss Bronte was sitting, leant forward with a 
 little commonplace, since brilliance was not to 
 be the order of the evening. " Do you like 
 London, Miss Bronte ? " she said ; another 
 silence, a pause, then Miss Bronte answers, 
 " Yes and No " very gravely ; Mrs. Brookfield 
 has herself reported the conversation. My sister 
 and I were much too young to be bored in those 
 days ; alarmed, impressed we might be, but not
 
 64 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 yet bored. A party was a party, a lioness was a 
 lioness ; and shall I confess it ? at that time 
 an extra dish of biscuits was enough to mark 
 the evening. We felt all the importance of the 
 occasion ; tea spread in the dining-room, ladies 
 in the drawing-room ; we roamed about incon- 
 veniently, no doubt, and excitedly, and in one 
 of my excursions crossing the hall, after Miss 
 Bronte had left I was surprised to see my father 
 opening the front door with his hat on. He put 
 his fingers to his lips, walked out into the dark- 
 ness, and shut the door quietly behind him. 
 When I went back to the drawing-room again, 
 the ladies asked me where he was. I vaguely 
 answered that I thought he was coming back. I 
 was puzzled at the time, nor was it all made clear 
 to me till long years afterwards, when one day 
 Mrs. Procter asked me if I knew what had 
 happened once when my father had invited a 
 party to meet Jane Eyre at his house. It was 
 one of the dullest evenings she had ever spent 
 in her life, she said. And then with a good 
 deal of humour she described the situation the 
 ladies who had all come expecting so much 
 delightful conversation, and the gloom and the
 
 v My Witches Caldron 65 
 
 constraint, and how finally, overwhelmed by 
 the situation, my father had quietly left the 
 room, left the house, and gone off to his 
 club. The ladies waited, wondered, and 
 finally departed also ; and as we were going 
 up to bed with our candles after everybody 
 was gone, I remember two pretty Miss 
 L.'s, in shiny silk dresses, arriving, full of 
 expectation. . . . We still said we thought 
 our father would soon be back, but the 
 Miss L.'s declined to wait upon the chance, 
 laughed, and drove away again almost im- 
 mediately. 
 
 Since writing the preceding lines, I have 
 visited Jane Eyre land, and stayed in the 
 delightful home where she used to stay with 
 Mrs. Gaskell. I have seen signs and tokens 
 of her presence, faint sketches vanishing away, 
 the delicate writing in the beautiful books she 
 gave that warm friend ; and I have also looked 
 for and re-read the introduction to Emma, that 
 " last sketch " and most touching chapter in the 
 never-to-be-written book of Charlotte Bronte's 
 happy married life. The paper is signed " W. 
 
 F
 
 66 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP, v 
 
 M. T. " ; it was written by the editor, and is 
 printed in one of the very earliest numbers of 
 the Cornhill Magazine. 
 
 I remember the trembling little frame, the little hand, 
 the great honest eyes ; an impetuous honesty seemed to 
 me to characterise the woman. ... I fancied an austere 
 little Joan of Arc marching in upon us and rebuking our 
 easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression 
 of being a very pure and lofty and high-minded person. 
 A great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to 
 be with her always. Such in our brief interview she 
 appeared to me. As one thinks of that life, so noble, so 
 lonely of that passion for truth of those nights and 
 nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, depres- 
 sion, elation, and prayer; as one reads of the necessarily 
 incomplete though most touching and admirable history of 
 the heart that throbbed in this one little frame of this one 
 among the myriads of souls that have lived and died on 
 this great earth this great earth ! this little speck in the 
 infinite universe of God, with what wonder do we think of 
 to-day, with what awe await to-morrow, when that which is 
 now but darkly seen shall be clear? 
 
 As I write out what my father's hand has 
 written my gossip is hushed, and seems to me 
 like the lamp-smoke in the old drawing-room 
 compared to the light of the summer's night in 
 the street outside.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 MY WITCHES' CALDRON 11 
 
 I AM suddenly conscious as I write that my 
 experiences are very partial ; but a witch's 
 caldron must needs after all contain hetero- 
 geneous scraps ; and mine, alas ! can be no 
 exception to the rest. It produces nothing 
 more valuable than odds and ends happily 
 harmless enough, neither sweltered venom nor 
 fillet of finny snake, But the back of one great 
 man's head, the hat and umbrella of another. 
 The first time I ever saw Mr. Gladstone I only 
 saw the soles of his boots. A friend had taken 
 me into the ventilator of the House of Commons, 
 where we listened to a noble speech and 
 watched the two shadows on the grating over- 
 head of the feet of the messenger of glad tidings. 
 One special back I cannot refrain from writing
 
 68 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 down, in a dark blue frock coat and strapped 
 trousers, walking leisurely before us up 
 Piccadilly. The sun is shining, and an odd 
 sort of brass buckle which fastens an old- 
 fashioned stock, flashes like a star. " Do 
 look!" I say to my father. "Who is that old 
 gentleman?" "That old gentleman! Why, 
 that is the Duke of Wellington," said my father. 
 On another occasion I remember some one 
 coming up to us and beginning to talk very 
 charmingly, and among other things describing 
 some new Lord Mayor who had been in state to 
 a theatrical performance, by which it seemed 
 he had been much affected. " I cried, I do 
 assure you," the Lord Mayor had said, " and as 
 for the Lady Mayoress, she cry too " ; and the 
 gentleman smiled and told the little story so 
 dryly and drolly that my sister and I couldn't 
 help laughing, and we went on repeating to one 
 another afterwards, "As for the Lady Mayoress, 
 she cry too." And then as usual we asked who 
 was that. " Don't you know Lord Palmerston 
 by sight ? " says my father. 
 
 I have a friend who declares that Fate is a 
 humorist, linking us all together by strangest
 
 vi My Witches Caldron 69 
 
 whims, even by broad jokes at times ; and this 
 vague little humour of the weeping Lady 
 Mayoress is my one personal link with the great 
 Whig administrator of the last generation. 
 
 Another miscellaneous apparition out of my 
 caldron rises before me as I write. On a 
 certain day we went to call at Mrs. Procter's 
 with our father. We found an old man stand- 
 ing in the middle of the room, taking leave of 
 his hostess, nodding his head he was a little 
 like a Chinese mandarin with an ivory face. 
 His expression never changed but seemed quite 
 fixed. He knew my father and spoke to him 
 and to us too, still in this odd fixed way. Then 
 he looked at my sister. " My little girl," he 
 said to her, " will you come and live with me ? 
 You shall be as happy as the day is long ; you 
 shall have a white pony to ride, and feed upon 
 red-currant jelly." This prospect was so alarm- 
 ing and unexpected that the poor little girl 
 suddenly blushed up and burst into tears. The 
 old man was Mr. Samuel Rogers, but happily 
 he did not see her cry, for he was already on 
 his way to the door. 
 
 My father was very fond of going to the
 
 jo Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 play, and he used to take us when we were 
 children, one on each side of him, in a hansom. 
 He used to take us to the opera too, which was 
 less of a treat. Magnificent envelopes, with 
 unicorns and heraldic emblazonments, used to 
 come very constantly, containing tickets and 
 boxes for the opera. In those days we thought 
 everybody had boxes for the opera as a matter 
 of course. We used to be installed in the front 
 places with our chins resting on the velvet 
 ledges of the box. For a time it used to be 
 very delightful, then sometimes I used suddenly 
 to wake up to find the singing still going on 
 and on as in a dream. I can still see Lablache, 
 a huge reverberating mountain, a sort of 
 Olympus, thundering forth glorious sounds, and 
 addressing deep resounding notes to what 
 seemed to me then a sort of fairy in white. 
 She stood on tiny feet, she put up a delicate 
 finger and sent forth a sweet vibration of song 
 in answer, sweeter, shriller, more charming 
 every instant. Did she fly right up into the 
 air, or was it my own head that came down 
 with a sleepy nod ? I slept, I awoke ; and each 
 time I was conscious of this exquisite floating
 
 vi My Witches Caldron 71 
 
 ripple of music flowing in and out of my dreams. 
 The singer was Mademoiselle Sontag ; it was 
 the Elisire, or some such opera, overflowing 
 like a lark's carol. All the great golden house 
 applauded ; my father applauded. I longed to 
 hear more, but in vain I struggled, I only 
 slumbered again, waking from minute to minute 
 to see the lovely little lady in white still stand- 
 ing there, still pouring forth her melody to 
 the thousand lights and people. I find when I 
 consult my faithful confidante and sympathiser 
 in these small memories of what is now so 
 nearly forgotten, that I am not alone in my 
 admiring impressions of this charming person. 
 My confidante is the Biographic Ge'ne'rale, 
 where I find an account, no sleepy visionary 
 impression, such as my own, but a very definite 
 and charming portrait of the bright fairy of my 
 dreams, of Mademoiselle Sontag, Comtesse 
 Rossi, who came to London in 1849: "On 
 remarquait surtout la limpidite" de ses gammes 
 chromatiques et 1'eclat de ses trilles . . . Et 
 toutes ces merveilles s'accomplissaient avec une 
 grace parfaite, sans que le regard fut jamais 
 attriste par le moindre effort. La figure
 
 72 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 charmante de Mademoiselle Sontag, ses beaux 
 yeux bleus, limpides et doux, ses formes 
 elegantes, sa taille elancee et souple achevaient 
 le tableau et compl^taient I'enchantement." 
 
 It seems sad to have enjoyed this delightful 
 performance only in one's dreams, but under 
 these humiliating circumstances when the whole 
 world was heaving and struggling to hear the 
 great singer of the North, and when the usual 
 box arrived for the Figlia del Reggimento, my 
 grandmother, who was with us, invited two 
 friends of her own, grown up and accustomed 
 to keep awake, and my sister and I were not 
 included in the party. We were not dis- 
 appointed, we imagined the songs for ourselves 
 as children do. We gathered all our verbenas 
 and geraniums for a nosegay and gave it to our 
 guests to carry, and watched the carriage roll 
 off in the twilight with wild hopes, unexpressed, 
 that perhaps the flowers would be cast upon 
 the stage at the feet of the great singer. But 
 though the flowers returned home again crushed 
 and dilapidated, and though we did not hear 
 the song, it was a reality for me and lasted 
 until a day, long years after, when I heard that
 
 vi My Witches Caldron 73 
 
 stately and glorious voice flashing into my 
 darkness with a shock of amazement never to 
 be forgotten, and then and there realised how 
 futile an imagination may be. 
 
 Alas ! I never possessed a note of music of 
 my own, though I have cared for it in a patient, 
 unrequited way all my life long. My father 
 always loved music and understood it too ; he 
 knew his opera tunes by heart. I have always 
 liked the little story of his landing with his 
 companions at Malta on his way to the East, 
 and as no one of the company happened to 
 speak Italian he was able to interpret for the 
 whole party by humming lines from various 
 operas, " ' Un biglietto Eccolo qua,'" says my 
 father to the man from the shore, " ' Lascu 
 darem' la mano,' " and he helped Lady T. up 
 the gangway, and so on. He used sometimes 
 to bring Mr. Ella home to dine with him, and 
 he liked to hear his talk about music. Through 
 Mr. Ella's kindness the doors of the Musical 
 Union flew open wide to us. 
 
 My father used to write in his study at the 
 back of the house in Young Street. The vine 
 shaded his two windows, which looked out
 
 74 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 upon the bit of garden, and the medlar tree, 
 and the Spanish jessamines of which the yellow 
 flowers scented our old brick walls. I can 
 remember the tortoise belonging to the boys 
 next door crawling along the top of the wall 
 where they had set it, and making its way 
 between the jessamine sprigs. Jessamines 
 won't grow now any more, as they did then, in 
 the gardens of Kensington, nor will medlars 
 and vine trees take root and spread their green 
 branches ; only herbs and bulbs, such as lilies 
 and Solomon seals, seem to flourish, though I 
 have a faint hope that all the things people put 
 in will come up all right some centuries hence, 
 when London is resting and at peace, and has 
 turned into the grass-grown ruin one so often 
 hears described. Our garden was not tidy 
 (though on one grand occasion a man came to. 
 mow the grass), but it was full of sweet things. 
 There were verbenas red, blue, and scented ; 
 and there were lovely stacks of flags, blades of 
 green with purple heads between, and bunches 
 of London Pride growing luxuriantly ; and 
 there were some blush roses at the end of the 
 garden, which were not always quite eaten up
 
 vi My Witches Caldron 75 
 
 by the caterpillars. Lady Duff Gordon came 
 to stay with us once (it was on that occasion, I 
 think, that the grass was mowed), and she after- 
 wards sent us some doves, which used to hang 
 high up in a wicker cage from the windows of 
 the schoolroom. The top schoolroom was over 
 my father's bedroom, and the bedroom was 
 over the study where he used to write. I liked 
 the top schoolroom the best of all the rooms in 
 the dear old house, the sky was in it and the 
 evening bells used to ring into it across the 
 garden, and seemed to come in dancing and 
 clanging with the sunset ; and the floor sloped 
 so, that if you put down a ball it would roll in a 
 leisurely way right across the room of its own 
 accord. And then there was a mystery a 
 small trap-door between the windows which we 
 never could open. Where did not that trap- 
 door lead to ! It was the gateway of Paradise, 
 of many paradises to us. We kept our dolls, 
 our bricks, our books, our baby-houses in the 
 top room, and most of our stupid little fancies. 
 My little sister had a menagerie of snails and 
 flies in the sunny window-sill ; these latter, 
 chiefly invalids rescued out of milk-jugs, lay
 
 76 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 upon rose - leaves in various little pots and 
 receptacles. She was very fond of animals, 
 and so was my father at least he always liked 
 our animals. Now, looking back, I am full of 
 wonder at the number of cats we were allowed 
 to keep, though De la Pluche, the butler, and 
 Gray, the housekeeper, waged war against 
 them. The cats used to come to us from the 
 garden, for then, as now, the open spaces of 
 Kensington abounded in fauna. My sister 
 used to adopt and christen them all in turn by 
 the names of her favourite heroes ; she had 
 Nicholas Nickleby, a huge gray tabby, and 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, and a poor little half-starved 
 Barnaby Rudge, and many others. Their 
 saucers used to be placed in a row on the little 
 terrace at the back of my father's study, under 
 the vine where the sour green grapes grew 
 not at all out of reach ; and at the farther end 
 of which was an empty greenhouse ornamented 
 by the busts of my father as a boy, and of a 
 relation in a military cloak. 
 
 One of my friends she never lived to be 
 an old woman used to laugh and say that she 
 had reached the time of life when she loved to
 
 vi My Witches Caldron 77 
 
 see even the people her parents had particularly 
 disliked, just for the sake of old times. I don't 
 know how I should feel if I were to meet one 
 agreeable, cordial gentleman, who used to come 
 on horseback and invite us to all sorts of 
 dazzling treats and entertainments, which, to 
 our great disappointment, my father invariably 
 refused, saying, "No, I don't like him; I don't 
 want to have anything to do with him." The 
 wretched man fully justified these objections by 
 getting himself transported long after for a 
 protracted course of peculiarly deliberate and 
 cold-blooded fraud. On one occasion a friend 
 told me he was talking to my father, and 
 mentioning some one in good repute at the 
 time, my father incidentally spoke as if he 
 knew of a murder that person had committed. 
 " You know it, then ! " said the other man. 
 " Who could have told you ? " My father had 
 never been told, but he had known it all along, 
 he said ; and indeed he sometimes spoke of this 
 curious feeling he had about people at times, as 
 if uncomfortable facts in their past history were 
 actually revealed to him. At the same time I 
 do not think anybody had a greater enjoyment
 
 78 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 than he in other people's goodness and well- 
 doing ; he used to be proud of a boy's prizes 
 at school, he used to be proud of a woman's 
 sweet voice or of her success in housekeeping. 
 He had a friend in the Victoria Road hard by 
 whose delightful household ways he used to 
 describe, and I can still hear the lady he called 
 "Jingleby" warbling "O du schone Mtillerin," 
 to his great delight. Any generous thing or 
 word seemed like something happening to him- 
 self. I can remember, when David Copperfield 
 came out, hearing him saying with emphasis to 
 my grandmother that "little Em'ly's letter to 
 old Peggotty was a masterpiece." I wondered 
 to hear him at the time, for that was not at all 
 the part I cared for most, nor indeed could I 
 imagine how little Em'ly ever was so stupid as 
 to run away from Peggotty's enchanted house- 
 boat. But we each and all enjoyed in turn our 
 share of those thin green books full of delicious 
 things, and how glad we were when they came 
 to our hands at last, after our elders and our 
 governess and our butler had all read them in 
 turn. 
 
 It is curious to me now to remember, con-
 
 vi My Witches Caldron 79 
 
 sidering how little we met and what a long way 
 off they lived, what an important part the 
 Dickens household played in our childhood. 
 But the Dickens books were as much a part of 
 our home as our own father's. 
 
 Certainly the Dickens children's parties were 
 shining facts in our early London days nothing 
 came in the least near them. There were 
 other parties, and they were very nice, but 
 nothing to compare to these ; not nearly so 
 light, not nearly so shining, not nearly so going 
 round and round. Perhaps it was not all as 
 brilliantly wonderful as I imagined it, but most 
 assuredly the spirit of mirth and kindly jollity 
 was a reality to every one present, and the 
 master of the house had that wondrous fairy 
 gift of leadership. *I know not what to call 
 that power by which he inspired every one 
 with spirit and interest. One special party I 
 remember, which seemed to me to go on for years 
 with its kind, gay hospitality, its music, its 
 streams of children passing and re -passing. 
 We were a little shy coming in alone in all the 
 consciousness of new shoes and ribbons, but 
 Mrs. Dickens called us to sit beside her till the
 
 8o Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 long sweeping dance was over, and talked to 
 us as if we were grown up, which is always 
 flattering to little girls. Then Miss Hogarth 
 found us partners, and we too formed part of 
 the throng. I remember watching the white 
 satin shoes and long flowing white sashes of 
 the little Dickens girls, who were just about 
 our own age, but how much more graceful and 
 beautifully dressed. Our sashes were bright 
 plaids of red and blue, a tribute from one of our 
 father's Scotch admirers (is it ungrateful to 
 confess now after all these years that we could 
 not bear them ?) ; our shoes were only bronze. 
 Shall I own to this passing shadow, amid all 
 that radiance ? But when people are once 
 dancing they are all equal again and happy. 
 
 Somehow after the music we all floated into 
 a long supper-room, and I found myself sitting 
 near the head of the table by Mr. Dickens, 
 with another little girl much younger than my- 
 self; she wore a necklace and pretty little 
 sausage curls all round her head. Mr. Dickens 
 was very kind to the little girl, and presently I 
 heard him persuading her to sing, and he put 
 his arm round her to encourage her ; and then,
 
 vi My Witches Caldron 81 
 
 wonderful to say, the little girl stood up (she 
 was little Miss Hullah) and began very shyly, 
 trembling and blushing at first, but as she 
 blushed and trembled she sang more and more 
 sweetly : and then all the jeunesse dorte, con- 
 sisting of the little Dickens boys and their 
 friends, ranged along the supper table, clapped 
 and clapped, and Mr. Dickens clapped too, 
 smiling and applauding. And then he made a 
 little speech, with one hand on the table ; I 
 think it was thanking the jeunesse dorte for 
 their applause, and they again clapped and 
 laughed but here my memory fails me, and 
 everything grows very vague. 
 
 Only this much I do remember very clearly, 
 that we had danced and supped and danced 
 again ; and that we were all standing in a hall 
 lighted and hung with bunches of Christmas 
 green, and, as I have said, everything seemed 
 altogether magnificent and important, more 
 magnificent and important every minute, as the 
 evening went on, and more and more people 
 kept arriving. The hall was crowded, and 
 the broad staircase was lined with little boys 
 thousands of little boys whose heads and
 
 82 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP, vi 
 
 legs and arms were waving about together. 
 They were making a great noise, and shouting, 
 and the eldest son of the house seemed to be 
 marshalling them. Presently their noise be- 
 came a cheer, and then another, and we looked 
 up and saw that our own father had come to 
 fetch us, and that his white head was there 
 above the others ; then came a third final ring- 
 ing cheer, and some one went up to him it 
 was Mr. Dickens himself who laughed and 
 said quickly, " That is for you ! " and my father 
 looked up surprised, pleased, touched, settled 
 his spectacles and nodded gravely to the little 
 boys.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 IN ST. MARY ABBOTS 
 
 OURS was more or less a bachelor's establish- 
 ment, and the arrangements of the house varied 
 between a certain fastidiousness and the 
 roughest simplicity. We had shabby table- 
 cloths, alternating with some of my grand- 
 mother's fine linen ; we had old Derby china for 
 our dessert of dried figs and dry biscuits, and a 
 silver Flaxman teapot (which always poured 
 oblations of tea upon the cloth) for breakfast, 
 also three cracked cups and saucers of unequal 
 patterns and sizes. One morning, Jeames de 
 la Pluche (so my father's servant and factotum 
 chose to call himself when he wrote to the 
 papers) brought in a hamper which had just 
 arrived. When it was unpacked we found, to 
 our great satisfaction, that it contained a lovely
 
 84 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 breakfast array. A china bowl for my father's 
 tea, ornamented with his initials in gold amid a 
 trellis of roses ; beautiful cups for the young 
 ladies, lovely gilt milk-jugs, and a copy of verses, 
 not written, but put together out of printed 
 letters from the Times. I quote it from memory : 
 
 Of esteem as a token, 
 
 Fate preserve it unbroken 
 
 A friend sends this tea-dish of porcelain rare. 
 
 And with truth and sincerity 
 
 Wishes health and prosperity 
 
 To the famed M. A. Titmarsh of Vanity Fair. 
 
 We could not imagine who the friend was 
 from whom the opportune present had come. 
 For many breakfasts we speculated and 
 wondered, guessing one person and another in 
 turn, while we sat at our now elegant board, of 
 which Dr. Oliver Holmes himself might have 
 approved. Years afterwards, when De la 
 Pluche was taking leave of my father and 
 sailing for Australia, where he had obtained a 
 responsible position, he said, reproachfully : 
 " I sent you the breakfast things ; you guessed 
 a great many people, but you never guessed 
 they came from me." 
 
 De la Pluche was devoted to my father, and
 
 vii In St. Mary Abbots 85 
 
 next to him he seemed the most important 
 member of the household. He was more than 
 devoted. We used to think he was a sorcerer. 
 He used to guess at my father's thoughts, plan 
 for him, work for him, always knew beforehand 
 what he would like far better than we ever did. 
 I remember that we almost cried on one 
 occasion, thinking that our father would ulti- 
 mately prefer him to us. He used to write to 
 the papers, and sign his letters, " Jeames de la 
 Pluche, 13 Young Street." "Like to see my 
 last, miss ? " he used to say, as he put down a 
 paper on the schoolroom table. He was a very 
 good and clever man, though a stern ruler. 
 My father had a real friendship and regard for 
 him, and few of his friends ever deserved it 
 
 *A 
 
 more. He lived alone downstairs, where he 
 was treated with great deference, and had his 
 meals served separately, I believe. He always 
 called my father " the Governor." He was a 
 little man, and was very like Holbein's picture of 
 Sir Thomas More in looks. I remember on 
 one occasion coming away from some lecture or 
 entertainment. As we got out into the street 
 it was raining. " It has turned cold," said my
 
 86 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 father, who was already beginning to be ill. 
 At that moment a voice behind him said, 
 " Coat, sir ? Brought it down " ; and there was 
 De la Pluche, who had brought his coat all the 
 way from Kensington, helping him on with it. 
 My father thanked him, and then mechanically 
 felt in the pocket for a possible cigar-case. 
 " Cigar ? Here," says De la Pluche, popping 
 one into my father's mouth, and producing a 
 match ready lighted. 
 
 I sometimes hear from my old friend, and I 
 hope he may not be pained by reading of these 
 childish jealousies long past. 
 
 When we were children attending our 
 classes we used to be encouraged to study large 
 sheets with coloured designs representing the 
 solar system and its various intricacies. One 
 can understand the pictures in the book while 
 one is looking at them, but it is a very different 
 thing from looking at pictures, to try to under- 
 stand the reality as it exists outside the print, 
 and to stand on one's own doorstep, for instance, 
 trying to realise it all. The earth is turning one 
 way, and the moon corkscrewing round it, and
 
 vii In St. Mary Abbots 87 
 
 the planets are dancing their mighty course, and 
 the fixed stars disappearing at the same time 
 behind the opposite roof, to say nothing of a 
 possibility that one's feet may be up in the air 
 and one's head hanging down below, without 
 any feeling of inconvenience (except perhaps a 
 certain bewilderment and confusion on most 
 subjects, which may, however, be peculiar to 
 myself). And so, looking back on one's own 
 life it is difficult to fit all the events and 
 chronologies accurately into their places. If 
 one tries to realise too much at once, the 
 impression is apt to grow chaotic and unmean- 
 ing in its complexity ; you can't get the propor- 
 tions of events ; and, perhaps, indeed, one of 
 the compensating constituents of all our various 
 existences consists* in that very disproportion 
 which passing impressions most happily take 
 for us, and which they often retain, notwith- 
 standing the experiences of years. That little 
 picture of Bewick's, in which a falling leaf 
 conceals the sky, the road, the passing gig and 
 its occupants, has always seemed to me to 
 contain the secret of a whole philosophy 
 which makes existence itself more possible,
 
 88 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 than it would be, if infinity held its proportional 
 place in our finite experience. . . . 
 
 Our London home was a happy but a very 
 quiet home. One day my father said that he 
 had been surprised to hear from his friend Sir 
 Henry Davison how seriously our house struck 
 people, compared to other houses : " But I 
 think we are very happy as we are," said he 
 and so indeed we were. We lived chiefly with 
 him and with quite little children, or with our 
 grandparents when they came over to visit us. 
 There was certainly a want of initiation : in 
 our house there was no one to suggest all sorts 
 of delightful possibilities, which, as we grew up, 
 might have been made more of; but looking 
 back, I chiefly regret it in so far as I think he 
 might have been happier if we had brought a 
 little more action and sunshine into daily life, 
 and taken a little more on our own responsibility, 
 instead of making ourselves into his shadows. 
 
 When my father had done his day's work, 
 he liked a change of scene and thought. I 
 think he was always glad to leave the ink-blots 
 for his beloved dabs of paint. Sometimes he 
 used to drive into town on the top of an
 
 vii In St. Mary Abbots 89 
 
 omnibus, sometimes in a brougham ; very often 
 he used to take us with him in hansoms (which 
 we much preferred) on long expeditions to 
 Hampstead, to Richmond, to Greenwich, or to 
 studios in distant quarters of the town. There 
 was Mr. David Roberts's studio ; his welcome 
 was certain, and his sketch-books were an 
 unfailing delight to turn over ; indeed, the 
 drawings were so accurate, delicate, and 
 suggestive, that they used to make one almost 
 giddy to look at. Once or twice we went to 
 Mr. Cattermole's, who had a studio among the 
 Hampstead hills, hidden among ancient walls 
 and ivy-trees. Mr. Du Maurier was not yet 
 living there, or I am sure we should have 
 driven further up the hill. As life goes on, one 
 grudges that time and chance alone should 
 have separated people who would have been so 
 happy with each other. Sometimes we used to 
 go to Sir Edwin Landseer's beautiful villa in 
 St. John's Wood, and enjoy his delightful 
 company. Among his many stories (as he 
 stood painting at his huge canvases), I 
 remember his once telling us an anecdote of 
 one of his dogs. He was in the habit of taking
 
 QO Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 it out every day after his work was over. The 
 dog used to wait patiently all day long while 
 Sir Edwin was painting, but he used to come 
 and lie down at his feet and look up in his face 
 towards five o'clock ; and on one occasion, 
 finding his hints disregarded, he trotted into 
 the hall and came back with the painter's hat, 
 which he laid on the floor before him. 
 
 Then we always enjoyed going on to the 
 house of a neighbour of Sir Edwin's, Mr. 
 Charles Leslie, who dwelt somewhere in that 
 locality with a delightful household. To say 
 nothing of the actual members of that painter's 
 home, there were others also belonging to it 
 who were certainly all but alive. I can still see 
 my father standing in the South Kensington 
 Museum, sympathetic and laughing before the 
 picture of Sancho Panza, in which he sits with 
 his finger to his nose, with that look of portentous 
 wisdom and absurdity. As for the charming 
 Duchess, whose portrait is also to be seen, she, 
 or her prototypes, must surely have dwelt in 
 the painter's own home. Mr. Dickens used to 
 be at the Leslies' sometimes, and though I 
 cannot quite account for it, I have a general
 
 vii In St. Mary Abbots 9 1 
 
 impression of fireworks perpetually going off 
 just outside their windows. 
 
 One day that we had come home from one 
 of these expeditions in a big blue fly, with a 
 bony horse, it was a bright blue fly, with a 
 drab inside to it, and an old white coachman on 
 the box my father, after a few words of con- 
 sultation with the coachman, drove off again, 
 and shortly afterwards returning on foot, told 
 us that he had just bought the whole concern, 
 brougham and horse and harness, and that he 
 had sent Jackson (our driver had now become 
 Jackson) to be measured for a great-coat So' 
 henceforward we came and went about in our 
 own private carriage, which, however, never 
 lost its original name of "the fly," although 
 
 "A 
 
 Jackson's buttons shone resplendent with the 
 Thackeray crest, and the horse too seemed 
 brushed up and promoted to be private. 
 
 I remember, or I think I remember, driving 
 in this vehicle to Mr. Frank Stone's studio in 
 Tavistock Square, and how he and my father 
 began laughing and talking about early days. 
 " Do you remember that portrait I began to 
 paint of you over the lady with the guitar ? "
 
 92 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 Mr. Stone said, and he added that he had the 
 picture still, and, going into some deep cup- 
 board, he brought out a cheerful florid picture 
 of my father, as I for one had never seen him, 
 with thick black hair and a young ruddy face. 
 We brought it away with us, and I have it now, 
 and the lady's red dress still appears in the 
 background. It is perhaps fortunate that 
 people, as a rule, are well and happy and at 
 their best when their portraits are painted. If 
 one looks down the Academy list year by year, 
 one sees that the pictures represent gentlemen 
 who have just been made Bishops, or Speakers, 
 or Governors-General ; or ladies who are brides 
 in their lovely new clothes and jewels. Sad 
 folks hide their heads, sick folks turn them 
 away, and are not fit subjects for the painter's 
 art ; and yet, as I write, I am also conscious 
 that facts contradict me, and that there has 
 been a fine run of late upon nurses and death- 
 bed scenes in general. 
 
 The happy hour had not yet come for us 
 when Mr. Watts came to live in Kensington at 
 Little Holland House, and built his studios 
 there. This was in later times, and after we
 
 vii In St. Mary Abbots 93 
 
 had just passed beyond the great pinafore age, 
 which sets such a stamp upon after life, and to 
 which my recollections seem chiefly to revert. 
 
 He always said that he should like to paint 
 a picture of my father, but the day for the 
 sitting, alas, never came ! And yet I can 
 imagine what that picture might have been, 
 a portrait, such as some portraits, with that 
 mysterious reality in them, that present which 
 is quite apart from time and dates. 
 
 I am sure there was no one among all his 
 friends whose society my father enjoyed more 
 than he did that of John Leech, whom he first 
 remembered, so he has often told us with a 
 smile, a small boy at the Charterhouse, in a 
 little blue buttoned-up suit, set up upon a form 
 and made to sing "liome, sweet home," to the 
 others crowding round about. Mr. Leech was 
 anything but a small boy when I remember 
 him in the old Young Street dining-room, 
 where De la Pluche was laying the cloth, while 
 Mr. Leech and my father sat talking by the 
 fire. He was very handsome and tall, and kind 
 and shy, and he spoke in a husky, melodious 
 voice : we admired him very much ; he was
 
 94 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 always beautifully dressed, and we used to see 
 him come riding up to the door on nice shining 
 horses ; and he generally came to invite us all 
 to something delightful to go there, or to dine 
 with him and his wife at Richmond or else- 
 where. My father liked to take us about with 
 him, and I am surprised, as I think of it, at the 
 great good-nature of his friends, who used so 
 constantly to include two inconvenient little 
 girls in the various invitations they sent him. 
 We used to be asked early, and to arrive at all 
 sorts of unusual times. We used to lunch with 
 our hosts and spend long afternoons, and then 
 about dinner-time our father would come in, 
 and sit smoking after dinner, while we waited 
 with patient ladies upstairs. Mrs. Brookneld 
 used to live in Portman Street in those days, 
 and thither we used to go very constantly, and 
 to Mrs. Procter's, as well as to various relations' 
 houses, Indian cousins of my father's coming 
 to town for a season with their colonels and 
 their families. Time after time we used to go 
 to the Leeches, who lived in Brunswick Square. 
 We used to play with the baby, we used to turn 
 over endless books of pictures, and perhaps go
 
 vii In St. Mary Abbots 95 
 
 out for a walk with kind Mrs. Leech, and some- 
 times (but this happened very rarely) we used 
 to be taken up to the room where John Leech 
 himself sat at his drawing-table under the 
 square of silver paper which softened the light 
 as it fell upon his blocks. There was his back 
 as he bent over his work, there were the tables 
 loaded with picture-books and drawing-blocks, 
 huge blocks, four times the size of any at home, 
 ready for next week's Punch; but our entrance 
 disturbed him (we instinctively felt how much), 
 and we used to hurry quickly back to the 
 drawing-books downstairs, and go on turning 
 over the pencil sketches. I have some of them 
 now, those drawings so roughly indicated, at 
 first so vague, and then by degrees worked 
 
 * 
 
 upon and altered and modelled and forced into 
 their life as it were, obliged to laugh, charmed 
 into kindly wit ; as I look at them now, I still 
 recognise the aspect of those bygone days and 
 places, and I cannot help thinking how much 
 more interesting to remember are some of the 
 shabby homes in which work and beauty and 
 fun are made, than those more luxurious and 
 elaborate, which dazzle us at the time, where
 
 96 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 everything one saw was only bought. But 
 after all the whole secret of life is made up of 
 the things one makes, and those one steals, 
 and those one pays for. 
 
 My own children turn over Leech's drawings 
 now, as happily as we ourselves used to do, and 
 it seems to me sometimes as if they also are at 
 play among our own old fancies and in our old 
 haunts. There are the rooms again. There 
 is Mrs. Leech's old piano like an organ stand- 
 ing bolt upright against the wall ; there are the 
 brown holland covers on the chairs ; there is 
 the domestic lamp, looking (as the lamps of 
 one's youth used to look) tall and dismantled 
 like some gaunt lighthouse erected upon bare 
 mahogany rocks. Besides these things, I 
 remember with real affection a lovely little 
 miniature portrait of Mrs. Leech, which used 
 to hang upon the wall, and which was done at 
 the time of her marriage. It was indeed the 
 sweetest little picture ; and when I saw her one 
 little granddaughter Dorothy Gillett, this old 
 favourite picture of my childhood came into my 
 mind. It may be hallucination, but, although 
 the houses were so ugly in those days, I still
 
 vii In St. Mary Abbots 97 
 
 think the people in them looked almost nicer 
 then than they do now. 
 
 Madame Elise was the great oracle of the 
 'Fifties, and she used to turn out floating, 
 dignified, squashy beings with close pearly 
 head-dresses and bonnets, and sloping, spread- 
 ing draperies. They are all to be seen in Mr. 
 Leech's pictures still, and they may be about 
 to come back to life, crinolines and all, for 
 anything I know to the contrary. But I hope 
 not ; I think this present generation of women 
 is a happier one than that one was. The 
 characters of the people I remember were 
 certainly different from the characters of their 
 daughters of the present, disporting them- 
 selves in the golden Du Maurier age of 
 liberty and out-door life. Mr. Leech once 
 drew our own green curtains for us in a 
 little picture of two girls asking a child what 
 it had for dinner. The child says, " Some- 
 thing that begins with a S." ; and when asked 
 what that might be, explains that it was cold 
 beef. 
 
 A certain number of writers and designers 
 for Punch used to dine at Mr. Leech's, coming 
 
 H
 
 98 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAR 
 
 in with my father towards the close of the day. 
 I remember Mr. Tenniel there, and Mr. Percival 
 Legh, and Mr. Shirley Brooks, and Millais in 
 later days, and an eminent member of a different 
 profession, the present Dean of Rochester. 
 Sometimes, instead of dining in Brunswick 
 Square or at the house in Kensington (to 
 which they afterwards removed), we used to be 
 taken all away to Richmond, to enjoy happy 
 hours upon the terrace, and the light of setting 
 suns. 
 
 My father was pleased when some dozen 
 years later the Leeches came to Kensington, 
 and he was greatly interested in their pretty 
 old house. Mr. Leech was pleased too ; and 
 at first he used to describe with resigned humour 
 what, alas, became slow torture in the end to 
 his strained nerves, the different noises as 
 they succeeded each other in what he had ex- 
 pected to find a quiet suburb of London : the 
 milkman, the carrier, the industrious carpenter, 
 all following in rotation one by one, from the 
 very earliest morning. But his nerves were 
 altogether overstrung. I remember hearing
 
 vii In St. Mary Abbots 99 
 
 him once, in far, far back times, tell a little 
 story, scarcely perhaps worth retelling. He 
 was looking altogether ill and upset, and he 
 told us that he had hardly recovered from a 
 little shock the night before. Coming home 
 late, and as he went upstairs, he had been 
 annoyed by hearing the howling of a dog in 
 a garden at the back of the house. He did 
 not know that one of his young sisters had 
 come to see his wife that evening, had been 
 persuaded to stay for the night, and put to 
 sleep in the very room into which he now 
 turned, throwing up the window to see where 
 the noise came from. The moon was shining, 
 and happening to look round he was quite 
 overcome, seeing a figure lying motionless 
 upon the bed, while* the light poured coldly 
 upon a white marble profile. 
 
 I was going along the Kensington Road 
 towards Palace Green one fine morning, when 
 I met my father carefully carrying before him 
 two blue Dutch china pots, which he had just 
 surreptitiously taken away out of his own study. 
 " I am going to see if they won't stand upon 
 Leech's dining-room chimney-piece," he said.
 
 ioo Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 I followed him, hoping, I am afraid, that they 
 would not stand there, for we were well used 
 to lament the accustomed disappearance of his 
 pretty ornaments and china dishes. People 
 may have stared to see him carrying his china, 
 but that I do not now remember, only this, that 
 he was amused and interested, and that we 
 found the iron gates open to the court in front, 
 and the doors of the Leeches' house all wide 
 open, though the house itself was empty and 
 the family had not yet arrived. Workmen 
 were coming and going, busy hammering carpets 
 and making arrangements. We crossed the 
 hall, and then my father led the way into the 
 pretty old dining-room, with its new Turkey 
 carpet and its tall windows looking to the 
 gardens at the back. " I knew they would 
 stand there," said he, putting up the two blue 
 pots on the high narrow ledge ; and there to 
 my mind they will ever stand. . . . l 
 
 It was in the Quarterly Review that my 
 father wrote of Leech's pictures. "While we 
 live we must laugh," he says. 
 
 Do we laugh enough ? Our fathers laughed 
 
 1 Midsummer 1894. Kensington Terrace has been pulled down.
 
 vii In Si. Mary Abbots 101 
 
 better than we do. Is it that we have over- 
 eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge ? I 
 cannot say. The art of design, as practised by 
 the successors of John Leech who have followed 
 in his steps, still holds its own delightful sway ; 
 but the kindred arts of action, of oratory, of 
 literature, have, to some narrow-minded critics, 
 taken most unpleasant forms of sincerity. Some- 
 times I wonder how the moralist would write 
 of us now, were he still among us. I don't 
 know how the present will strike the new 
 generation, when it has grown up to look back 
 in turn upon this somewhat complicated phase 
 of civilisation. Sheep's clothing is out of date, 
 and wolf-skins all the fashion now; but they 
 are imitation wolf-skins. The would-be Lion 
 
 A 
 
 affects the Donkey's ears ; the Pharisee is 
 anxious to be seen in the Publican's society for 
 the good impression it makes upon his constit- 
 uency. It is all very perplexing, and not very 
 edifying to speculate on. And then I feel that 
 any day, while one is fumbling and probing 
 and dissecting and splitting hairs, some genius 
 such as John Leech's silently appears, and 
 touches commonplace things, and lo ! here is
 
 IO2 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP, vn 
 
 a new light upon earth, a new happiness ; 
 here is another smile in the land. " Can 
 we have too much of truth and fun and 
 beauty and kindness ? " said John Leech's 
 Friend.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 TO WEIMAR AND BACK 
 
 I SUPPOSE the outer circuit of my own very 
 limited wanderings must have been reached at 
 the age of thirteen, or thereabouts, when my 
 father took me and my little sister for the grand 
 tour of Europe. We had of course lived in 
 Paris and spent our summers in quiet sunny 
 country places abroad with our grandparents, 
 but this was to be something different from 
 anything we had eVer known before at St. 
 Germains or Montmorenci among the donkeys ; 
 Switzerland, and Venice, and Vienna, Germany 
 and the Rhine ! our young souls thrilled with 
 expectation. And yet those early feasts of life 
 are not unlike the miracle of the loaves and 
 fishes ; the twelve basketfuls that remain in 
 after years are certainly even more precious 
 than the feast itself.
 
 IO4 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 We started one sleety summer morning. 
 My father was pleased to be off, and we were 
 enchanted. He had bought a gray wide-awake 
 hat for the journey, and he had a new sketch- 
 book in his pocket, besides two smaller ones 
 for us, which he produced as the steamer was 
 starting. We sailed from London Bridge, and 
 the decks were all wet and slippery as we came 
 on board. We were scatter-brained little girls, 
 although we looked demure enough in our 
 mushroom hats and waterproofs. We also had 
 prepared a travelling trousseau, which consisted 
 of miscellaneous articles belonging to the fancy 
 goods department of things in general, rather 
 than to the usual outfit of an English gentle- 
 man's family, I was not without some diffidence 
 about my luggage. I remember a draught- 
 board, a large wooden work-box, a good many 
 books, paint-boxes, and other odds and ends ; 
 but I felt that whatever else might be deficient 
 our new bonnets would bring us triumphantly 
 out of every crisis. They were alike, but with 
 a difference of blue and pink wreaths of acacia, 
 and brilliant in ribbons to match, at a time 
 when people affected less dazzling colours than
 
 vin To Weimar and Back 105 
 
 they do now. Of course these treasures were 
 not for the Channel and its mischances ; they 
 were carefully packed away and guarded by the 
 draught-boards and work-boxes and the other 
 contents of our trunk ; and I may as well con- 
 clude the episode at once, for it is not quite 
 without bearing upon what I am trying to 
 recall. Alas for human expectations ! When 
 the happy moment came at last, and we had 
 reached foreign parts and issued out of the 
 hotel dressed and wreathed and triumphantly 
 splendid, my father said : " My dear children, 
 go back and put those bonnets away in your 
 box, and don't ever wear them any more ! Why, 
 you would be mobbed in these places if you 
 
 walked out alone with such ribbons!" How 
 
 ** 
 
 the sun shone as he spoke ; how my heart sank 
 under the acacia trees. My sister was eleven 
 years old, and didn't care a bit ; but at thirteen 
 and fourteen one's clothes begin to strike root. 
 I felt disgraced, beheaded of my lovely bonnet, 
 utterly crushed, and I turned away to hide my 
 tears. 
 
 Now, there is a passage in the life of Charles 
 Kingsley which, as I believe, concerned this
 
 io6 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 very time and journey ; and I am amused, as I 
 remember the tragedy of my bonnet, to think of 
 the different sacrifices which men and women 
 have to pay to popular prejudice, casting their 
 head-gear into the flames, just as the people did 
 in the times of Romola. We had started by 
 the Packet-boat from London Bridge, as I have 
 said, and immediately we came on board we 
 had been kindly greeted by a family group 
 already established there, an elderly gentleman 
 in clerical dress and a lady sitting with an 
 umbrella in the drizzle of rain and falling smuts 
 from the funnel. This was the Kingsley family, 
 consisting of the Rector of Chelsea and his wife 
 and his two sons (Charles Kingsley was the 
 elder of the two), then going abroad for his 
 health. It will now be seen that my recollec- 
 tions concern more historical head-dresses 
 than our unlucky bonnets ; associations which 
 William Tell himself might not have disdained. 
 Mr. Kingsley and his brother were wearing 
 brown felt hats with very high and pointed 
 crowns, and with very broad brims, of a different 
 shape from my father's commonplace felt. 
 The hats worn by Mr. Kingsley and his brother
 
 viii To Weimar and Back 1 07 
 
 were more like those well-known brims and 
 peaks which have crowned so many poets' 
 heads since then. 
 
 It was a stormy crossing ; the waves were 
 curling unpleasantly round about the boat ; I 
 sat by Mrs. Kingsley, miserable, uncomfortable, 
 and watching in a dazed and hypnotised sort of 
 way the rim of Charles Kingsley's wide-awake 
 as it rose and fell against the horrible horizon. 
 He stood before us holding on to some ropes, 
 and the horizon rose and fell, and the steamer 
 pitched and tossed, and it seemed as if Time 
 stood still. But we reached those farther 
 shores at last, and parted from our companions, 
 and very soon afterwards my father told us with 
 some amusement of the adventure which befell 
 
 A 
 
 Mr. Charles Kingsley and his brother almost as 
 soon as they landed, and after they had parted 
 from their parents. They were arrested by the 
 police, who did not like the shape of their wide- 
 awakes. I may as well give the story in Mr. 
 Kingsley's own words, which I found in his 
 Life in an extract from a letter written 
 immediately after the event to Mrs. Charles 
 Kingsley at home :
 
 io8 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 " ' Here we are at Treves,' he says, ' having 
 been brought there under arrest with a gendarme 
 from the Mayor of Gettesburg, and liberated 
 next morning with much laughter and many 
 curses from the police here. However, we 
 had the pleasure of spending a night in prison 
 among fleas and felons, on the bare floor. The 
 barbarians took our fishing-tackle for Todt- 
 instrumenten and our wide-awakes for Italian 
 hats, and got it into their addle-pates that we 
 were emissaries of Mazzini. . . ." 
 
 Perhaps I can find some excuse for the 
 " addle-pates " when I remember that proud 
 and eager head, and that bearing so full of 
 character and energy. One can imagine the 
 author of Alton Locke not finding very great 
 favour with foreign mouchards and gendarmes, 
 and suggesting indefinite terrors and suspicions 
 to their minds. 
 
 Fortunately for the lovers of nature, un- 
 fortunately for autobiographers, the dates of the 
 years as they pass are not written up in big 
 letters on the blue vaults overhead, though the
 
 vin To Weimar and Back 109 
 
 seasons themselves are told in turn by the 
 clouds and lights and by every waving tree and 
 every country glade. And so, though one 
 remembers the aspect of things, the years are 
 apt to get a little shifted at times, and I cannot 
 quite tell whether it was this year or that one 
 following it, in which we found ourselves still 
 in glorious summer weather returning home 
 from distant places, and coming back by 
 Germany and by Weimar. 
 
 In common with most children, the stories 
 of our father's youth always delighted and 
 fascinated us, and we had often heard him 
 speak of his own early days at college and in 
 Germany, and of his happy stay at Pumper- 
 nickel-Weimar, where he went to Court and 
 saw the great Goethe, and was in love with the 
 beautiful Amalia von X. And now coming to 
 Weimar we found ourselves actually alive in 
 his past somehow, almost living it alongside 
 with him, just like Gogo in Mr. du Maurier's 
 story. I suddenly find myself walking up the 
 centre of an empty shady street, and my father 
 is pointing to a row of shutters on the first floor 
 of a large and comfortable -looking house,
 
 no Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 " That is where Frau von X. used to live," he 
 said. " How kind she was to us, and what a 
 pretty girl Amalia was." And then a little 
 further on we passed the house in the sunshine 
 of a plaz in which he told us he himself had 
 lodged with a friend ; and then we came to the 
 palace, with the soldiers and sentries looking 
 like toys wound up from the Burlington Arcade, 
 and going backwards and forwards with their 
 spikes in front of their own striped boxes ; and 
 we saw the acacia trees with their cropped heads, 
 and the iron gates ; and we went across the 
 courtyard into the palace and were shown the 
 ball-room and the smaller saloons, and we stood 
 on the shining floors and beheld the classic 
 spot where for the first and only time in all his 
 life, I believe, my father had invited the lovely 
 Amalia to waltz. And then coming away all 
 absorbed and delighted with our experiences in 
 living backwards, my father suddenly said, " I 
 wonder if old Weissenborne is still alive ? He 
 used to teach me German." And lo ! as he 
 spoke a tall, thin old man, in a broad-brimmed 
 straw hat, with a beautiful Pomeranian poodle 
 running before him, came stalking along with a
 
 vin To Weimar and Back 1 1 1 
 
 newspaper under his arm. "Good gracious, 
 that looks like yes, that is Doctor Weissen- 
 borne. He is hardly changed a bit," said my 
 father, stopping short for a moment, and then 
 he too stepped forward quickly with an out- 
 stretched hand, and the old man in turn stopped, 
 stared, frowned. " I am Thackeray, my name 
 is Thackeray," said my father eagerly and shyly 
 as was his way ; and after another stare from 
 the doctor, suddenly came a friendly lighting 
 up and exclaiming and welcoming and hand- 
 shaking and laughing, while the pretty white 
 dog leapt up and down, as much interested as 
 we were in the meeting. 
 
 " You have grown so gray I did not know 
 you at first," said the doctor in English. And 
 my father laughed, and said he was a great deal 
 grayer now than the doctor himself; then he 
 introduced us to the old man, who shook us 
 gravely by the finger-tips with a certain aus- 
 tere friendliness, and once more turned again 
 with a happy, kind, grim face to my father. 
 Yes, he had followed his career with interest ; 
 he had heard of him from this man and that 
 man ; he had read one of his books, not all.
 
 ii2 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 Why had he never sent any ? why had he never 
 come back before ? " You must bring your 
 misses and all come and breakfast at my 
 lodging," said Dr. Weissenborne. 
 
 "And is this your old dog?" my father 
 asked, after accepting the doctor's invitation. 
 Dr. Weissenborne shook his head. Alas ! the 
 old dog was no more, he died two years before. 
 Meanwhile the young dog was very much 
 there, frisking and careering in cheerful circles 
 round about us. The doctor and his dog had 
 just been starting for their daily walk in the 
 woods when they met us, and they now invited 
 us to accompany them. We called at his 
 lodging on the way to announce our return to 
 breakfast, and then started off together for the 
 park. The park (I am writing of years and 
 years ago) was a bright green little wood, with 
 leaves and twigs and cheerful lights, with small 
 trees not very thickly planted on the steep 
 slopes, with many narrow paths wandering 
 into green depths, and with seats erected at 
 intervals along the way. On one of these 
 seats the old professor showed us an inscription 
 cut deep into the wood with a knife, " Doctor
 
 vin To Weimar and Back 113 
 
 W. and his dog" Who had carved it ? He 
 did not know. But besides this inscription on 
 every one of the benches where Goethe used 
 to rest, and on every tree which used to shade 
 his head was written another inscription, 
 invisible indeed, and yet which we seemed to 
 read all along the way " Here Goethe's life 
 was spent ; here he walked, here he rested ; 
 his feet have passed to and fro along this 
 narrow pathway." The pathway led to his 
 garden-house. 
 
 It was lovely summer weather as I have 
 said, that weather which used to be so common 
 
 * 
 
 when one was young, and which I dare say our 
 children still discover now, though we cannot 
 always enjoy it. We came back with our 
 friend the doctor and breakfasted with him in 
 his small apartment, in a room full of books, at 
 a tiny table drawn to an open window ; then 
 after breakfast we sat in the Professor's garden 
 among the nasturtiums. My sister and I were 
 given books to read ; they were translations 
 for the use of students, I remember ; and the 
 old friends smoked together and talked over 
 a hundred things. Amalia was married and 
 
 I
 
 ii4 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 had several children : she was away. Madame 
 von Goethe was still in Weimar with her sons, 
 and Fraulein von Pogwishe, her sister, was 
 also there. "They would be delighted to see 
 you again," said the Professor. "We will go 
 together, and leave the young misses here till 
 our return." But not so; our father declared 
 we also must be allowed to come. My recol- 
 lections (according to the wont of such 
 provoking things) here begin to fail me, and in 
 the one particular which is of any interest ; for 
 though we visited Goethe's old house I can 
 scarcely remember it at all, only that the 
 doctor said Madame von Goethe had moved 
 after Goethe's death. She lived in a handsome 
 house in the town, with a fine staircase running 
 up between straight walls, and leading into a 
 sort of open hall, where, amid a good deal of 
 marble and stateliness, stood two little unpre- 
 tending ladies by a big round table piled with 
 many books and papers. The ladies were 
 Madame von Goethe and her sister. Doctor 
 Weissenborne went first and announced an old 
 friend, and then ensued more welcomings and 
 friendly exclamations and quick recognitions on
 
 vin To Weimar and Back 115 
 
 both sides, all benevolently superintended by our 
 Virgil. "And are you both as fond of reading 
 novels as ever ? " my father asked. The ladies 
 laughed. " Yes, indeed," they said, and pointed 
 to a boxful of books which had just arrived, 
 with several English novels among them, which 
 they had been unpacking as we came in. Then 
 the sons of the house were sent for, kind and 
 friendly and unassuming young men, walking in, 
 and as much interested and pleased to witness 
 their parents' pleasure as we were ; they were 
 not handsome, with nothing of their grand- 
 father's noble aspect (as one sees it depicted), 
 but with most charming and courteous ways. 
 One was a painter, the mother told us, the other 
 a musician. And while my father talked to the 
 elder ladies, the young men took us younger 
 ones in hand. They offered to show us the 
 celebrated garden-house and asked us to drink 
 tea there next day. And so it happened that 
 once more we found ourselves being conducted 
 through the little shady wood. But to be 
 walking there with Goethe's family, with his 
 grandsons and their mother, the Ottilie who 
 had held the dying poet's hand to the last ;
 
 n6 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 to be going to his favourite resort where so 
 much of his time was spent ; to hear him so 
 familiarly quoted and spoken of was something 
 like hearing the distant echo of the great voice 
 itself: something like seeing the skirts of his 
 dressing-gown just waving before us. And at 
 the age that I was then, impressions are so vivid 
 that I have always all my life had a vague 
 feeling of having been in Goethe's presence. 
 We seemed to find something of it everywhere, 
 most of all in the little garden-house, in the 
 bare and simple room where he used to write. 
 One of the kind young men went to the 
 window and showed us something on the pane. 
 What it was I know not clearly, but I think it 
 was the great name written with a diamond ; and 
 finally in the garden, at a wooden table, among 
 trees and dancing shadows, we drank our tea, 
 and I remember Wolfgang von Goethe hand- 
 ing a tea-cup, and the look of it, and suddenly 
 the whole thing vanishes. . . . There was a 
 certain simple dignity and hospitality in it all 
 which seems to belong to all the traditions of 
 hospitable Weimar, and my father's pleasure 
 and happy emotion gave a value and import-
 
 vni To Weimar and Back 117 
 
 ance to every tiny detail of that short but 
 happy time. Even the people at the inn remem- 
 bered their old guest, and came to greet him ; 
 but also they sent in such an enormous bill as 
 we were departing on the evening of the 
 second day, that he exclaimed in dismay to the 
 waiter, " So much for sentimental recollections ! 
 Tell the host I shall never be able to afford to 
 come back to Weimar again." 
 
 The waiter stared ; I wonder if he delivered 
 the message. The hotel-bill I have just men- 
 tioned was a real disappointment to my father, 
 and, alas for disillusions ! another more serious 
 shock, a meeting which was no meeting, some- 
 what dashed the remembrance of Amalia 
 von X. 
 
 It happened at Venice, a year or two after 
 our visit to Weimar. We were breakfasting 
 at a long table where a fat lady also sat a little 
 way off, with a pale fat little boy beside her. 
 She was stout, she was dressed in light green, 
 she was silent, she was eating an egg. The 
 sala of the great marble hotel was shaded from 
 the blaze of sunshine, but stray gleams shot 
 across the dim hall, falling on the palms and
 
 n8 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 the orange trees beyond the lady, who gravely 
 shifted her place as the sunlight dazzled her. 
 Our own meal was also spread, and my sister 
 and I were only waiting for my father to begin. 
 He came in presently, saying he had been 
 looking at the guest-book in the outer hall, and 
 he had seen a name which had interested him 
 very much. " Frau von Z. Geboren von X. 
 It must be Amalia ! She must be here in the 
 hotel," he said ; and as he spoke he asked a 
 waiter whether Madame von Z. was still in the 
 hotel. "I believe that is Madame von Z.," 
 said the waiter, pointing to the fat lady. The 
 lady looked up and then went on with her egg, 
 and my poor father turned away, saying in a 
 low, overwhelmed voice, " That Amalia ! That 
 cannot be Amalia." I could not understand 
 his silence, his discomposure. "Aren't you 
 going to speak to her ? Oh, please do go and 
 speak to her ! " we both cried. " Do make 
 sure if it is Amalia." But he shook his head. 
 " I can't," he said ; "I had rather not." 
 Amalia meanwhile having finished her egg, 
 rose deliberately, put down her napkin and 
 walked away, followed by her little boy. . . .
 
 vin To Weimar and Back 1 1 9 
 
 Things don't happen altogether at the same 
 time ; they don't quite begin or end all at once. 
 Once more I heard of Amalia long years after- 
 wards, when by a happy hospitable chance I 
 met Dr. Norman Macleod at the house of my 
 old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Cunliffe. I was 
 looking at him, and thinking that in some 
 indefinable way he put me in mind of the past, 
 when he suddenly asked me if I knew that he 
 and my father had been together as boys at 
 Weimar, learning German from the same pro- 
 fessor, and both in love with the same beautiful 
 girl. " What, Amalia ? Dr. Weissenborne ? " 
 I cried. " Dear me ! do you know about 
 Amalia?" said Dr. Macleod, "and do you 
 know about old Weissenborne ? I thought I 
 was the only person left to remember them. 
 We all learnt from Weissenborne ; we were all 
 in love with Amalia, every one of us, your 
 father too ! What happy days those were ! " 
 And then he went on to tell us that years and 
 years afterwards, when they met again on the 
 occasion of one of the lecturing tours in Scot- 
 land, he, Dr. Macleod, and the rest of the 
 notabilities were all assembled to receive the
 
 I2O Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 lecturer on the platform, and as my father came 
 by carrying his papers and advancing to take 
 his place at the reading-desk, he recognised 
 Dr. Macleod as he passed, and in the face of 
 all the audience he bent forward and said 
 gravely, without stopping one moment on his 
 way, " Ich liebe Amalia dock" and so went on 
 to deliver his lecture. 
 
 Dr. Macleod also met Amalia once again 
 in after life, and to him, too, had come a dis- 
 illusion. He too had been overwhelmed and 
 shocked by the change of years. Poor lady ! 
 I can't help being very sorry for her. To have 
 had two such friends and not to have kept 
 them seems a cruel fate. To have been so 
 charming, that her present seemed but a 
 calumny upon the past. It is like the story of 
 the woman who flew into a fury with her own 
 portrait, young, smiling, and triumphant, and 
 who destroyed it, so as not to be taunted by 
 the past any more. Let us hope that Frau 
 von Z. was never conscious of her loss, never 
 looked upon this picture and on that. 
 
 Since writing all this, I have found an old
 
 vin To Weimar and Back 121 
 
 letter from my father to his mother, and written 
 from Weimar. It is dated 29th September 
 1830. "There is a capital library here," he 
 says, "which is open to me, an excellent theatre 
 which costs a shilling a night, and a charming 
 petite socie'te' which costs nothing. Goethe, the 
 great lion of Weimar, I have not yet seen, but 
 his daughter-in-law has promised to introduce 
 me." Then he describes going to Court : "I 
 have had to air my legs in black breeches and 
 to sport a black coat, black waistcoat, and cock- 
 hat, looking something like a cross between a 
 footman and a Methodist parson. 
 
 " We have had three operas," he goes on ; 
 "Medea and the Barber of Seville and the 
 Flauto Magico. Hummel conducts the orches- 
 tra [then comes a sketch of Hummel with huge 
 shirt collars]. The orchestra is excellent, but 
 the singers are not first-rate." . . . Amalia 
 must have had rivals, even in those early days, 
 for this same letter goes on to say : " I have 
 fallen in love with the Princess of Weimar, 
 who is unluckily married to Prince Charles of 
 Prussia. I must get over this unfortunate 
 passion, which will otherwise, I fear, bring me
 
 122 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP, vm 
 
 to an untimely end. There are several very 
 charming young persons of the female sex here ; 
 Miss Amalia von X. and ditto von Pappenheim 
 are the evening belles." 
 
 "Of winter nights," says my father in the 
 other well-known letter which is printed in 
 Lewes' s Life of Goethe, " we used to charter 
 sedan chairs, in which we were carried through 
 the snow to those pleasant Court entertain- 
 ments. I for my part was fortunate enough to 
 purchase Schiller's sword, which formed a part 
 of my Court costume and still hangs in my 
 study, 1 and puts me in mind of days of youth 
 the most kindly and delightful." 
 
 1 So he wrote in 1855, but a few years after he gave the sword to a 
 friend for whom he had a great affection, who carried it back to 
 America as a token of good will and sympathy. This friend was 
 Bayard Taylor, a true knight, and worthy to carry the honourable 
 bloodless weapon.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 WILLIS'S ROOMS TO CHELSEA 
 
 ONE day Jackson drove the blue fly up to the 
 door, and my father, looking rather smart, with 
 a packet of papers in his hand, and my grand- 
 mother who had come over from Paris, and my 
 sister and I all got in, and we drove away, a 
 nervous company, to Willis's Rooms to hear 
 the first of the lectures upon the English 
 Humorists. My father was of course very 
 nervous, but as we drove along he made little 
 jokes to reassure us all ; then together we 
 mounted the carpeted staircase leading to the 
 long empty room, and after a time he left us. 
 I have no very pleasant recollection of that 
 particular half-hour of my life. I remember the 
 unoccupied chairs, and people coming in rather 
 subdued, as if into a church. Many of the
 
 124 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 windows were open, the sky looked very blue 
 over the roof-tops, our hearts were thumping, 
 the carriages outside came driving up, with 
 distant rumbling sounds, growing louder and 
 louder ; and I remember wondering at the time 
 whether I should mind very much if the day of 
 judgment could suddenly come upon us and 
 thus put an end to this terrible ordeal, which 
 desperate imagination was a real consolation to 
 me at the moment. It is a happiness to realise 
 now who it was who came to my dear father's 
 help when all our emotion and sympathy was, 
 I fear, only a hindrance. I cannot help giving 
 the passage out of Mrs. Kemble's records con- 
 cerning my father's lectures, although it may 
 have already been quoted by others. 
 
 I met Thackeray at Miss Perry's at dinner, a few days 
 before he began his course of lectures on the English 
 Essayists, and he asked me to come and hear him, and 
 told me he was so nervous about it, that he was afraid he 
 should break down. . . . 
 
 He was to lecture at Willis's Rooms, in the same room 
 where I read ; and going thither before the time for his 
 beginning, I found him standing like a forlorn, disconsolate 
 giant in the middle of the room, gazing about him. " Oh 
 Lord," he exclaimed, as he shook hands with me, " I'm 
 sick at my stomach with fright ! " I spoke some words of
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 125 
 
 encouragement to him, and was going away, but he held 
 my hand like a scared child, crying, " Oh, don't leave me ! " 
 "But," said I, "Thackeray, you mustn't stand here. Your 
 audience are beginning to come in "; and I drew him from 
 the middle of the chairs and benches, which were beginning 
 to be occupied, into the retiring-room adjoining the lecture- 
 room, my own reading having made me perfectly familiar 
 with both. " Oh," he said, " if I could only get at that 
 confounded thing [his lecture], to have a last look at it ! " 
 "Where is it?" said I. "Oh, in the next room on the 
 reading-desk." " Well," said I, " if you don't like to go in 
 and get it, I'll fetch it for you." And remembering well 
 the position of my reading-table, which had been close to 
 the door of the retiring-room, I darted in, hoping to snatch 
 the manuscript without attracting the attention of the 
 audience, with which the room was already nearly full. I 
 had been used to deliver my readings seated, at a very low 
 table, but my friend Thackeray gave his lectures standing, 
 and had had a reading-desk placed on the platform, adapted 
 to his own very tall stature, so that when I came to get his 
 manuscript it was almost above my head. Though rather 
 disconcerted, I was determined not to go back without it, 
 and so made a half jump and a clutch at the book, when 
 every leaf of it (they were not fastened together) came 
 fluttering separately down about me. I hardly know what 
 I did, but I think I must have gone nearly on all fours in 
 my agony to gather up the scattered leaves, and retreating 
 with them, held them out in dismay to poor Thackeray 
 crying, " Oh, look, look what a dreadful thing I have done ! " 
 " My dear soul," said he, " you couldn't have done better, 
 for me. I have just a quarter of an hour to wait here, and 
 it will take me about that to page this again, and it's the 
 best thing in the world that could have happened."
 
 126 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 And meanwhile my father was paging the 
 manuscript, and we were waiting outside, and 
 the people kept coming in more and more 
 quickly and filling up the places in front of us, 
 behind us, all round us, settling down, unfasten- 
 ing their wraps, nodding to each other. I was 
 gazing at a lady who had taken off her bonnet 
 and sat in a little Quaker cap just in front of 
 me, when suddenly, there stood my father 
 facing this great roomful. Though we had 
 been waiting all the time, he came sooner than 
 we expected. His voice sounded strained and 
 odd for an instant, and I didn't recognise it. 
 "In treating of the English humorists of the 
 eighteenth century, it is of the men rather than 
 of their works," so the strange voice began, 
 and then almost immediately it softened and 
 deepened and became his own : and at the 
 same time as he stood there I realised that he 
 looked just like himself; there was his waistcoat 
 and his watch-chain, and my vague youthful 
 spinnings, and chokings, began to subside. 
 
 I was now glad the day of judgment hadn't 
 come. I don't remember taking in one word 
 after the first sentence, but sat staring and
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 127 
 
 taking breath, and realising somehow that all 
 was going well. Among other things I did 
 notice, and do remember, the proud and happy 
 look of light and relief in my grandmother's 
 face, and her beautiful gray eyes all shining 
 when the people applauded and the lecture was 
 over just as unexpectedly as it had begun, 
 and the lady in the Quaker cap tied her 
 bonnet on again, somebody said she was 
 the Duchess of Sutherland, the people were 
 all talking and crowding up and shaking hands 
 with the lecturer. Then came the happy drive 
 home ; Jackson made the horse gallop, and my 
 father laughed and made real jokes, without 
 any effort, and we laughed and enjoyed every 
 jolt and turning, on the way home. 
 
 These lectures gradually became a part of 
 our everyday life, just as much as the books 
 and the articles my father used to write, for 
 the little printers' boys waiting and swinging 
 their legs in the hall. Young Men's Institutes 
 and provincial agencies used to invite him 
 to the north and to the south. He came 
 and he went ; sometimes he read in the 
 suburbs or at friends' houses, at Mrs. Procter's
 
 128 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 and elsewhere ; once he read at home, at the 
 request, I think, of his well-loved Mrs. Elliot 
 and Miss Perry. Sometimes he took us with 
 him when he was not going very far from home. 
 To this day I can enjoy that glorious summer's 
 day we first spent at Oxford among the gardens 
 and the gables, and where, with our host, St. 
 John Thackeray, we stood in the street outside 
 watching the backs of the audience pressing in 
 to hear the lecture. 
 
 One year my father told us that he was 
 going away he was going to America to give 
 his lectures there ; he was going as soon as he 
 had finished the book upon which he was 
 engaged, and we were to spend the winter in 
 Paris during his absence. " I must replace my 
 patrimony," he said, " and make some provision 
 for your mother and for you, and you must go 
 to my mother's and spend the winter with her ; 
 you must work as hard as you can while I am 
 away, and consider yourselves at college in a 
 fashion, and learn French and a little music to 
 play me to sleep of an evening when I come 
 home." Alas! we neither of us could ever 
 make enough music to send him to sleep,
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 129 
 
 though I have often sent him out of the room. 
 My hair used to stand on end, my fingers used 
 to turn to stone when I tried to play to him ; 
 even the things I liked best seemed to go off 
 the rails in some general catastrophe. 
 
 America was farther away then than it is 
 now, when a thousand Columbuses or Columbi 
 (whatever the plural may be) cross the ocean 
 week by week with a parting nod and a return 
 ticket. That whole summer of 1854 seemed 
 darkened by the coming separation. It was a 
 long and burning summer ; even the shadows 
 seemed burnt up, and so were the gardens at 
 the back of the houses, and the brown turf and 
 the avenues of Kensington Gardens, those 
 gardens where that strange mist which is not 
 quite fog nor quite r*eal, nor even a fancy, but 
 which has always seemed to me to be the very 
 spirit of London itself, comes rising along the 
 straight and formal distances. My father was 
 hard at work finishing a book which some 
 people still say is the best of all his books. 
 People read it then, when it came out, and read 
 it still and re-read it. He used to write in his 
 study with the vine shading the two windows, 
 
 K
 
 130 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 and we used to do our lessons, or sit sewing 
 and reading in the front room with the bow- 
 window to the street ; and one day, as we were 
 there with our governess, my father came in, in 
 great excitement. " There's a young fellow 
 just come," said he; " he has brought a thousand 
 pounds in his pocket ; he has made me an offer 
 for my book, it's the most spirited, handsome 
 offer, I scarcely like to take him at his word ; 
 he's hardly more than a boy, his name is George 
 Smith ; he is waiting there now, and I must go 
 back " ; and then, after walking once up and 
 down the room, my father went away, and for 
 the first time, a life-time ago, I heard the name 
 of this good friend-to-be. 
 
 A great many arrangements were made for 
 the coming year's absence ; there was a talk of 
 letting the house, but it was only shut up with 
 a couple of old servants to keep it. My father's 
 servants rarely left him. His old publishers 
 gave him a silver punch -bowl, and his new 
 publisher (I am writing of nearly half a century 
 ago) gave him a beautiful despatch-box ; and 
 this same good friend gave to my sister and to 
 me a noble drawing of our father's head by
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 131 
 
 Samuel Lawrence that we might look at while 
 he was away. Then we all set off and went 
 abroad to rejoin our grandmother and grand- 
 father, and for a little while we travelled together, 
 and then my father had to leave us. I can see 
 him now as he stood beside a wooden column at 
 some railway junction, Olten, I think it was, and 
 he stooped to kiss us ; and then he put us into 
 our railway carriage, and we were carried off with 
 heavy hearts while he stood looking at us fixedly, 
 tall and straight, and the train scudded off. 
 Somehow we never got used to these partings, 
 though our father returned each time safe and 
 in good spirits, and pleased with his journey 
 and its results. . . . 
 
 People can still walk through Kensington 
 Square and look up at the house yet standing 
 with its windows facing westward, in which 
 Rachel Castlewood once dwelt, and where 
 Colonel Esmond came, and where the Pretender 
 also came in his blonde periwig and blue ribbon, 
 and threw away so Colonel Esmond tells us 
 a kingdom for a passing fancy. In so look- 
 ing they may well people the past with figures 
 all touched with its colour, and yet so strangely
 
 132 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 living still, that as one reads one seems to have 
 known them all. But any one who should try 
 to follow the familiar shades out of the precincts 
 of Kensington Square, and beyond Young Street, 
 where the porters with the chairs must have 
 passed, into the high road beyond which leads to 
 London, must be imaginative indeed to conjure 
 up their remembrance any more. The Kings 
 Arms, where the conspirators were assembled 
 when King George was proclaimed, has van- 
 ished out of sight ; its quiet gardens are piled 
 up high with bricks and stories rearing like a 
 new Babel to the sky. There are cities spread- 
 ing where the market-gardens were flowering 
 but yesterday, tram-cars passing, engines whist- 
 ling. I can scarcely imagine my father himself 
 writing Esmond in such a chaos. Novels of 
 the future will take place by telegram, in flats, 
 in lifts, in metropolitan railways they will 
 whirl Ixion-like on perpetual bicycles and 
 wheels. It is difficult to imagine devotion such 
 as Esmond's continuing in this present sequence 
 of events ; it seems as if new impulses, both 
 physical and mental, must arise in such a multi- 
 plicity of impressions ; as if a new race must
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 133 
 
 people the earth. Beatrix indeed might be- 
 long to these later times ; but Esmond and 
 Lady Castlewood would seem strangely out of 
 place. 
 
 Some one not long ago gave me a little map 
 of Kensington in 1764 by which one can see 
 what lanes and green fields and gardens then 
 lay between the village and London, more than 
 a mile away. Nursery gardens, wide open 
 spaces, brick kilns on Campden Hill and Gravel 
 Pits. In the midst of green fields stood three 
 or four houses called Bays Watering. The Ser- 
 pentine was called the New River, Kensington 
 Gore consisted of five houses ; Hogmore Lane 
 and Lobb's Field ran from the high road to- 
 wards Chelsea. It is easier to imagine some- 
 thing than nothing *at all, though I have the 
 map before me I can hardly feel that it is 
 true, and yet I remember Hogmore Lane, and 
 there was Love Lane just beyond, along which 
 we used to go for straggling walks on early 
 summer mornings with our playfellows, the 
 Coles, who lived in the terrace close by. We 
 used to start about six o'clock and bring home 
 branches of hawthorn blossom to decorate our
 
 134 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 school-rooms and to remind us that it was May 
 time. 
 
 There is one part of London which however 
 still seems to me little changed, and this is 
 Cheyne Row, which used to be at the end of all 
 these hawthorn lanes, and Chelsea, whither we 
 used often to go as children, crossing these lanes 
 and fields, and coming by a pond and a narrow 
 street called Paradise Row into the King's 
 Road, and then after a few minutes' walk to 
 Cheyne Row, where Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle lived 
 to the end of their lives, and which seems to all 
 of us made living still by their dead footsteps. 
 
 The old house in Cheyne Row is one of the 
 first things I can remember when we came to 
 London. Its stillness, its dimness, its panelled 
 walls, its carved banisters, and the quiet garden 
 behind, where at intervals in the brickwork lay 
 the tobacco-pipes all ready for use ; little Nero, 
 the doggie, in his little coat, barking and 
 trembling in every limb it all comes before 
 one with so much clearness, that, although so 
 much has been said about that home, I cannot 
 omit all mention of a place which made so vivid 
 a part of my early life.
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 135 
 
 In the dining-room stood that enchanting 
 screen covered with pictures, drawings, prints, 
 fashions, portraits without end, which my father 
 liked so much ; upstairs was the panelled 
 drawing-room with its windows to the Row, 
 and the portrait of Oliver Cromwell hanging 
 opposite the windows. But best of all, there 
 was Mrs. Carlyle herself, a living picture ; 
 Gainsborough should have been alive to paint 
 her; slim, bright, dark-eyed, upright, in her place. 
 She looked like one of the grand ladies our 
 father used sometimes to take us to call upon. 
 She used to be handsomely dressed in velvet 
 and point lace. She sat there at leisure, and 
 prepared for conversation. She was not familiar, 
 but cordial, dignified, and interested in every- 
 thing as she sat installed in her corner of the 
 sofa by one of the little tables covered with 
 nicknacks of silver and mother-of-pearl. 
 
 Almost the first time we ever went to see 
 her we had walked to Chelsea through the 
 snow, and across those lanes which have now 
 become South Kensington, and when we arrived, 
 numb and chilled and tired, we found in the 
 dining-room below, standing before the fire,
 
 136 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 two delicious hot cups of chocolate all ready 
 prepared for us, with saucers placed upon the 
 top. " I thought ye would be frozen," said she ; 
 and the hot chocolate became a sort of institu- 
 tion. Again and again she has sat by, benevo- 
 lent and spirited, superintending our wintry 
 feasts, inviting our confidences, confiding in us 
 to a certain degree. 
 
 She used to tell us many of the stories which 
 have since come into print. She was never 
 weary of discoursing of " Carlyle," of his genius, 
 his dyspepsia, of quoting his sayings. " If you 
 wish for a quiet life," she used to say, " never 
 you marry a dyspeptic man of genius." I re- 
 member she used to tell us, when he first grew 
 a beard, how all the time he had saved by 
 ceasing to shave he spent wandering about the 
 house, and bemoaning that which was amiss in 
 the universe. As children we did not have 
 much of Carlyle's company ; if he came in and 
 sat down in the arm-chair, which was his, on the 
 opposite side to the sofa, we immediately went 
 away ; but the sense of his presence overhead 
 in the study distinctly added to our enjoyment 
 so long as he remained upstairs. Mrs. Carlyle
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 137 
 
 used to tell us of her early life, of her passion 
 for study. Many of her admonitions and 
 friendly warnings have remained in my memory. 
 Once, looking expressively at me with her dark 
 eyes, she began to speak of self-control. " We 
 have all," she said, "a great deal more power 
 over our minds than it is at all the fashion to 
 allow, and an infinity of resource and ability to 
 use it. There was a time in my own life," she 
 said, "when I felt that unless I strove against 
 the feeling with all my strength and might I 
 should be crazed outright. I passed through 
 that time safely ; I was able to fight it out and 
 not to let myself go. People can help them- 
 selves, that I am convinced of, and that fact is 
 not nearly enough dwelt upon." 
 
 One day we went there ; we were no longer 
 children. I was a grown young lady, keeping 
 a diary at the time, in which I find the 
 following record of a brown paper parcel : 
 "To Mrs. Carlyle's, where we found Lady 
 Stanley of Alderley just leaving the room ; 
 then Mrs. Carlyle, taking up the talk 
 again, immediately began speaking enthusias- 
 tically about Adam Bede. She had written to
 
 138 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 the author, she said ; she had received grateful 
 messages from him in reply. She said that 
 Mr. Carlyle quite declined reading the book, 
 and when she expressed a hope that it might 
 be sent to her, ' What should he send it to you 
 for ? ' he said. ' Why shouldn't he send it ? ' 
 she answered ; ' he sent me the other/ ' You 
 are just like all weemen,' said he. (Mrs. 
 Carlyle always says weemen.) ' You are 
 always forming unreasonable expectations.' ' 
 
 "We were going away, for we heard a 
 ring at the bell, which seemed to betoken fresh 
 visitors. Then the door opened, and in came, 
 not visitors, but Charly the maid, carrying an 
 unmistakable publisher's brown -paper parcel. 
 Mr. Carlyle, who had followed her in, came 
 and sat down upon the sofa. Mrs. Carlyle 
 exclaimed and started forward. We opened 
 our eyes in delighted partisanship ; the string 
 was cut, and there sure enough were the three 
 orange volumes of Adam Bede sent with the 
 author's compliments. . . ." 
 
 Here are two notes addressed to my father 
 in the philosopher's cramped handwriting :
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 139 
 
 CHELSEA, ztfh May i860. 1 
 
 Alas, dear Thackeray, I durst as soon undertake to 
 dance a hornpipe on the top of Bond Steeple, as to eat a 
 white-bait dinner in my present low and lost state ! Never 
 in my life was I at such a pass. You are a good brother 
 man ; and I am grateful. Pray for me, and still hope for 
 me if you can. Yours ever, T. CARLYLE. 
 
 CHELSEA, zdth May 1860. 
 
 DEAR THACKERAY, The thing I contemplated just now 
 (or the nucleus of the thing) was a letter concerning that 
 anecdote about Fontenoy. " Faites feu, Messieurs" on the 
 part of the English, with answer from the Gardes Franfaises, 
 " Begin you, gentlemen ; wouldn't do such a thing for the 
 world ! " My letter is from Lord Charles Hay, Captain of 
 the Scots Fusiliers, main actor in the business ; it was sent 
 me last year by Lord Gifford ; and I could have made a 
 little story out of it which would have been worth 
 publishing. 
 
 But on applying to Lord Gifford, he (what he is himself, 
 I believe, truly sorry for) cannot at present give me permis- 
 sion. So the poor little enterprise falls to nothing again ; 
 and I may be said to be* in a state of ill-luck just now ! 
 
 If I ever in the end of this book have life left, you shall 
 have plenty of things. But for the time being I can only 
 answer de profundis to the above effect. 
 
 Fair wind and full sea to you in this hitherto so successful 
 voyage, for which the omens certainly are on all sides good. 
 Your people do not send me a copy (since No. I.) ; but 
 we always draw our purse upon it to the small extent 
 requisite. Yours ever truly, T. CARLYLE. 
 
 1 These notes were written when the Cornhill was first started, 
 an eventful time in our lives.
 
 140 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 Some voices are those which speak to us ; 
 others speak for us. The first belong to the 
 immortals who dwell apart somewhere beyond 
 the boundaries of common life and moods, and 
 it is, perhaps, for that very reason they are 
 best able to give utterance to oracles ; the 
 others belong to humanity itself, and among 
 these latter voices, who would not reckon 
 Carlyle's? . . . 
 
 " I wish you could get Carlyle's miscel- 
 laneous criticisms," wrote my father in 1839, in 
 a letter to his mother. " I have read a little in 
 the book. A nobler one does not live in our 
 language, I am sure, and one that will have 
 such an effect on our ways of thought and 
 prejudices. Criticism has been a party matter 
 with us till now, and literature is a poor 
 political lacquey. Please God we shall begin, 
 ere long, to love art for art's sake. It is 
 Carlyle who has worked more than any other 
 to give it its independence." 
 
 I went out with my father one evening in 
 the winter of 1863, and as we were driving 
 along in the dusk by the Serpentine we passed 
 Carlyle walking across the park, and my father
 
 ix Via Willis s Rooms to Chelsea 141 
 
 seeing him, leant forward and waved his hands. 
 " A great benevolent shower of salutations," 
 Carlyle called it, when he spoke in after days 
 of this last meeting. 
 
 After Mrs. Carlyle's death, it was Mr. 
 Carlyle that we used to go and see in her old 
 drawing-room, which he now took to inhabiting 
 altogether. It was no surprise, when his 
 history was told, to realise that he had been 
 constantly cross and often contrary ; but that 
 passion of tender love and remorse and devotion 
 came as a revelation 1 , all the more moving that 
 one had almost guessed it at times. It was 
 when my own father died that something was 
 revealed to us of that deep and tender feeling. 
 
 It will be remembered that in Lewes's Life 
 of Goethe there is art account of a birthday gift 
 sent by fifteen Englishmen to Goethe. " The 
 young Carlyle who had been cheered through 
 his struggling sadness and strengthened for the 
 part he was to play in life, by the beauty and 
 the wisdom which Goethe had revealed to him, 
 conceived the idea that it would be a pleasant 
 and fitting thing if some of the few admirers of 
 Goethe in England forwarded to Weimar a
 
 142 Chapters front some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 trifling token of their admiration. On reaching 
 home Mrs. Carlyle at once sketched the design 
 of a seal to be engraved the Serpent of 
 Eternity encircling a star, with the words 
 " Ohne Hast Ohne Rast " (unhasting, unrest- 
 ing), in allusion to the well-known verses 
 
 " Like a Star, unhasting unresting, 
 
 Be each one fulfilling his God-given hest." 
 
 Long years afterwards another small present- 
 ation took place to Carlyle himself, at a time 
 when hewas living in Cheyne Rowwith his niece. 
 There had been some alarm of housebreakers in 
 Chelsea, which sacrilegious housebreakers, not 
 content with robbing ordinary people, broke 
 into Mr. Carlyle's house and ran away again, 
 without carrying off anything more valuable 
 than the dining-room clock. As I have said, it 
 was the remembrance of this little incident of 
 the seal which suggested to some one the idea 
 of replacing the stolen clock, and about fifteen 
 of Carlyle's friends and admirers subscribed 
 to purchase one, a small sign of their respect 
 and goodwill. Among these were his old friends 
 Lady Stanley of Alderley, the Countess of 
 Airlie, and Mrs. Oliphant. Lady Stanley was
 
 ix Via Willis's Rooms to Chelsea 143 
 
 asked to be spokeswoman on the occasion, and 
 to present the gift. It was Carlyle's birthday, 
 and a dismal winter's day, 1 the streets were 
 shrouded in greenish vapours, and the houses 
 looked no less more dreary within, than the 
 streets through which we had come. Some- 
 what chilled and depressed, we all assembled in 
 Lady Stanley's great drawing-room in Dover 
 Street, where the fog had also penetrated, and 
 presently from the further end of the room, 
 advancing through shifting darkness, came 
 Carlyle. There was a moment's pause. No 
 one moved ; he stood in the middle of the room 
 without speaking. No doubt the philosopher, 
 as well as his disciples, felt the influence of the 
 atmosphere. Lady Stanley went to meet him. 
 " Here is a little birthday present we want you 
 to accept from us all, Mr. Carlyle," said she, 
 quickly pushing up before him a small table, 
 upon which stood the clock ticking all ready 
 for his acceptance. Then came another silence, 
 broken by a knell sadly sounding in our ears. 
 " Eh, what have I got to do with Time any 
 more ?" he said. It was a melancholy moment. 
 
 1 Carlyle was born December 4, 1794.
 
 144 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP, ix 
 
 Nobody could speak. The unfortunate pro- 
 moter of the scheme felt her heart sinking into 
 her shoes. Had she but had the wit to answer 
 him cheerfully, to assure him that anyhow time 
 had a great deal to do with him, the little 
 ceremony might have been less of a fiasco than 
 it assuredly was ; and yet I think afterwards 
 the old man must have been pleased, and liked 
 to think that he was remembered. Few people 
 could value sincerity as he did, or better know 
 the worth of love and affectionate respect. 
 
 After Carlyle himself was laid to rest I went 
 for the last time to look at the house, which I 
 remembered all my life ; my little boy was with 
 me, and he began crowing and pointing to the 
 old screen full of pictures, some of which his 
 grandfather had drawn. The screen still stood 
 in its place in the dining-room. From behind 
 the old screen came Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, 
 carrying her little Tom, who, seeing a fellow- 
 baby, uttered three deep notes of interest, and 
 in them was some strange echo of the familiar 
 voice that had filled the house so long, and 
 reached how far beyond its walls !
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 IN VILLEGGIATURA 
 
 I HAVE already mentioned my father's tour in 
 America when he went to deliver those lectures 
 which had been so successful in England. 
 Saying good-bye is the price one has to pay 
 even for a prosperous and fortunate expedition. 
 I can still see him as he stood on the platform 
 of the railway-station at Olten, in Belgium, 
 where we parted. He stood by a slender iron 
 column, looking very tall and very sad as he 
 watched the train go off in which we were 
 bound for Switzerland with our grandparents. 
 He himself was returning to England through 
 Germany. He had to correct the proofs of 
 Esmond before he left, and to give some more 
 lectures in the provinces, and to wind up things 
 
 at home. 
 
 L
 
 146 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 My grandmother was very miserable and 
 nervous. She had brought him a life-belt for 
 his cabin as a farewell gift, and thoroughly 
 frightened herself by so doing. We were too 
 young to be nervous, but we were very unhappy. 
 Our dear old grandfather did his best to cheer 
 us all, and after we had parted from my father 
 he made out all sorts of pleasant little plans, and 
 ordered various special compotes and tartlets at 
 the hotels suited to our youthful appetites. He 
 took us for walks and to visit museums, and he 
 always consulted any fellow-travellers and 
 sight-seers as to our next movements. Indeed 
 our journeyings greatly depended upon these 
 chance encounters and recommendations. The 
 first night, when we put up at some little inn, 
 the waiter brought us the travellers' book to 
 write our names in ; I forget all about the place, 
 but I can see the book and the table spread, 
 and what I do most vividly remember is our 
 despair when, instead of the neat Mr. 
 Thackeray and family to which we were used, 
 we read the following announcement in our 
 grandfather's handwriting : Schmid Major, en 
 retraite, avec Madame sa Spouse et ses deux
 
 x In Villeggiatura 147 
 
 Mademoiselles. My grandmother, sad as she 
 was, began to laugh, and we all entreated our 
 dear old Major to make some changes in the 
 inscription, but he stuck to it, and would not 
 alter a single letter. 
 
 We reached Geneva after some days. There 
 at the poste restante we found various letters 
 waiting, and news of our father. " As for the 
 arrival at this place [he was writing from Salz- 
 burg], it's like entering into fairyland, it is so 
 beautiful ; and the Tyrol is delightful too, but 
 not like our Switzerland. And one Swiss 
 cottage is uncommonly like another, and with 
 five or six days of rocks and pine-woods I feel 
 somehow as if I've had enough ! " Then a little 
 further on he writes : " Give my love to my 
 dearest mother, and liave her to understand 
 that this blew devil of which I complain is only 
 an artistic blew devil, and that he comes always 
 before I get to work, and that there is no other 
 reason. . . . There is bad music here for a 
 wonder at the beer -garden ; though I amused 
 myself very well there yesterday, opposite a 
 pretty little child of three years, who ate three 
 sausages with her fingers and without any bread,
 
 148 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 all except a little bit which she gave out of her 
 mouth to her mamma. And I went up a hill 
 to a Capuchin convent and saw some of my 
 favourite dirty scoundrels with beards, and the 
 town clinks all over with Austrian sabres." 
 
 I never think of Geneva and of those 
 particular days without a curious feeling of 
 terror and emotion. We were in a tall hotel 
 with windows looking towards the lake, and 
 it was lovely summer weather, but it was a dis- 
 mal time. My dear grandmother sought for 
 sympathy among the people to whom she was 
 naturally drawn, the masters and teachers 
 belonging to the Protestant Church in Geneva. 
 They were interesting and important person- 
 ages, who inspired me with a curious mixture 
 of respect and discomfort, and to whom my 
 grandmother had brought various introductions 
 from her friends the French Protestant pasteurs 
 at Paris. 
 
 There was a garden to which she took me, 
 not far from our hotel, with beautiful shady 
 trees and spreading grass. In the garden stood 
 a white chapel, clean, light, bare, decorous, with 
 some black and white marble ornamentations.
 
 x In Villeggiatura 149 
 
 A woman in a black frilled cap showed us to 
 our seats, and there we waited, listening for 
 some time to a clanging bell. Then the service 
 began. Only one or two people came to it, but 
 the place, although to others it might speak of 
 most fervent and passionate emotion, seemed 
 oppressive with chill and silent religion to me. 
 When all was over, my grandmother had some 
 low-voiced conversation with the woman in the 
 black cap, who beckoned to the bell-ringer, and 
 the result of the whispering was that, after a 
 short delay, we were led across the grass and 
 under the trees to a retired part of the garden, 
 where in the shade of some bushes sat an old 
 man of very noble aspect, with long white hair 
 falling on his shoulders. He looked to me like 
 some superior being." Indeed, to my excited 
 imagination it seemed as if I was being brought 
 up to the feet of a prophet, to some inspired 
 person who was sitting there in authority and 
 in judgment on all the rest of the world. This 
 old man was M. Cesar Malan, the head of a 
 section of the Calvinist Church in Geneva, 
 whose name was well known and very widely 
 respected. He had built the chapel in his
 
 150 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 garden. Not a little to my consternation, after 
 a few words with my grandmother, he immedi- 
 ately, with the utmost kindness, began asking 
 me questions about myself, about my convic- 
 tions, my religious impressions, my hopes, my 
 future aspirations. He was very kind, but even 
 an angel from heaven would be alarming, 
 suddenly appearing to a girl of fifteen with such 
 a catechism. The more kindly he pressed me, 
 the less able I was to answer. Sometimes I 
 said too much, sometimes I was hopelessly 
 silent, and in the midst of a nervous discussion 
 as to the ultimate fate of Judas (I felt some- 
 what akin to him myself) the scene ended in 
 my bursting into tears of embarrassment and 
 hopeless confusion. I was consoled on our 
 return to the hotel by my grandfather, who was 
 most sympathetic. "Those, my dear child," 
 he said, " who have studied deeply, who are 
 able to read the Scriptures in the original, are 
 far more likely than you or I to be able to judge 
 correctly upon such important subjects, and we 
 had therefore better leave all such speculations 
 entirely to them." 
 
 That next winter, which we spent in Paris,
 
 x In Villeggiatura 151 
 
 we used to attend the classes of a man even 
 better known than Csar Malan, Adolphe 
 Monod, who remains to me one of the most 
 striking and noble figures I have ever met ; 
 his face, his dark eyes, all spoke as well as his 
 eloquent voice, and above all his earnest life 
 and ways. To me he seemed the St. Paul of 
 my own time ; and those classes which cost so 
 many tears, and which gave rise to so much 
 agitated discussion, are still among the most 
 touching and heart-reaching experiences of my 
 life. I can see the girls' faces now, as they 
 listened to their beloved pasteur. Our hearts 
 were in our lessons, as his was in his teaching, 
 undoubtedly ; we were all in earnest and ready 
 to follow ; only, though I longed to be convinced, 
 I could only admire* and love the lesson and 
 the teacher as well. He warned, encouraged, 
 explained in his earnest, gentle voice. " Ah, 
 mes enfants," I can hear him saying, "fuyez, 
 fuyez ce monde ! " Fly the world ! If ever the 
 world was delightful and full of interest it was 
 then the daily task, the hour and its incidents 
 eventful and absorbing ; if ever our hearts were 
 open to receive, not to reject it, it was then.
 
 152 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 M. Monod himself was no unimportant factor 
 in my world. I once saw Faraday, who re- 
 minded me of him. M. Monod only once came 
 to our house to see my grandmother, and I met 
 him on the staircase, but he passed me by, and 
 did not recognise me out of my place in the 
 second row of chairs, nor did I venture to speak 
 to him. I still remember the strange thrill we 
 felt, and which ran in a whisper along the class, 
 when we heard that Henrietta P. had been 
 refused her first communion for going to a ball 
 within a week of the event. She came no more 
 to the meetings. The girls sat in their places 
 on rows of straw chairs, and many of the parents 
 accompanied them. Sometimes in a corner by 
 the window holding up a small Bible, in which 
 he followed the references with attention, there 
 sat an oldish gentleman, who was (so we were 
 told) the great Prime Minister, M. Guizot. 
 
 My father did not sail for America till the 
 autumn of that year, but we remained on 
 at Paris with our grandparents. The sun 
 streamed into our apartment all day long, for 
 we had windows looking to every side of the
 
 x In Villeggiatura 153 
 
 compass. When Paris was getting intolerably 
 hot, we started for the country, where my 
 grandfather had taken a country house on a 
 lease for two or three years, in a village called 
 Mennecy, near Corbeil. Mennecy was a 
 straggling little village among peat fields, 
 crossed by narrow black streams, or canals, of 
 the colour of the peat. Growing by the banks 
 were long rows of stumpy willow trees, cut 
 year by year for the sake of the osiers, which 
 were sold to the basket-makers. Here and 
 there, perhaps at the turn of the stream, some 
 single tree had been allowed to grow to its 
 natural dimensions, forming a sequestered nook 
 where some of us used to bathe on hot summer 
 days. Two young friends of my grandmother's, 
 Laura and Pauline *C., were with us most of 
 the time we were living in this villeggiatura, 
 and Pauline especially loved the water, 'and 
 used to come home fresh and smiling and 
 pluming herself after her cool divings. 
 Mennecy was a rural quiet spot among willow 
 trees, and a perfect retreat in hot summer 
 weather. 
 
 There was an old paved place in the centre
 
 154 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 of the village, leading to a fine old church well 
 served and well frequented, of which the 
 Sunday bells clanged far across the country. 
 We used to see the congregation assembling 
 in cheerful companies, arriving from outlying 
 farms, and greeting each other in the market- 
 place before the Mass began ; a congregation 
 with more of talk and animation than with us, 
 with blue smocks and white linen coiffes and 
 picturesque country cloaks and sabots. We 
 used somewhat ruefully to wish to follow 
 Pauline and Louise (our cross maid-of-all-work) 
 through the swing doors behind which the 
 incense was tossing and the organ rolling out 
 its triumphant fugue. A Roman Catholic 
 service seems something of a high festival, 
 coming round Sunday after Sunday, bringing 
 excitement and adoration along with it. Our 
 own village church-bells also ring out, calling 
 to the peaceful congregations ; calling us to 
 something more tranquil, more free, more full 
 of individual feeling, but it is an aspiration 
 rather than a rite. 
 
 My grandparents' house had once been a 
 hunting-lodge belonging to Henry the Fourth,
 
 x In Villeggiatura 155 
 
 who loved the neighbourhood and frequented 
 Gompiegne long years before the President 
 Louis Napoleon, or the Emperor Napoleon 
 the Third, and his courtiers, and their ladies 
 in hunting costumes, and with spirited horses 
 and fanfarons, all followed the chase. I don't 
 remember ever seeing any of them, but we 
 had a general impression that these hunting 
 companies were about, and any day a gay 
 procession, not unlike something out of a fairy 
 tale, might come riding past our old gates. 
 They were old creaking gates which had once 
 been green, now gray and weather-stained ; 
 our high walls, which had once been white, 
 were also green and stained and overgrown by 
 a vine. M. Roche had given us Jocelin to 
 read about a year before, and I used to think 
 of the description of the curfs home as I stood 
 in the old courtyard at Mennecy, with its well 
 and its vine-clad walls. There was an old well 
 with a wrought -iron top to it and a rope, and 
 there was a vine travelling along the margin 
 and spreading beyond it, along the wrought- 
 iron railing, to the pretty old iron gate dividing 
 the courtyard from the old garden at the back,
 
 156 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 which with its dainty rusty iron scrolls excluded 
 the cocks and hens, that flapped and picketed 
 and strutted all day long in the front court, 
 and roosted at night in the great empty stables 
 opposite our house. 
 
 The hunting-lodge before it had become 
 our home had been turned into a farm ; the 
 knights and cavaliers had made way for blouses 
 and cowherds, and the hunters had given up 
 their stalls to heavy cart-horses, though indeed 
 there was room to spare for any number of 
 either. But the farmer died in time and his 
 widow married the milkman, and she let the 
 old place to my grandfather, who had a special 
 purpose in coming to Mennecy. 
 
 A flight of stone steps led from the court- 
 yard to the house, just as one sees in Scotland, 
 which looks so like France in places. Our 
 front windows opened on to a garden, and the 
 passages and the sitting-rooms were panelled 
 in some parts. We could walk all round the 
 drawing-room between the panels and the 
 walls ; nor was it dark within the wainscot, for 
 there were two little windows at either end to 
 give light to the spiders and the active mice
 
 x In Villeggiatura 157 
 
 who chiefly frequented this passage. The 
 floors were all of brick, on which we had laid 
 a carpet, and my grandmother had brought a 
 blue sofa and chairs from Paris, and hired a 
 piano in Corbeil. 
 
 "Quel charmant meuble!" our neighbour 
 the Maire used to say when he came in of an 
 evening, bowing politely to the piano and then 
 to us. Polished rosewood ! ivory keys ! gilt 
 handles ! he was genuine in his enthusiastic 
 admiration. To hear him, one would think 
 there had never been such a piano since the 
 world began. It got very much out of tune, 
 but that did not shake our faith in it. We 
 gave parties on the strength of the charmant 
 meuble. Piano-company (so we considered 
 ourselves) was not so very common in the 
 neighbourhood. Laura could play (as she still 
 does) to the delight of her listeners ; Pauline 
 had a very sweet voice, and used to sing to the 
 piano and to us of summer evenings. M. le 
 Maire was also very fond of singing and of 
 being accompanied. His wife was not musical, 
 but our young ladies were very patient and 
 kind, and used to repeat the more difficult
 
 158 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 passages over and over again for him, and try 
 not to laugh when he went very much out 
 of tune. My sister and I used to find the 
 panelled passages a convenient retreat occa- 
 sionally, when a note went very wildly astray ; 
 or we could always run out through the French 
 windows into the garden, where the grass- 
 hoppers' concert would also strike up of fine 
 summer evenings, and seemed to whistle and 
 spread far, far beyond the corn-fields and the 
 poppy-heads. There was a terrace at the end 
 of the garden, where a pavilion stood, over- 
 looking the high road, from which we could 
 see the regiments as they passed on their way 
 to Corbeil, and the dragoons watering their 
 horses at the little village inn. All along this 
 terrace grew pumpkin plants, which we scarcely 
 noticed when we first arrived, although we 
 were full of admiration for the luxuriant vines 
 hanging from all the walls, and of which one 
 charming tunnelled avenue ran right across a 
 corner of the garden. Pauline and I used to 
 sit there that summer time under the green 
 shadows, making believe to learn Italian with 
 Goldoni and a dictionary. That is to say, I
 
 x In Villeggiatura 159 
 
 was making believe ; she not only learned the 
 language, but married a Milanese gentleman 
 in after years. Only the other day, as we sat 
 entranced by Madame Duse's gracious inspira- 
 tions, I seemed for the first time to enter into 
 the real spirit of those bygone and almost for- 
 gotten studies. Goldoni suddenly came to life 
 again, and I thought of the old green vine 
 avenue, and the books I had been bored by as 
 a girl began to speak to me for the first time. 
 As the autumn went on, myriads of wasps 
 appeared ; the grapes swelled and turned to 
 golden sweetness ; we used to go into the 
 garden with hunches of bread, and gather our 
 own breakfasts and luncheons growing on 
 the walls. Along with the grapes came the 
 pumpkins, and they also grew. Cinderella's 
 were nothing to them ; the huge balls came 
 swelling and rolling down upon us, colouring 
 and rising in every direction. We got fright- 
 ened at last, it seemed wicked to waste them ; 
 we boiled them, we passed them through 
 sieves, we steeped them in milk by the Maire's 
 advice. At the end of three or four days we 
 absolutely loathed them. The pigs of the
 
 160 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 neighbourhood, already satiated with pumpkin, 
 refused to touch them any more. On the fifth 
 day a neighbour sent us in a great basketful as 
 a present. We were literally bombarded with 
 pumpkins that year, but let us hope it was a 
 specially good year for fruit. 
 
 I said that my grandfather had a special 
 purpose in view when he brought us to 
 Mennecy. Our dear Colonel Newcome had a 
 fancy that he could rehabilitate the family 
 fortunes by establishing a manufactory for peat 
 fuel, which was to be made by the help of a 
 certain machine. It had been invented by an 
 old friend, who had sold him the patent for a 
 certain sum and as a special favour. This same 
 friend, who seems to have been an ingenious, 
 though an expensive acquaintance, had also 
 invented a wooden horse which was to supersede 
 the usual living quadrupeds. It had the great 
 advantage of only eating coal and coke, but 
 I believe it was found all the same to be 
 much more expensive than the real animal, and 
 far less intelligent. I remember seeing the 
 elaborately carved hoofs of the wooden horse 
 standing on the piano, with a drawing of his
 
 x In Villeggiatura 161 
 
 cast-iron inside. I was only once shown the 
 peat-machine ; it looked something like a stove, 
 and used to be poked by an old woman, while 
 a little boy with a barrow brought up the peat, 
 which was then and there turned into black 
 cakes. We never made our fortunes out of the 
 peat, but we burnt a great stack of it, which 
 glowed bright and clear and lasted through 
 several winters, and I believe the whole thing 
 was finally handed over to an experimentalist 
 on the spot, who may still be there, for all I 
 know. He was a short and swarthy man, who 
 used to come and bargain in the dining-room 
 at enormous length. 
 
 As my grandparents had spent several 
 summers at Mennecy they had made acquaint- 
 ance with the two or three neighbours, and with 
 the family at the chateau. We used to pass the 
 chateau when we walked along the high road, 
 which was divided from the park by a wall. 
 Here and there were iron gates through which 
 we could see into the shady avenues of poplar 
 trees and nut trees, and in one place, where an 
 old bridge crossed a stream, we caught sight of 
 the old white house with its shutters and 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 chimneys and high slated roof. There had 
 been another, a finer one, before this, we were 
 told, standing in a different corner of the same 
 park. A fine old gateway still remained with 
 its heraldic carvings and mementoes of the 
 past, but the road had travelled on elsewhere 
 and no longer passed under it, as it did once 
 long ago when the King's hunt used to come 
 along the avenue which now led from nothing 
 to nowhere. There is a description of this 
 very place in Lucien Percy's delightful Memoirs 
 of President Renault and Madame Du Deffand. 
 "The first chateau belonged to the early 
 days of Louis XV., and was inhabited by the 
 great Marechal de Villeroi," says the book. 
 " Remy Henault had a pretty country house at 
 Etioles [Etioles comes back to me with its 
 willow trees and dark amber canals] ; it was 
 the house that Madame de Pompadour after- 
 wards lived in. Henault used to spend part of 
 the year there, and as his son was fond of sport 
 he bought for him from the Marechal de 
 Villeroi a rangership and the place of Governor 
 of Corbeil. The old Marechal took a fancy to 
 young Henault and used to keep him to stay
 
 x In Villeggiatura 163 
 
 at the chateau and also at his little house at 
 Soisy near Etioles. As ranger of the district 
 Henault often received the Dauphin, the Duke 
 of Burgundy, and the Duke of Berry, who used 
 to come with a small suite to Villeneuve-Saint- 
 Georges. The Dauphin used to hunt wolves, 
 accompanied by the rangers ; the young princes 
 only shot pheasants. It is curious nowadays to 
 think of people hunting wolves at Villeneuve- 
 Saint-Georges," continues Lucien Percy, still 
 conjuring up my past, and then he gives a 
 note, saying : " The remains of the Chateau 
 de Villeroi still exist on the right hand of the 
 road from Corbeil to Mennecy, a road which is 
 always called in the country ' La route de 
 Villeroi.' ' And this was the road along which 
 we used to straggle of summer evenings. 
 
 The people who were living at the chateau 
 when we lived at Mennecy (the first chateau I be- 
 lieve was burned down during the great Revolu- 
 tion) were retired manufacturers who had given 
 up business and who now dwelt at ease and in 
 dignity, sheltered by the high slated roofs and 
 chimneys of the old place. My grandparents 
 had been introduced to the family by our friend
 
 164 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 the Maire, and when we all went up to call with 
 him one day, the younger members of the party 
 were not without hopes of finding some com- 
 panions there, for we had seen a girl of about 
 our own age, who was, so the Maire told us, an 
 heiress and the only daughter of the house. 
 As we walked up through the park we met the 
 gardener, who left his work to escort us to the 
 front door, calling also to a maid who sat 
 darning stockings in the marble hall. She in 
 turn put down her work and disappeared 
 through a tall carved doorway, returning almost 
 immediately to ask us to go in. We found 
 ourselves in a big drawing-room with polished 
 floors, and with many tall windows opening to 
 the garden ; some of them were shuttered and 
 curtained, and the room was rather dark. In it 
 sat, in a sort of semicircle of chairs ready 
 placed, the stout mother, the burly father, and 
 the broad-shouldered heiress in her plaid frock. 
 They received us very coldly, looking at us 
 aloof with curiosity and as if we had been 
 specimens of some strange unknown race. I 
 thought the gardener and the sewing-maid also 
 stared at us, when they returned, almost
 
 x In VUleggiatura 165 
 
 immediately, with trays of refreshment, biscuits 
 and glasses of beer, which were handed round 
 already poured out. I do not know if this 
 was a custom peculiar to the neighbourhood, 
 or only to this particular family. The young 
 lady seemed surprised that we should refuse. 
 "What, English, and you do not take beer?" 
 she said, placing her tumbler between her 
 knees. Between her draughts she then went 
 on to ask us many questions about that strange 
 country to which we belonged, about our out- 
 landish ways and singular habits. It was a 
 very different catechism from M. Malan's. 
 "Did we ever go to church at all ? " " Did we 
 ever say any prayers ? " " Did not heretics 
 fast every Sunday instead of making it a fete- 
 
 *A 
 
 day ? " "Had we ever heard of the Virgin 
 Mary (surprise expressed) and the saints (more 
 surprise) ? " Our friend the Maire saw with 
 pain that we young ladies were not getting on, 
 and tried to bring the conversation round to 
 other more congenial topics than those funda- 
 mental differences for which we should all have 
 burned one another a century before ; he there- 
 fore introduced the piano by way of a diversion,
 
 1 66 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 the charmant meuble from Corbeil, and I could 
 see that we slightly rose in our host's estima- 
 tion, but I came away, all the same, very much 
 put out. It is disagreeable to be both damned 
 in the future and looked down upon in the 
 present, as one belonging to an ignorant and 
 barbarous race. I felt as if all the Catholic 
 saints in Paradise, certainly all the French ones, 
 were shrugging their shoulders at us when we 
 came away, and I spoke quite crossly to M. le 
 Maire when he asked me what I thought of the 
 chateau. 
 
 There used to be an odd stout figure walk- 
 ing about Mennecy in a workman's blouse and 
 loose trousers, and with a cropped head of black 
 hair and an old casquette. We were told that 
 it was a woman ; and a wholly supposititious 
 impression once arose in some one's mind that 
 it might have been George Sand herself. I 
 passed quite close on one occasion, when the 
 mysterious personage looked round and then 
 turned away, and I thrilled from head to foot. 
 How odd those mysterious moments are when 
 nothing seems to be happening, but which 
 nevertheless go on all the rest of one's life. I
 
 x In Villeggiatura 167 
 
 saw a face stolid and sad, giving me an im- 
 pression of pain and long endurance which 
 comes back still. It seemed to be a woman's 
 face, flabby and tanned, not old. There was 
 no gaiety in it, no adventure in the eyes ; but 
 expiation, endurance, defiance, I know not what 
 tragedy was expressed by that thick-set down- 
 cast figure. I have now, alas, no doubt that it 
 was not George Sand. I had not read any of 
 her books then, but we had many things to 
 read in the old garden. There were various 
 books my father had given us and told us to 
 read during his absence, Macaulay's Essays 
 among them ; and there was Pendennis, which 
 I had brought away from home, and which has 
 always seemed to me more like hearing him 
 talk than any other of his books ; and above 
 all, there were his letters which came from time 
 to time. He was giving lectures at Manchester 
 and elsewhere before sailing for America, and 
 there is one of his letters folded in three and 
 addressed on the back to my sister at Mennecy, 
 Seine-et-Oise. " You see here is the stuck-up 
 hand as you like it best. ... I have not a 
 great deal to say in the stuck-up hand. Ken-
 
 1 68 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 sington is so gloomy that I can't stand it. ... 
 How dismal it must be for poor Eliza [Eliza 
 was the housekeeper], who has no friends to 
 go to, who must stop in the kitchen all day. 
 As I think of her I feel inclined to go back and 
 sit in the kitchen with Eliza, but I dare say I 
 shouldn't amuse her much, and after she had 
 told me about the cat and how her father was, 
 we should have nothing more to say to one 
 another. Last week I was away at Manchester, 
 when I broke down in a speech before 3000 
 ladies and gentlemen. I felt very foolish, but 
 I tried again at night and did better, and as 
 there is nothing more wicked in breaking down 
 in a speech than in slipping on a bit of orange- 
 peel and breaking one's nose, why I got up 
 again, and made another speech at night with- 
 out breaking down. It's all custom, and most 
 people can no more do it than they can play 
 the piano without learning. I hope you and 
 
 are learning hard to play me to sleep when 
 
 I come back from America. I believe I am 
 going to Birmingham next week with the 
 lectures, and then to Manchester, and then, 
 Steward, bring me a basin ! "
 
 x In Villeggiatura 169 
 
 Many years afterwards, long after I married, 
 the good and beautiful Lady Pease gave us the 
 great pleasure of meeting Mr. John Bright at 
 dinner at her house. I sat next Mr. Bright, 
 and he began speaking to me of my father, and 
 of this very time. " I remember," he said, 
 " taking him to a meeting at Manchester, just 
 before he went to America with his lectures. 
 He broke down, and he was very much annoyed, 
 and he said to me : ' Who will ever come and 
 hear me lecture if I break down like this before 
 such a number of people ? ' And I said to him : 
 ' Never you mind ; very few people don't break 
 down at one time or another. You come along 
 with me this evening; I'm going to another 
 meeting ; I'm not going to speak to fine fal-lal 
 folks, but to a set *of good, honest working 
 men, and you must try again.' And he spoke," 
 said Mr. Bright in his downright way, " and I 
 never heard a better speech in all my life ; it 
 was a capital speech, and they were all delighted 
 with him." And then and there Mr. Bright 
 told me another little anecdote of my father, 
 whom he had met a short while before his death 
 at the Reform Club. He said that as he was
 
 170 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 passing through the hall, he met him standing 
 in his way and he stepped back, took off his 
 hat, and stood with it in his outstretched hand. 
 " What is that for ? " said Mr. Bright. " Why 
 do you hold your hat like that ? " " Because I 
 see the most consistent politician I know going 
 by," said my father, "and I take off my hat to 
 him." 
 
 When my father sailed for America, people 
 were very kind to us, and wrote to us with 
 news of him. Esmond came for my grand- 
 mother, and a box which we received at Paris 
 puzzled us very much, and delighted us no less 
 than it puzzled us. It contained a magnificent 
 iced cake, anonymously and carefully packed 
 with strips of many-coloured paper. It was not 
 my father who had sent it, as we imagined, nor 
 was it till long afterwards that we discovered 
 that the sender was Mrs. Procter. Many 
 things are remembered of her ; but how many 
 kind deeds there have been of hers without a 
 name to them ! 
 
 Once the letters began to arrive from 
 America we were all much happier, for we 
 seemed in touch with him once more, and to
 
 x In Villeggiatura 1 7 1 
 
 know what was happening. He was fairly 
 well and in good spirits, and making friends 
 and making money. I remember his writing 
 home on one occasion and asking us to send 
 him out a couple of new stomachs, so hospitable 
 were his friends over the water, so numerous 
 the dinners and suppers to which he was in- 
 vited. When the long summer and winter 
 were over and the still longer spring, suddenly 
 one day we heard that he was coming back 
 much sooner than he expected. I believe 
 he saw a steamer starting for home and 
 could stand it no longer, and then and there 
 came off. 
 
 I can still remember sitting with my grand- 
 parents, expecting his return. My sister and I 
 sat on the red sola in the little study, and 
 shortly before the time we had calculated that 
 he might arrive came a little ring at the front- 
 door bell. My grandmother broke down ; my 
 sister and I rushed to the front-door, only 
 we were so afraid that it might not be he 
 that we did not dare to open it, and there 
 we stood until a second and much louder 
 ringing brought us to our senses. "Why
 
 172 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP, x 
 
 didn't you open the door ? " said my father 
 stepping in, looking well, broad, and upright, 
 laughing. In a moment he had never been 
 away at all.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 TOUT CHEMIN 
 
 AFTER his return from America my father took 
 an apartment in Paris for the autumn months, 
 and it was then that he told us he had made a 
 plan for wintering in Rome. It almost seems 
 to me now that all the rest of my life dates in 
 some measure from those old Roman days, 
 which were all the more vivid because my 
 sister and I were still spectators and not yet 
 actors in the play. I was just fifteen, my 
 sister was still a little girl, but I thought myself 
 a young woman. I have written elsewhere of 
 Mrs. Kemble and Mrs. Sartoris and the 
 Brownings, who were all living at Rome that 
 winter, with a number of interesting people, all 
 drinking, as we were about to do, of the waters 
 of Trevi. How few of us returned to the
 
 174 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 fountain ! But the proverb, I think, must apply 
 to one's spiritual return. For, though one may 
 drink and drink and go back again and again, 
 it is ever a different person that stands by the 
 fountain, whereas the shadowy self by the stone 
 basin, bending over the rushing water, is the 
 same, and does not change. 
 
 We started early in December, my father, 
 my sister, and I. He had his servant with 
 him, for already his health had begun to fail 
 him. We reached Marseilles in bitter weather 
 late one night. We laid our travelling plaids 
 upon our beds to keep ourselves warm, but 
 though we shivered, our spirits rose to wildest 
 pitch next morning in the excitement of the 
 golden moment. The wonderful sights in the 
 streets are before me still the Jews, Turks, 
 dwellers in Mesopotamia, chattering in gorgeous 
 colours and strange languages ; the quays, the 
 crowded shipping, the amethyst water. I can 
 still see in a sort of mental picture a barge 
 piled with great golden onions floating along 
 one of the quays, guided by a lonely woman in 
 blue rags with a coloured kerchief on her head. 
 "There goes the Lady of Shalot," said my
 
 XI 
 
 Tout Chemin 175 
 
 father ; and when we looked at him rather 
 puzzled, for we knew nothing of onions and 
 very little of Tennyson in those days, he 
 explained that a shalot was a species of onion, 
 and after a moment's reflection we took in his 
 little joke, feeling that nobody ever thought of 
 such droll things as he did. Then we reached 
 our hotel again, where there were Turks still 
 drinking coffee under striped awnings, and a 
 black man in a fez, and a lank British diplomat, 
 with a very worn face, who knew my father, 
 arriving from some outlandish place with piles 
 of luggage ; and we caught sight of the master 
 of the hotel and his family gathered round a 
 soup tureen in a sort of glass conservatory, and 
 so went upstairs to rest and refresh ourselves 
 before our start that evening. All this 
 splendour and novelty and lux mundi had 
 turned our heads, for we forgot our warm 
 wraps and half our possessions at the hotel, 
 and did not discover, till long after the steamer 
 had started with all of us on board, how many 
 essentials we had left behind. 
 
 The sun was setting as we steamed out of 
 Marseilles, and the rocky Island of If stood
 
 176 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 out dark and crisp against the rush of bright 
 wavelets ; across which we strained our eyes to 
 see Monte Cristo in his sack splashing into the 
 water of the bay. Then we got out to sea, 
 and the land disappeared by degrees. How 
 the stars shone that night on board the big 
 ship ! The passengers were all on deck talk- 
 ing in a pleasant murmur of voices, broken by 
 laughs and exclamations. Among them were 
 some people who specially attracted us, a very 
 striking and beautiful quartet from the north. 
 There was a lovely mother, oldish, widowed, 
 but very beautiful still ; the two charming 
 daughters, one tall and lovely, the other a 
 piquant brunette ; there was the son, one of 
 the handsomest young men I have ever seen. 
 They were going to Rome, they told us, for 
 the winter. Christina, the eldest girl, was 
 dressed in white. She seemed to me some fair 
 Urania, controlling the stars in their wondrous 
 maze as she and I and my sister paced the 
 deck till it was very late, and some bell 
 sounded, and my father came up and sent us 
 down to our cabin. Then the night turned 
 bitter cold, and as we had left our shawls on
 
 xi Tout Chemin 177 
 
 the shores of France, we made haste to get to 
 bed and to be warm. Though it was cold we 
 liked fresh air, and were glad to find that our 
 port-holes had been left open by the steward ; 
 we scrambled into our berths, and fell asleep. 
 I lay at the top, and my sister in the berth 
 below. How well I remember waking sud- 
 denly in a slop of salt water ! The ship was 
 sinking, we were all going to be drowned, and 
 with a wild shriek calling to my sister I sprang 
 from the cabin and rushed up the companion- 
 steps on deck. I thought she called me back, 
 but I paid no heed, as I reached the top of the 
 companion-ladder, dripping and almost in tears, 
 with my fatal announcement. There I encoun- 
 tered the steward, who began to laugh, and 
 who led me back crestfallen to our cabin, at 
 the door of which my sister was standing. 
 The water was dancing in, in a stream, and 
 the steward scolded us well as he screwed 
 up the port-holes and got us some dry bed- 
 ding. Next morning, to my inexpressible mor- 
 tification, I heard some people telling the 
 story. " She rushed on deck, and declared 
 the ship was sinking," said one voice to 
 
 N
 
 178 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 another. I didn't wait to hear any more, but 
 fled. 
 
 The wind went down again, but it was still 
 bitter cold, and we shivered without our wraps, 
 as we steamed up to Genoa, along the 
 spreading quays with their background of 
 gorgeous palaces and cloud-capped towers. 
 There were convicts in their chains at work 
 upon the great steps of the quay, who stared at 
 us as we landed. And the very first thing 
 which happened to us when we found ourselves in 
 Italy at last the land where citrons bloom, 
 where orange flowers scent the air was that 
 we drove straight away to a narrow back street, 
 where we were told we should find a shop for 
 English goods, and then and there my father 
 bought us each a warm gray wrap, with stripes 
 of black, nothing in the least Italian or 
 romantic, but the best that we could get. And 
 then, as we had now a whole day to spend on 
 shore, and shawls to keep us warm, we drove 
 about the town, and after visiting a palace or 
 two took the railway, which had been quite 
 lately opened, to Pisa. The weather must have 
 changed as the day went on, for it was sun-
 
 xi Tout Chemin 179 
 
 shine, not Shetland wool, that warmed us at 
 last ; but the wind was blowing still, and what 
 I specially remember in the open Piazza at 
 Pisa is the figure of a stately monk, whose 
 voluminous robes were fluttering and beating 
 as he passed us, wrapped in darkness, mystical, 
 majestic, with all the light beyond his stateliness 
 and the cathedral in its glory and the Leaning 
 Tower aslant in the sunlight for a background. 
 Our adventures for the day were not yet 
 over. At the station we found two more of the 
 ship's passengers, young men with whom we 
 had made acquaintance, and we all returned to 
 Genoa together. The train was late and we 
 had to be on board at a certain time, so that 
 we engaged a carriage and drove quickly to 
 the quay, where the convicts clanking in their 
 chains were still at work. A boat was found, 
 rowed by some sailors who certainly did not 
 wear chains, but who were otherwise not very 
 unlike those industrious convicts in appearance. 
 The bargain was made, we entered the boat all 
 five, and as we were getting in we could see our 
 great ship in the twilight looking bigger than 
 ever, and one rocket and then another going
 
 180 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 off towards the dawning stars. " They are 
 signalling for us," said one of our companions : 
 "we shall soon be on board." 
 
 We had rowed some twenty strokes from the 
 shore by this time, when suddenly the boatmen 
 left off rowing, they put down their oars, and 
 one of them began talking volubly, though I 
 could not understand what he said. "What's 
 to be done ? " said one of the young men to my 
 father. " They say they won't go on unless we 
 give them fifty francs more," and he began 
 shaking his head and remonstrating in broken 
 Italian. The boatmen paid no attention, 
 shrugged their shoulders, and waited, as if they 
 were determined never to row another stroke. 
 Then the steamer sent up two more rockets, 
 which rose through the twilight, bidding us 
 hurry ; and then suddenly my father rose up in 
 the stern of the boat where he was sitting, and, 
 standing tall and erect and in an anger such as 
 I had never seen him in before or after in all 
 my life, he shouted out in loud and indignant 
 English, " D n you, go on ! " a simple male- 
 diction which carried more force than all the 
 Italian polysyllables and expostulations of our
 
 xi Tout Chemin 181 
 
 companions. To our surprise and great relief, 
 the men seemed frightened, and took to their 
 oars again and began to row, grumbling and 
 muttering. When we got on board the ship 
 they told us it was a well-known trick the 
 Genoese boatmen were in the habit of playing 
 upon travellers, and that they would have sent 
 a boat for us if we had delayed any longer. 
 
 We reached our journey's end next morning, 
 and landed at Civita Vecchia about mid-day. 
 This landing was no less wonderful than every- 
 thing else, we thought, as we looked in awe at 
 the glorious blaze of colour, at the square 
 Campanile with its flat tiled roof, and at all that 
 we were going to see, which was coming to 
 meet us on the very shore. To begin with, 
 there was the chorus from the Opera waiting 
 in readiness, men with pointed hats and Italian 
 legs, women in fancy dress, with fancy dress 
 babies, all laughing, talking in Italian, and at 
 home in Italy. We had some trouble in getting 
 our luggage through the dogana. Most of the 
 other travellers started before we did, and we 
 were among the last to start for Rome. My 
 father was anxious to get on, for there were
 
 1 82 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 unpleasant rumours about brigands on the road. 
 Another family, Russians, with a courier, and a 
 great deal of luggage, was to follow us, and 
 some one suggested we should wait for their 
 escort ; but on the whole my father decided to 
 start. The afternoon shadows were beginning 
 to lengthen, when at length we were packed 
 and ready. We had a mouldy post-chaise, with 
 a gray ragged lining, and our luggage on the 
 top. We hoped to get to Rome before dark. 
 I remember thrilling as my father buttoned his 
 overcoat and told us he had put his hundred 
 louis for safety into an inner pocket. 
 
 The country is not very beautiful between 
 Civita Vecchia and Rome at least I do not 
 remember anything to distract our attention 
 from our alarms. We were just frightened 
 enough to be stimulated and amused as we 
 jolted past the wide fields where the men were 
 at work. We sat all three abreast in the jolting 
 old carriage : my father's servant was on the 
 box. We were reading our Tauchnitz books, 
 being tired of watching the flat horizons, when 
 suddenly the carriage stopped, and Charles 
 Pearman with a pale face of alarm came to the
 
 xi Tout Ckemin 183 
 
 window and said that one of the traces had 
 broken, and that there were a number of people 
 all coming round the carriage. We were 
 surrounded by people as if by magic satyrs, 
 shepherds, strange bearded creatures with 
 conical hats, and with pitchforks in their hands. 
 The sun was just setting, and dazzling into our 
 faces all the time. For some five minutes we 
 waited, looking at each other in silence, and 
 wondering what was going to come next. At 
 the end of that time, and after a good deal of 
 conversation with the postilions, the satyrs and 
 fauns went their way with their pitchforks, 
 leaving us, to our inexpressible relief, to con- 
 tinue our journey. Then came the dusk at 
 last, and the road seemed longer and longer. 
 I think I had fallen 'asleep in my corner, when 
 my father put his hand on my shoulder. 
 "Look!" he said, and I looked, and, lo ! there 
 rose the dusky dome of St. Peter's, gray upon 
 the dark-blue sky. 
 
 Very soon afterwards some one with a 
 lantern opened the gates of Rome, and 
 examined our passport, and let us in. We 
 drove to our hotel in the Via Condotti, and
 
 184 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 when we awoke next morning it was to the 
 sound of countless church bells in the morning 
 light. 
 
 When we leant from the window of our 
 entresol sitting-room, with its odd yellow walls, 
 we could almost touch the heads of the passers- 
 by. It was Sunday morning, all the bells were 
 flinging and ringing : and they seemed to be 
 striking and vibrating against that wonderful 
 blue sky overhead. How well I remember my 
 first Roman contadina, as she walked majestic- 
 ally along the street below ; black-haired, white- 
 becapped, white-besleeved, and covered with 
 ornaments, on her way to mass. 
 
 The Piazza d'Espagna, at the end of our 
 street, was one flood of sunshine, in which 
 other contadinas and bambinos and romantic 
 shepherds were floating when we came out to 
 look and to wonder. Wonderful as it all was, 
 it seemed also almost disappointing. We had 
 expected, we didn't know what ; and this was 
 something ; something tangible, and, so far less 
 than we expected, appreciable. " Wait a little," 
 said my father ; " people are always a little 
 disappointed when they first come to Rome."
 
 XI 
 
 Tout Chemin 185 
 
 I remember long after hearing Mr. Appleton 
 say, " People expect to taste the result of two 
 thousand years of civilisation in a morning : it 
 takes more than a morning to receive so much 
 into one's mind ... a lifetime is not too long." 
 Mr. Appleton was right when he said it takes 
 a lifetime to realise some ideas. But now and 
 then one certainly lives a lifetime almost in a 
 comparatively flying minute ; and those two 
 months at Rome, short as they were, have lasted 
 my lifetime. The people, the sights, the sounds, 
 have never quite ceased for me yet. They 
 have become an habitual association, and have 
 helped to make that mental standard by which 
 one habitually measures the events as they 
 follow one another. 
 
 That first evening in Rome, as we sat at 
 dinner at the table d'hote, in the dark vaulted 
 dining-room, all the people, I remember, were 
 talking confusedly of an attack by brigands 
 upon some Russians on the road from Civita 
 Vecchia the very vagueness of the rumour 
 made it the more impressive to us. 
 
 There is a letter from my father to his 
 mother which he must have written the very
 
 1 86 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 next day : it is dated Hotel Franz, Via Condotti, 
 December 6. "We have very comfortable 
 quarters at the hotel where I lived before," he 
 writes, "except for some animal that bit me 
 furiously when I was asleep yesterday on the 
 sofa. It can't be a bug, of course the chamber- 
 maid declares she has never seen such a thing, 
 nor so much as a flea, so it must be a scorpion, 
 I suppose," and he goes on to compare St. 
 Peter's to Pisa. " We agreed Pisa is the best," 
 he says. " The other is a huge heathen parade. 
 The founder of the religion utterly disappears 
 under the enormous pile^of fiction and ceremony 
 that has been built round him. I'm not quite 
 sure that I think St. Peter's handsome. The 
 front is positively ugly, that is certain, but 
 nevertheless the city is glorious. We had a 
 famous walk on the Pincio, and the sun set for 
 us with a splendour quite imperial. I wasn't 
 sorry when the journey from Civita Vecchia 
 was over. Having eighty or ninety louis in my 
 pocket, I should have been good meat for the 
 brigands had they chosen to come." 
 
 Very soon our friends began to appear 
 Mr. Browning, Mr. Sartoris, Mr. ^Eneas
 
 XI 
 
 Tout Chemin 187 
 
 Macbean. Mr. Macbean was the English 
 banker. He was the kindest of bankers, and 
 he used to send us great piles of the most 
 delightful books to read. Lockhart's, Scott's, 
 and Bulwer's heroes, and D' Israeli's saint -like 
 politicians all came to inhabit our palazzo when 
 we were established there. Zanoni and that 
 cat-like spirit of the threshold are as vivid to 
 me as any of the actual people who used to 
 come and see us, or our late fellow-travellers 
 (who now also seemed like old friends) as we 
 passed them, hurrying about in search of 
 lodgings. All that day we came and went ; we 
 stood under the great dome of St. Peter's, we 
 saw the Tiber rushing under its bridges ; then 
 no doubt in consequence of the scorpions we 
 also went about to look for lodgings, and it was 
 Mr. Browning who told us where to go. One 
 can hardly imagine a more ideal spot for little 
 girls to live in than that to which he directed 
 us to a great apartment just over the pastry- 
 cook's in the Palazzo Poniatowski, in the Via 
 Delia Croce. We climbed a broad stone stair- 
 case with a handsome wrought-iron banister, 
 we clanged at an echoing bell, and a little old
 
 1 88 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 lady in a camisole, rejoicing in the imposing 
 name of Signora Ercole, opened the door, and 
 showed us into a dark outer hall. Then she 
 led the way from room to room, until we finally 
 reached a drawing-room with seven windows, 
 at which we exclaimed in preliminary admira- 
 tion. Among the other items of our installation 
 were a Chinese museum, a library, a dining- 
 room with a brazen charcoal-burner in the 
 centre, and besides all these we were to 
 have a bedroom, a dressing-room, and a 
 cupboard for my father's servant. My father 
 took the dressing-room for himself. He put 
 me and my sister into the big bedroom to the 
 front, and the man retired to the cupboard in 
 the hall. Signora Ercole, our landlady, also 
 hospitably offered us the run of her own 
 magnificent sitting-rooms, besides the four or 
 five we had engaged. I have a vague impres- 
 sion of her family of daughters, also in 
 camisoles, huddled away into some humbler 
 apartment, but we saw little of them. We 
 established ourselves comfortably in one corner 
 of the great drawing-room, clearing an inlaid 
 table of its lamps and statuettes, its wax flowers,
 
 xi Tout Chemin 189 
 
 and other adornments. Then we felt at home. 
 A stone-mason suspended at his work began to 
 sing in mid-air just outside one of the windows, 
 there came to us the sound of the pfifferari from 
 the piazza down below, and the flutter of the 
 white doves' wings and their flying shadows 
 upon the floor, together with a scent of flowers 
 and sense of fountains, and the fusty fascinating 
 smell from the old hangings and bric-a-brac. 
 I think the Ercoles must have done some 
 business in brocanteurs, for the furniture was 
 more like that of a museum than a human 
 living house : all over the walls they had rows 
 of paintings in magnificent gildings, of which 
 the frames were the most important parts. 
 All the same, the whole effect was imposing 
 and delightful, ancl we felt like enchanted 
 Princesses in a palace, and flew from room to 
 room. 
 
 About luncheon time my father sent us down 
 to the pastry-cook's shop, where we revelled 
 among cream tarts and petits fours, and then 
 we ordered our dinner, as people did then, from 
 a trattoria near at hand. Then we went out 
 again, still in our raptures, and when dinner-
 
 190 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 time came, just about sunset, excitement had 
 given us good appetites, notwithstanding the 
 tarts. 
 
 We were ready, but dinner delayed. 
 
 We waited more and more impatiently as 
 the evening advanced, but still no dinner 
 appeared. Then the English servant, Charles, 
 was called, and despatched to the cook-shop to 
 make inquiry. He came back much agitated, 
 saying the dinner had been sent that they 
 assured him it had been sent ! It had appar- 
 ently vanished on its way up the old palace 
 stairs. "Go back," said my father, "and tell 
 them there is some mistake, and that we are 
 very hungry, and waiting still." The man left 
 the room, then returned again with a doubtful 
 look. There was a sort of box came an hour 
 ago, he said : " I have not opened it, sir." 
 With a rush my sister and I flew into the hall, 
 and there sure enough stood a square solid iron 
 box with a hinged top. It certainly looked 
 very unlike dinner, but we raised it with some 
 faint hopes which were not disappointed ! 
 Inside, and smoking still upon the hot plates, 
 was spread a meal like something in a fairy
 
 xi Tout Chemin 191 
 
 tale roast birds and dressed meat, a loaf of 
 brown bread and compotes of fruit, and a salad 
 and a bottle of wine, to which good fare we 
 immediately sat down in cheerful excitement 
 our first Roman family meal together. 
 
 When people write of the past, those among 
 us who have reached a certain age are 
 sometimes apt to forget that it is because so 
 much of it still exists in our lives, that it is so 
 dear to us. And, as I have said before, there 
 is often a great deal more of the past in the 
 future than there was in the past itself at the 
 time. We go back to meet our old selves, 
 more tolerant, forgiving our own mistakes, 
 understanding it all better, appreciating its 
 simple joys and realities. There are compen- 
 sations for the los's of youth and fresh 
 impressions ; and one learns little by little that 
 a thing is not over because it is not happening 
 with noise and shape or outward sign : its roots 
 are in our hearts, and every now and then they 
 send forth a shoot which blossoms and bears 
 fruit still. 
 
 Early life is like a chapter out of Dickens, 
 I think one sees people then : their tricks of
 
 192 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 expression, their vivid sayings, and their 
 quaint humours and oddities do not surprise 
 one ; one accepts everything as a matter of 
 course no matter how unusual it may be. 
 Later in life one grows more fastidious, 
 more ambitious, more paradoxical ; one begins 
 to judge, or to make excuses, or to think about 
 one's companions instead of merely staring at 
 them. All these people we now saw for the 
 first time, vivid but mysterious apparitions : we 
 didn't know what they were feeling and 
 thinking about, only we saw them, and very 
 delightful they all were to look at. 
 
 Meanwhile our education was not neglected. 
 We had a poetess to teach us a little Italian, a 
 signora with a magnificent husband in plaid 
 trousers, to whom I am sure she must have 
 written many poems. Once she asked us to 
 spend an evening in her apartment. It was 
 high up in a house in a narrow street, bare and 
 swept, and we found a company whose conver- 
 sation (notwithstanding all Madame Eleonora 
 Torti's instructions) was quite unintelligible to 
 us. We all sat in a circle round the great brass 
 brazier in the centre of the bare room. Every
 
 xi Tout Ckemin 193 
 
 now and then the host took up an iron bar 
 and stirred the caldron round, and the fumes 
 arose. Two or three of the elder people sat in 
 a corner playing cards but here also we were 
 at fault. The cards represented baskets of 
 flowers, coins, nuts, unknown and mysterious 
 devices ; among which the familiar ace of 
 diamonds was the only sign we could recognise. 
 After these social evenings our servant used 
 to come to fetch us home, through moonlight 
 streets, past little shrines with burning lamps, 
 by fountains plashing in the darkness. We 
 used to reach our great staircase, hurry up half- 
 frightened of ghosts and echoes, and too much 
 alive ourselves to go quickly to sleep. Long 
 after my father had come home and shut his door 
 we would sit up with Mr. Macbean's heroes and 
 heroines, and read by the light of our flaring 
 candles till the bell of the Frate in the convent 
 close by began to toll.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 MRS. KEMBLE 
 
 MY father was a very young man when he first 
 knew the Kemble family. In 1832 he himself 
 was twenty-one, a couple of years younger than 
 Mrs. Fanny Kemble, who was born in 1809. 
 The mentions of the Kemble family in a diary 
 which he kept about that time are very constant. 
 "Called at Kemble's. Walked with Kemble 
 in the Park. [Kemble was John Mitchell 
 Kemble, Mrs. Fanny Kemble's brother.] We 
 met the Duke looking like an old hero," he 
 writes. " Breakfasted with Kemble ; went to 
 see the rehearsal of the Easter piece at Covent 
 Garden, with Farley in his glory." Again : 
 " Called at Kemble's. He read me some very 
 beautiful verses by Tennyson." On another 
 occasion my father speaks of seeing "Miss Tot,
 
 CHAP, xii Mrs. Kemble 195 
 
 a very nice girl. Madam not visible " ; and 
 again of " Miss Fanny still in Paris. . . ." 
 
 It was in the year 1851, or thereabouts, that 
 my own scraps of recollections begin and that I 
 remember walking with my father along the 
 High Street at Southampton ; and somewhere 
 near the archway he turned, taking us with him 
 into the old Assembly Rooms, where I heard 
 for the first and only time in all my life a 
 Shakesperean Reading by Mrs. Fanny Kemble. 
 I think it was the first time I ever saw her. 
 She came in with a stiff and stately genuflexion 
 to the audience, took her seat at the little table 
 prepared for her, upon which she laid her open 
 book, and immediately began to read. My 
 sister and I sat on either side of our father. 
 He followed every word with attention ; I 
 cannot even make sure of the play after all these 
 years, but Falstaff was in it, and with a rout 
 and a shout a jolly company burst in. Was it 
 Falstaff and his companions, or were they 
 
 Fairies, black, grey, green, and white, 
 You moonshine revellers ? 
 
 Suddenly the lady's voice rose, with some 
 generous cheery chord of glorious fun and
 
 196 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 jollity. I can hear the echo still, and see her 
 action as she pointed outwards with both open 
 hands, and my father with a start, bursting into 
 sympathising laughter and plaudit, began crying 
 " Brava ! Brava ! " and then again he sat listen- 
 ing and looking approvingly through his 
 spectacles. As we came away he once more 
 broke into praise. " Don't you see how 
 admirably she forgets herself? " he said ; "how 
 she throws herself into it all ? how finely she 
 feels it ? " My father was that best of audiences, 
 a born critic and yet an enthusiast ; and to the 
 last he could throw himself into the passing 
 mood, into the spirit of the moment, while at 
 the same time he knew what it was he was 
 admiring, and why he admired. 
 
 Some years passed before we met Mrs. 
 Kemble again, in Rome. It was at a very 
 hard and difficult hour of her life, so I have 
 heard her say, a time when she needed all her 
 courage to endure her daily portion of suffering. 
 I was then a hobbledehoy, and (though she was 
 no less kind to me then than in later years) I 
 only stared and wondered at her ways, asking 
 myself what she meant, and how much she
 
 XII 
 
 Mrs. Kemble 197 
 
 meant by the things she said, for I only half 
 understood her ; but when I, too, was an older 
 woman the scales fell from my eyes. 
 
 One had to learn something one's self before 
 one could in the least appreciate her. When 
 the gods touch one's hair with gray, then comes 
 some compensating revelation of what has been 
 and is still. Now I can understand the 
 passionate way in which Mrs. Kemble used in 
 early times to speak of slavery ; then I used to 
 wonder nor realise in the least what she felt, 
 when she would sometimes start to her feet in 
 agitation and passionate declamation ; she who 
 with streaming eyes and wrung heart had 
 walked about the plantations feeling more, 
 perhaps, than any slave could do what it was 
 to be a slave. To her free and ruling nature 
 every hour of bondage must have seemed 
 nothing short of torture. In those far-back 
 Roman days of which I have been writing, she 
 used to take us out driving with her from time 
 to time. "Where shall I drive to?" asks the 
 coachman. " Andate al Diavolo" says Mrs. 
 Kemble gaily. " Go where you will, only go ! " 
 And away we drive through streets, and out by
 
 198 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 garden walls and garden gates to the Campagna, 
 and as we drive along she begins to sing to us. 
 I could box my own past ears for wondering 
 what the passers-by would think of it, instead 
 of enjoying that bygone song. 
 
 I can also remember Mrs. Kemble sitting 
 dressed in a black dress silently working all 
 through the evening by her sister's fireside, and 
 gravely stitching on and on, while all the 
 brilliant company came and went, and the music 
 came and went. In those days Mrs. Kemble 
 had certain dresses which she wore in rotation 
 whatever the occasion might be. If the black 
 gown chanced to fall upon a gala day she wore 
 it, if the pale silk gown fell upon a working day 
 she wore it ; and I can still hear an American 
 girl exclaiming with dismay as the delicate folds 
 of a white silk embroidered with flowers went 
 sweeping over the anemones in the Pamphili 
 Gardens. Another vivid impression I have 
 is of an evening visit Mrs. Kemble paid Mrs. 
 Browning in the quiet little room in the Bocca 
 di Leone, only lit by a couple of tapers and by 
 the faint glow of the fire. I looked from one 
 to the other : Mrs. Browning welcoming her
 
 XII 
 
 Mrs. Kemble 199 
 
 guest, dim in her dusky gown unrelieved ; Mrs. 
 Kemble upright and magnificent, robed on this 
 occasion like some Roman empress in stately 
 crimson edged with gold. It happened to be 
 the red dress day, and she wore it. " How do 
 you suppose I could have lived my life," I once 
 heard her say, " if I had not lived by rule, if I 
 had not made laws for myself and kept to 
 them ? " Out of this stress of feeling, out of 
 this passionate rebellion against fate, she grew 
 to the tender, the noble and spirited maturity 
 of her later days. In time, by habit and 
 degrees, we learn to understand a little more 
 how to fit ourselves to circumstances, and life 
 begins to seem possible, and to contain certain 
 elements of peace and of philosophy ; it is in 
 mid-life, when we try to accommodate our own 
 wants and wishes to those of others, that the 
 strain is greatest and the problem occasionally 
 passes beyond our powers of solution. Indeed 
 very few solutions are possible, though wise 
 compromises exist for us all. Some are more 
 adaptable than others, and not having very 
 positive selves to manage, having impressions 
 rather than strong convictions to act upon, they
 
 2oo Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 run fairly well along other people's lines ; but 
 when strong feeling, vivid realisations, passion- 
 ate love of truth and justice, uncompromising 
 faith exist, then experience becomes hard 
 indeed. When Mrs. Kemble went to her rest 
 only the other day, the critics who spoke so 
 inadequately of that great personality had not 
 felt the influence of her generous inspiration. 
 "A prouder nature never fronted the long 
 humiliation of life," said Mr. Henry James who 
 knew her, touching upon the more tragic side 
 of her history. 1 
 
 One should have a different language to 
 speak with of each of those one has loved and 
 admired in turn. Such a language exists in 
 one's heart, but how can one translate it into 
 print ? Some people seem like green places in 
 the desert ; one thinks of them, and one is at 
 rest. It is also true that there also exist a certain 
 number who oppress one with nameless dis- 
 couragement, bores past and present. But the 
 Elect are those who put life into one, who give 
 courage to the faint-hearted, hope, out of their 
 
 1 In the Atlantic Monthly for May 1893, I also read a very re- 
 markable and most interesting article about my old friend, by Mr. 
 Lee, who had known her in her youth.
 
 XII 
 
 Mrs. Kemble 201 
 
 own hearts' constancy ; to these Fanny Kemble 
 belonged indeed. To the end she retained the 
 power of making new friends, of being loved 
 by them and of loving them. One member of 
 my own family, whom the elder lady was pleased 
 to christen Rosalind, only knew her when she 
 was long past seventy years of age, but what a 
 true and spontaneous friendship was that which 
 sprang up between them both, one which added, 
 so wrote Mrs. Wister, to the happiness of her 
 mother's later years. Mrs. Kemble returned 
 love with love in full measure, whether it came 
 to her in the shape of beautiful white azaleas 
 from an old friend's hand, or of music played 
 so as to delight her fine taste, or even as 
 dumme Liebe with nothing to say, nothing to 
 show. 
 
 I once went out shopping with her one 
 spring morning when she thought her room 
 would look the brighter for muslin curtains to 
 admit the light. She carried a long purse full 
 of sovereigns in her hand. We drove to 
 Regent Street to a shop where she told me her 
 mother and her aunt used both to go. It may 
 have been over that very counter that the classic
 
 2O2 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 "Will it wash? " was uttered. The shopman, 
 who had assuredly not served Mrs. Siddons, or 
 he would have learned his lesson earlier in life, 
 produced silken hangings and worsted and 
 fabrics of various hues and textures, to Mrs. 
 Kemble's great annoyance. I had gone to 
 another counter and came back to find her 
 surrounded by draperies, sitting on her chair 
 and looking very serious ; distant thunder 
 seemed in the air. "Young man," she said to 
 the shopman, " perhaps your time is of no value 
 to you to me my time is of great value. I 
 shall thank you to show me the things I asked 
 for instead of all these things for which I did not 
 ask," and she flashed such a glance at him as 
 must have surprised the youth. He looked per- 
 fectly scared, seemed to leap over the counter, 
 and the muslin curtains appeared on the spot. 
 
 Mrs. Kemble once asked me suddenly what 
 colour her eyes were, and confused and unready 
 I answered, " Light eyes." At the moment 
 indeed they looked like amber, not unlike the 
 eyes of some of those captive birds one sees in 
 their cages sitting alone in the midst of crowds. 
 Mrs. Kemble laughed at my answer. " Light
 
 XII 
 
 Mrs. Kemble 203 
 
 eyes ! Where are your own ? Do you not 
 know that I have been celebrated for my dark 
 eyes ? " she said ; and then I looked again and 
 they were dark and brilliant, and looking at me 
 with a half-amused half-reproachful earnestness. 
 
 It must have been in the early years of the 
 century that Sir Thomas Lawrence sketched 
 that well-known and most charming head of 
 Miss Fanny Kemble with which we are most 
 of us acquainted. The oval face, the dark eyes, 
 the wise young brows, the glossy profusion of 
 dark hair, represent her youth ; she was no less 
 striking in her age, though no great painter 
 ever depicted it. She grew to be old indeed, 
 but it was only for a little while that she was 
 an old woman. Stately, upright, ruddy and 
 brown of complexion, almost to the very last ; 
 mobile and expressive in feature, reproachful, 
 mocking, and humorous, heroic, uplifted in 
 turn. This was no old woman, feeling the 
 throb of life with an intensity far beyond that 
 of younger people, splendid in expression, 
 vehement, and yet at times tender with a 
 tenderness such as is very rare. She was
 
 204 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 indeed one of those coming from the mountain, 
 one of the bearers of good tidings. As a girl 
 I used to watch Mrs. Kemble stitching at her 
 worsted work, and so in later days we have all 
 seen her, sitting stitching in her arm-chair, 
 dressed in her black silk Paris dress and lace 
 cap. She sits upright by the window, with 
 flowers on the table beside her, while her birds 
 are pecking in their cage. For a long time 
 she kept and tended certain American mocking- 
 birds, letting them out of their cages to fly 
 about the room, and perch here and there upon 
 the furniture. " I have no right," she used to 
 say, " to inflict the annoyance of my pleasures 
 upon my servants, and therefore I attend to my 
 birds and their requirements myself." She 
 emphasises her words as she sits at work, 
 stitching in the long coloured threads with extra 
 point as she speaks ; or again, when she is 
 interested in what she says, putting down her 
 tapestry and looking straight into your face, as 
 she explains her meaning directly and clearly, 
 without fear of being misunderstood. I once 
 complained to her of something said by some 
 one else. " I do not care what any one thinks
 
 XII 
 
 Mrs. Kemble 205 
 
 of me, or chooses to say of me " I can almost 
 hear her speak " nay, more than that, I do not 
 care what any one chooses to say of the people 
 I love ; it does not in any way affect the truth. 
 People are at liberty to speak what they choose, 
 and I am also at liberty not to care one farthing 
 for what they say, nor for any mistakes that they 
 make." What Mrs. Kemble did care for, 
 scrupulously, with infinite solicitude, was the 
 fear of having ever caused pain by anything 
 that she had said in the energy of the moment ; 
 she would remember it and think over it after 
 days had passed. People did not always under- 
 stand her, nor how her love of the truth, as it 
 appeared to her, did not prevent her tenderness 
 for the individual ; she would also take it for 
 granted, that whoever it was she was talking to 
 also preferred the truth to any adaptation of it. 
 Her stories of the past were endlessly interest- 
 ing and various. She had known everybody 
 interesting as well as uninteresting. She had 
 always detested banalities, and even as a girl 
 she seems to have had the gift of making other 
 people speak out of their hearts. Her pathetic 
 story of Mary Shelley haunts one with the
 
 206 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 saddest persistence, and seems to sigh back the 
 curtain of the past. " Bring up a boy to think 
 for himself," she as a girl once said to Mrs. 
 Shelley ; and to this came the mother's passionate 
 answer, "Ah! no, no, bring him up to think 
 like other people." 
 
 Mr. Henry James instances among her 
 other social gifts, her extraordinary power of 
 calling up the representation of that which was 
 in her mind, and impressing others with her 
 own impression. Those, he says, who some- 
 times went with her to the play in the last 
 years of her life, will remember the Juliets, the 
 Beatrices, the Rosalinds, whom she could still 
 make vivid without any accessory except the 
 surrounding London uproar. 
 
 I myself fortunately once happened to ask 
 her some question concerning As You Like 
 It, which had been Mrs. Sartoris's favourite 
 play. Suddenly, as if by a miracle, the little 
 room seemed transformed ; there were the 
 actors, no, not even actors ; there stood 
 Rosalind and Celia themselves, there stood the 
 Duke, there was Orlando in the life and spirit. 
 One spoke and then another, Rosalind pleading,
 
 XII 
 
 Mrs. Kemble 207 
 
 the stern Duke unrelenting ; then somehow we 
 were carried to the Forest with its depths and 
 its delightful company. It all lasted but a few 
 moments, and there was Mrs. Kemble again 
 sitting in her chair in her usual corner ; and 
 yet I cannot to this day realise that the whole 
 beautiful mirage did not sweep through the 
 little room, with colour and light and emotion, 
 and the rustling of trees, and the glittering of 
 embroidered draperies. 
 
 Mrs. Kemble told me that she herself had 
 only once heard her aunt, Mrs. Siddons, read. 
 She said the impression was very overpowering, 
 though she had been almost a child at the time. 
 It was from the witches' scene in Macbeth 
 that Mrs. Siddons read. She was very old 
 and broken at the *time, and living in retire- 
 ment, but for a moment she forgot her suffering 
 state. The sense of storm and mystery and 
 power was all round about, Mrs. Kemble said. 
 One can imagine the scene, the dark-eyed 
 maiden sitting at the feet of the great actress 
 and receiving initiation from her failing hands. 
 
 The true dramatic faculty does not indeed 
 depend on footlights, or on a stage ; it is a
 
 208 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 special gift from spirit to spirit. Fanny 
 Kemble was almost the very last representative 
 of the ruling race to which she belonged, and 
 in no small degree did she retain to the very 
 end their noble gift of illumination, of giving 
 life to words and feelings. She herself has 
 denned this power. " Things dramatic and 
 things theatrical are often confounded together," 
 she writes. " English people, being for the 
 most part neither one nor the other, speak as if 
 they were identical, instead of so dissimilar 
 that they are nearly opposite. That which is 
 dramatic in human nature is the passionate, 
 emotional, humorous element, the simplest 
 portion of our composition ; that which imitates 
 it is its theatrical reproduction. The dramatic 
 is the real of which the theatrical is the false. 
 A combination of the power," she continues, 
 " of representing passion and emotion with that 
 of imagining or conceiving it, is essential to 
 make a good actor ; their combination in the 
 highest degree alone makes a great one." 
 
 I remember Mrs. Sartoris once saying, " I 
 do not know if you will think it very conceited 
 of me ; but it always seems to me that no one
 
 Mrs. Kemble 209 
 
 I ever talk to seems able to say anything 
 clearly and to the point, except myself and my 
 sister Fanny. When she speaks, I know 
 exactly what she means and wants to say ; 
 when other people speak, I have to find out 
 what they mean, and even then I am not 
 certain that they know it themselves." As 
 Mrs. Sartoris spoke, she looked at me with her 
 searching glance ; her beautiful head was like 
 that of some classical statue nobly set upon her 
 shoulders. But no classical statue ever looked 
 at you as she did ; her eyes and mouth spoke 
 before she uttered. She always seemed to me 
 an improvisatrice. Both these women had the 
 rare power of stirring and stimulating one's 
 sleepy makeshift soul, suggesting, satisfying. 
 It was as if Mrs. Sartoris could at will compel 
 the sound and the sense and the colour into 
 that in which she was interested, she created 
 as she spoke instead of only speaking, so that we 
 were all for the time, and indeed for a lifetime 
 since, illumined by her. 
 
 Mrs. Sartoris was living in Paris in the Rue 
 Royale, at one time, in a very stately apartment. 
 It seemed to suit her, as did all handsome and
 
 2io Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 beautiful things. I do not suppose the modern 
 aesthetic taste would have suited her. She 
 liked glorious things full of colour, Italian, 
 sumptuous, and she liked them used for daily 
 life and pleasure. She made a home out of 
 her lovely bric-a-brac and tapestries and 
 cabinets. Something of course must be allowed 
 for the grateful excitement of inexperience, but 
 to us in those days, her houses seemed like 
 succeeding paradises upon earth. I can 
 remember on one occasion gazing in admiration 
 at a glowing shaded lamp, the first I had ever 
 seen, reflected from one glass to another, and 
 listening to my hostess as she sang Oberon's 
 " Mermaid Song," from the far end of the room. 
 Then came dinner in an octagon dining-room 
 at a round table with pink wax candles and ices, 
 and then a quick drive to the theatre where our 
 stalls were kept for us. I remember neither 
 the name of the theatre nor of the play, only the 
 look of the bright lighted stage, and the pretty 
 white house full of spectators. Mrs. Sartoris 
 was using a pair of turquoise eye-glasses, through 
 which she looked about, and presently she whis- 
 pered to me, " There, to your left in the box on
 
 xii Mrs. Kemble 211 
 
 the first tier." I looked expecting I know not 
 what, and my first impression was disappoint- 
 ment. I saw some figures in the box, two men 
 standing at the back, and a lady in a front seat 
 sitting alone. She was a stout middle-aged 
 woman, dressed in a stiff watered-silk dress, 
 with a huge cameo, such as people then wore, 
 at her throat. Her black shiny hair shone like 
 polished ebony, she had a heavy red face, 
 marked brows, great dark eyes ; there was 
 something how shall I say it ? rather fierce, 
 defiant, and set in her appearance, powerful, 
 sulky ; she frightened one a little. " That is 
 George Sand," said Mrs. Sartoris, bending her 
 head and making a friendly sign to the lady 
 with her eye-glasses. The figure also bent its 
 head, but I don't remember any smile or change 
 of that fixed expression. The contrast struck 
 me the more, for my hostess, as I have said, 
 scarcely needed to speak to make herself 
 understood ; her whole countenance spoke for 
 her even if she was silent. George Sand 
 looked half-bored, half-far-away ; she neither 
 lighted up nor awoke into greeting. 1 
 
 1 I like better to think of George Sand as I never saw her, with
 
 212 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 Mrs. Kemble once said she had heard 
 George Sand described half in fun as "un- 
 amiable, very emphatic, very dictatorial, very 
 like herself, in short " ; but perhaps the descrip- 
 tion was as superficial in one case as it assuredly 
 would have been in the other. 
 
 Mrs. Kemble was dramatic rather than 
 dictatorial. Her selection of facts was curiously 
 partial and even biassed ; not so her uncom- 
 promising sense of their moral value. When 
 she sat with her watch open before her, reading, 
 writing, working to rule, it was because time 
 itself was of importance in her eyes, rather than 
 her work. For her, life belonged to time, 
 rather than time to life. " Do you think I could 
 have borne with my life if I had not lived by 
 rule ?" she used to say. She carried her love of 
 method into everything, even into the game of 
 Patience with which she amused herself. 
 Evening after evening the table would be set 
 
 gray hairs and a softened life, outcoming and helpful and living in later 
 years among her plants, and her grandchildren, and her poor people ; 
 to imagine her as I have heard her described in her age, beneficent, 
 occupied, tending and prescribing, distributing the simples out of her 
 garden, healing the sick, softened by time, giving to others day by day 
 what she still earned by her nights of persistent work.
 
 Mrs. Kemble 213 
 
 and the appointed number of games would be 
 played conscientiously, as she sat, whether she 
 was tired or not, inclined or not, as a beloved 
 enchantress dealing out passing destinies to the 
 pasteboard men and women on the table before 
 her. Mrs. Kemble once sent over for a 
 neighbour to teach him Patience ; one might 
 moralise over the combination, Mrs. Kemble 
 teaching Patience in her grand-seigneur fashion 
 and meekly subservient to its laws ! It was 
 indeed because she was so conscious of 
 passionate interests and diversities, that she 
 tried to shape her life to one recurring pattern. 
 A friend recalls an anecdote of Frederika 
 Bremer, who was not willing to see Mrs. Kemble 
 on one occasion, explaining afterwards, " I could 
 not see so many pecfple as you are when I had 
 a headache." She was indeed many people, 
 actors and musicians, philosophers, teachers, 
 and poets, in one. She was eighty before she 
 attempted a novel, but her letters are models, 
 especially the earlier ones. Her poems are 
 very lovely. Her Farewell to the Alps was 
 written after threescore years and ten had 
 passed over her head, and I heard her read it
 
 214 Chapters from some Memoirs CHAP. 
 
 with tears. Once I asked her why she so dis- 
 liked the stage, loving all that belonged to it 
 as she did. She said that it was because she 
 loved her own being even more than her art ; 
 that she found the constant simulation of 
 emotion in time destroyed in herself the possi- 
 bility of natural feeling, and that she wished to 
 keep the possession of her own soul ; but I 
 think she has also written this somewhere in 
 her Records. 
 
 Perhaps the most distinguishing stamp of 
 her character was her great and fervent piety. 
 Her convictions were very deep ; what she said 
 of her own religious faith was that it was 
 " invincible, unreasoning." I have heard a 
 friend describe how, as they came along the 
 mountain pass from Roselaui, Mrs. Kemble 
 made her bearers set her down at the summit of 
 the ascent. " I will lift up mine eyes unto the 
 hills," she said, breaking out into the words of 
 the Psalm, and repeating verse after verse. 
 She used to go regularly to church when she 
 was in London, though I do not think any of 
 the steeples and pulpits which adorn South 
 Kensington exactly suited the deep and fervent
 
 XII 
 
 Mrs. Kemble 215 
 
 spirit of her faith. She was neither H igh Church 
 nor Low Church nor Broad Church, and once 
 after witnessing a Catholic ceremony, Fete 
 Dieu, in some foreign city, she exclaimed to her 
 foreign man-servant, " Oh, Govert, what an 
 amusing religion you have ! " But her faith 
 was a noble one, and her great reverence for 
 what was good and great seemed to make good- 
 ness and greatness nearer to us. 
 
 Of all possessions, that of the added power 
 which comes to us through the gifts of others 
 is one of the most mysterious and most precious. 
 We are inadequate in a thousand ways, but the 
 grace is there. 
 
 Mrs. Kemble possessed to a rare degree the 
 gift of ennobling that to which she turned her 
 mind. Kindness is" comparatively common- 
 place, but that touch which makes others feel 
 akin to qualities greater than any they are 
 conscious of in themselves, was, I think, the 
 virtue by which she brought us all into 
 subjection. 
 
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