“. . . I shall be very anxious to know how the proposition of M. d’Arblay has been received, and, if accepted, on what conditions, and when and how the voyage is to be performed; I should hope in a stout man-of-war; and that M. de Narbonne will be of the party, being so united in friendship and political principles.
“. . . I have written to Mrs. Crewe all you have said on the subject of writing something to stimulate benevolence and commiseration in favour of the poor French ecclesiastics, amounting to 6000 now in England, besides 400 laity here, and 800 at Jersey, in utter want . . . . I have been working with my pen night and day for more than this last fortnight, in correspondence with Mrs. Crewe and others.
“The expense, in only allowing the clergy 8s. a week, amounts to about £7500 a month, which cannot be supported long by private subscriptions, and must at last be taken up by Parliament; but to save the national disgrace of suffering these excellent people to die of hunger, before the Parliament meets and agrees to do something for them, the ladies must work hard.”
It was a Ladies’ Committee which Mrs. Crewe had formed for the Emigrant Clergy Contribution Fund, of which Dr. Burney had undertaken the office of secretary. He gives a long list of names - “very illustrious and honourable” - of those whom Mrs. Crewe had induced to join her committee.
“Your mother works hard,” continues the Doctor, “in packing and distributing papers among her friends in town and country, and Sally in copying letters. You and M. d’Arblay are very good in wishing to contribute your mite; but I did not intend leading you into this scrape. If you subscribe your pen, and he his sword, it will best answer Mr. Burke’s idea, who says ‘There are two ways by which people may be charitable - the one by their money, the other by their exertions.’”
Edmund Burke, in a letter unpublished save for the last sentence, writes to Dr. Burney (Sept. 15, 1793):
“The plan you send does great honour to Mrs. Crewe’s goodness of heart and soundness of judgment. Mrs. B. will be glad to act an underpart in such an excellent design . . . . What is done by the public for these excellent persons is very honourable to the nation, but still it is not done in the exact way I could wish. What is done is done from general humanity and not as in favour of sufferers in a common cause. Their cause is our own, if the cause of honour, religion, fidelity, an adherence to the grand foundations of social order, be our cause. If things had been taken up on that ground our charity would not have been the less charity, and it would answer a great political purpose into the bargain.” After lamenting the defeat of the Duke of York’s army at Dunkirk, he remarks: “But I must say that the whole scheme of the war is mistaken (or appears to me to be so), for it ought not to be for Dunkirk, or this or t’other town - but to drive Jacobinism out of the world . . . . To say the truth I feel very awkward. I am as responsible as a Minister for the war, and yet in no one instance have I (or Wyndham that I know of) been consulted or communicated with. Most assuredly this affair of Dunkirk would never have been my plan, nor an errand on which I should have sent the Duke of York. But at present we must mum and give the enemy no occasion to insult and triumph. This complaint never would be made but to a friend, and one as warm in the cause as myself.
“. . . This is a great thing, this of Toulon, - if Lord Hood can throw in a body of Spanish forces from Barcelona - otherwise it will not be as decisive as the possession of the great fort
[Facing Page]
EDMUND BURKE
and arsenal of France in the Mediterranean ought to promise.”
Mr. Burke goes on to say, however, that “well improved, the plan may promise complete success,” and in that case, looking forward to better prospects for the émigrés, he observes: “The establishment of Madame d’Arblay is a matter in which I take no slight interest. If I had not the greatest affection to her virtues, my admiration of her incomparable talents would make me desirous of an order of things which would bring forward a gentleman of whose merits, by being the object of her choice, I have no doubt.
“. . . Before I went to bed (last evening) a friend brought me the Gazette, which confirms the advantage obtained by Beaulieu . . . . I certainly should have been more pleased that the Duke of York had relieved Beaulieu than that Beaulieu had relieved the Duke of York . . . . [But] we must take the good which God gives us thankfully, and in the way in which he is pleased to give it. Surely no man was ever more thankful, though the weakness of our querulous nature cries - quan quam o!”
In the course of a few weeks Madame d’Arblay’s pamphlet in aid of the French priests appeared before the public. That pamphlet lies before us, its paper discoloured by age. The title-page runs as follows
The writer observes: “By addressing myself to females, I am far from inferring that charity is exclusively their praise; no, it is a virtue as manly as it is gentle; it is Christian, in one word, and ought therefore to be universal. But the pressure of present need is so urgent that the ladies who patronise this plan are content to spread it amongst their own sex, whose contributions, though smaller, may more conveniently be sudden, and whose demands for wealth being less serious may render those contributions more general.”
After speaking with horror and indignation of the crimes perpetrated by the Convention, the writer goes on to remark: “Let us not, however, destroy the rectitude of our horror of these enormities by mingling it with implacable prejudice; nor condemn the oppressed with the oppressor, the slaughtered with the assassin . . . . We are too apt to consider ourselves rather as a distinct race of beings than as merely the emulous inhabitants of rival states; but ere our detestation leads to the indiscriminate proscription of a whole people, let us look at the Emigrant French Clergy, and ask where is the Englishman, where, indeed, the human being, in whom a sense of right can more disinterestedly have been demonstrated, or more nobly predominate? O let us be brethren with the good, wheresoever they may arise! and let us resist the culpable, whether abroad or at home . . . . Flourishing and happy ourselves, shall we see cast upon our coasts virtue we scarce thought mortal, sufferers whose story we could not read without tears, martrys that remind us of other days, and let them perish?”
In sending her manuscript to her father on October 21, Madame d’Arblay writes: “My dear father will think I have been very long in doing the little I have done . . . . [but] I have done it with my whole mind, and, to own the truth, with a species of emotion that has greatly affected me, for I could not deeply consider the situation of these venerable men without feeling for them to the quick. If what I have written should have power to procure for them one more guinea, I shall be paid.”
During this same month of October, Marie Antoinette underwent her trial before the Revolutionary tribunal. Madame de Staël wrote an eloquent “defence of her conduct as queen, wife, and mother,” addressed to the French nation; but those in power turned a deaf ear to all arguments in favour of the prisoner, and on the 16th of October Marie Antoinette was executed.
Fanny writes to her father: “The terrible confirmation of this last act of savage hardness of heart has wholly overset us again. M. d’Arblay had entirely discredited its probability, and, to the last moment, disbelieved the report; not from milder thoughts of the barbarous rulers of his unhappy country, but from seeing that the death of the Queen could answer no purpose, helpless as she was to injure them, while her life might answer some as a hostage with the Emperor. Good heaven! that that wretched princess should so finish sufferings so unexampled!
“With difficulties most incredible,” she continues, “Madame de Staël has contrived, a second time, to save the lives of M. de Jaucourt and M. de Montmorenci, who are just arrived in Switzerland.[] We know as yet none of the particulars; simply that they are saved is all; but they write in a style the most melancholy to M. de Narbonne, of the dreadful fanaticism of licence . . . that still reigns unsubdued in France.
“No answer comes from Mr. Pitt, and we now expect none till Sir Guilbert Elliot makes his report of the state of Toulon and
of the Toulonese; till which no decision will be formed whether the Constitutionals in England will be employed or not.”
M. d’Arblay’s offer of serving in the expedition, we are told, “was not accepted,” but before the answer reached Bookham “the attempt upon Toulon had proved abortive.”
There is no doubt that both the Government and the Court looked with coldness and suspicion upon the party of the Constitutionels - the men who, through all the phases of the Revolution, alone had had the “enthusiasm of moderation.” This feeling is shown in the attitude assumed by the Government towards Lafayette.
“The business of M. de Lafayette has indeed been extremely bitter to M. d’Arblay,” writes his wife. “It required the utmost force he could put upon himself not to take some public part in it . . . . I was dreadfully uneasy during the conflict, knowing, far better than I can make him conceive, the mischiefs that might follow any interference at this moment in matters brought before the nation from a foreigner. But conscious of his own integrity, I plainly see he must either wholly retire or come forward to encounter whatever he thinks wrong.”
CHAPTER XIX. THE BOOKHAMITE RECLUSES
ABOUT four months after her marriage Madame d’Arblay writes to a friend: “We are now removed to a very small house in the suburbs of a very small village called Bookham. Our views are not so beautiful as from Phenice Farm, but our situation is totally free from neighbours and intrusion. We are about a mile and a half from Norbury Park, and two miles from Mickleham. I am become already so stout a walker, by use and with the help of a very able supporter, that I go to those places and return home on foot without fatigue, when the weather is kind.” In the “Memoirs” of her father she speaks of their dwelling as “a small but pleasant cottage, endeared for ever to their remembrance from having been found out for them by Mr. Lock.”
This cottage stands near to Bookham Church, facing a shady lane. Its surroundings can have little changed during the century that has elapsed since the d’Arblays made it their home. The church, with its quaint wooden spire, remains the same, the village is little altered, and fields, as of yore, lie beyond the garden of the dwelling. The cottage itself was smaller in former times, as two
THE COTTAGE AT BOOKHAM
rooms and a verandah have been added, but it is a cottage still - an ideal one indeed, with its tiled roof, its white window-frames, its green outside shutters, and its clustering roses. The little parlour and two bedrooms, one panelled, the other oak-floored, mentioned in the “Diaries,” are said to be just as they were in the d’Arblays’ day. We have sat in that parlour and have pictured to ourselves the husband and wife enjoying their peaceful occupations. “Here,” writes Fanny, “we are tranquil, undisturbed, and undisturbing. ‘Can life,’ M. d’Arblay often says, ‘be more innocent than ours, or happiness more inoffensive?’ He works in his garden, or studies English and mathematics, while I write. When I work at my needle he reads to me; and we enjoy the beautiful country around us in long and romantic strolls. He is extremely fond, too, of writing, and makes, from time to time, memorandums of such memoirs, poems, and anecdotes as he recollects and I wish to have preserved.”
The piece of land behind the cottage consisted, in those days, of a garden and orchard, the only change in modern times being that the garden has been increased in size. There are some old gnarled apple-trees at the further end of the lawn which may possibly be the very trees experimented on by M. d’Arblay. “Think of our horticultural shock last week,” writes Fanny, “when Mrs. Bailey, our landlady, entreated M. d’Arblay ‘not to spoil her fruit-trees!’ - trees he had been pruning with his utmost skill and strength. However, he has consulted your ‘Miller’ thereupon, and finds out she is very ignorant, which he has gently intimated to her.
“. . . This sort of work is so totally new to him that he receives every now and then some of poor Merlin’s[] ‘disagreeable compliments,’ for when Mr. Lock’s or the Captain’s gardeners
INTERIOR OF THE COTTAGE
favour our grounds with a visit they commonly make known that all has been done wrong. Seeds are sowing in some parts when plants ought to be reaping, and plants are running to seed while they are thought not yet at maturity. Our garden, therefore, is not yet quite the most profitable thing in the world; but M. d’A. assures me it is to be the staff of our table and existence.
“A little, too, he has been unfortunate; for, after immense toil in planting and transplanting strawberries round our hedge, he has just been informed they will bear no fruit the first year, and the second we may be ‘over the hills and far away!’
“Another time, too, with great labour, he cleared a considerable compartment of weeds, and, when it looked clean and well, and he showed his work to the gardener, the man said he had demolished an asparagus bed! M. d’A. protested, however, nothing could look more like des mauvaises herbes.
“His greatest passion is for transplanting. Everything we possess he moves from one end of the garden to the other, to produce better effects. Roses take the place of jessamines, jessamines of honeysuckles, and honeysuckles of lilacs, till they have all danced round as far as the space allows; but whether the effect may not be a general mortality, summer only can determine.
“Such is our horticultural history. But I must not omit that we have had for one week cabbages from our own cultivation every day! Oh, you have no idea how sweet they tasted! We agreed they had a freshness and a goût we had never met with before. We had them for too short a time to grow tired of them, because, as I have already hinted, they were beginning to run to seed before we knew they were eatable.”
Fanny’s old friend, Mr. Arthur Young, must have rejoiced to hear of her new mode of life. In one of his letters, written to her soon after she had resigned her post at Court, he remarks: “What a plaguy business ’tis to take up one’s pen to write to a person who is constantly moving in a vortex of pleasure, brilliancy, and wit - whose movements and connections are, as it were, in another world!
“. . . It seemeth that you make a journey to Norfolk. Now, do you see, if you do not give a call on the farmer and examine his ram (an old acquaintance), his bull, his lambs, calves and crops, he will say but one thing of you - that you are fit for a Court, but not for a farm; and there is more happiness to be found among my rooks than in the midst of all the princes and princesses of Golconda. I would give a hundred pounds to see you married to a farmer that never saw London, with plenty of poultry ranging in a few green fields, and flowers and shrubs disposed where they should be, around a cottage, and not around a breakfast-room in Portman Square,[] fading in eyes that know not to admire them.”
In the summer of this same year (1794) Fanny had the great pleasure of receiving a visit from her father. In one of the Doctor’s “domestic and amical tours . . . he suddenly turned out of his direct road to take a view of the dwelling of the Hermits of Bookham.”
“It was not, perhaps, without the spur of some latent solicitude,” she writes in the “Memoirs” of her father, “that Dr. Burney made this first visit to them abruptly, at an early hour, and when believed far distant; and if so, never were kind doubts more kindlily solved; he found all that most tenderly he could wish - concord and content; gay concord and grateful content.
“When he sent in his name from his post-chaise, the Hermits flew to receive him; and ere he could reach the little threshold of the little habitation, his daughter was in his arms. How long she thus kept him she knows not, but he was very patient at the detention, tears of pleasure standing in his full eyes at her rapturous reception.”
Fanny writes to her father soon after his visit:
“It is just a week since I had the greatest gratification of its kind I ever, I think, experienced - so kind a thought, so sweet a surprise as was my dearest father’s visit! How softly and soothingly it has rested upon my mind ever since!
‘‘‘Abdolomine’[] has no regret but that his garden was not in better order; he was a little piqué, he confesses, that you said it
was not very neat . . . . However, you should have seen the place before he began his operations to do him justice; there was then nothing else but mauvaises herbes; now you must, at least, allow there is a mixture of flowers and grain! I wish you had seen him yesterday, mowing down our hedge - with his sabre, and with an air and attitudes so military that, if he had been hewing down other legions than those he encountered - i.e., of spiders - he could scarcely have had a mien more tremendous or have demanded an arm more mighty. Heaven knows I am ‘the most contente personne in the world ‘to see his sabre so employed!
“You spirited me on in all ways; for this week past I have taken tightly to the grand ouvrage.[] If I go on so a little longer, I doubt not but M. d’Arblay will begin settling where to have a new shelf for arranging it!
“. . . Mr. Lock was gratified, even affected, by my account of the happiness you had given me. He says, from the time of our inhabiting this maisonnette one of his first wishes had been that you should see us in it; as no possible description or narration could so decidedly point out its competence . . . . How thankfully did I look back, the 28th of last month, upon a year that has not been blemished with one regretful moment!”
Dr. Burney, who was engaged at this time in translating some of Metastasio’s poems, writes to his daughter: “I have this morning attempted his charming pastoral in ‘Il Re Pastore.’ I’ll give you the translation, because the last stanza is a portrait:
“‘Our simple, narrow mansion
Will suit our station well;
There’s room for heart expansion,
And peace and joy to dwell.”’
[Box Hedges at Mickleham]
CHAPTER XX. A GLIMPSE OF THE GAY WORLD
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 722
