Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  The Wanderer was a serious critical failure. The first edition sold out before publication (on the expectation that had been aroused), but the subsequent reprint fell flat, and three years later the publishers, much to their chagrin, were left to pulp the copies they had overprinted in 1814. The novel was brought back into print in 1992 as a feminist rediscovery (and is popular with students), but prior to that new lease of life was almost universally derided as a really bad novel. Even Macaulay, keen to anatomise the poor style of Memoirs of Doctor Burney, passed over The Wanderer with a kind of weary disbelief, like an exhausted angel of death: it was ‘a book which no judicious friend to her memory will attempt to draw from the oblivion into which it has justly fallen’, he wrote in his essay-length review of the posthumous Diary and Letters.40

  Contemporary reviewers bemoaned the book’s ‘most unnecessary length’, ‘trifling and tedious’ dialogues and insufficiently ‘modern’ ideas.41 The style of The Wanderer was particularly criticised: ‘If we had not been assured in the title-page, that this work had been produced by the same pen as Cecilia,’ wrote John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review, ‘we should have pronounced Madame d’Arblay to be a feeble imitator of the style of Miss Burney’;42 and William Hazlitt wrote even more forthrightly in the Edinburgh Review that ‘There is little other power in Miss Burney’s novels than that of immediate observation; her characters, whether of refinement or vulgarity, are equally superficial and confined.’ There were many private expressions of disappointment, too; Sir Walter Scott regretted that ‘Madame D’Arblay has certainly made a miss’,43 while Byron rather more forcefully dismissed the book as ‘feminine trash’.44 Fanny’s friends hardly knew what to say about the novel. ‘You read the “Wanderer”, I doubt not, with as much surprise and disappointment as I did,’ William Weller Pepys wrote to Hannah More three months after publication; ‘but as we both have so much regard for the author, we must be faithful, and not quote each other’s opinion on that book.’45

  The unhappy truth was that the plot of The Wanderer was improbable and badly structured, and the style and language quite astonishingly awful. Nothing in the novel is directly or simply put. Instead of the wind blowing through the trees, zephyrs agitate the verdant foliage of venerable branches. ‘The feathered race’ does not sing but issues warbling sounds celestial ‘from the abode of angels, or to that abode chanting invitation’.46 It is a book in which cheeks are mantled with ‘the varying dies of quick transition of sentiment’, and where joy irradiates the hero’s countenance to such an extent that he feels obliged to bend his eyes to the ground:

  But their checked vivacity checked not the feelings which illumined them, nor the alarm which they excited, when Ellis, urged by affright to snatch a second look, saw the brilliancy with which they had at first sought her own, terminate in a sensibility more touching[.]47

  Joyce Hemlow has described this style as ‘a double swelling, present in neither romantic nor eighteenth-century writers, and peculiar to Madame d’Arblay alone’,48 a hybrid between the generalised diction of the eighteenth century and the loosening of control associated with ‘romantic’ writing. Professor Hemlow has also noted the influence of French on Burney’s English (her constant use of the phrasal genitive, such as ‘the presage of Harleigh’, ‘the house of Mrs Maple’, for instance), a phenomenon less charitably described by George Saintsbury in 1913 as ‘a lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original by a person who does not know English’.49 Alex d’Arblay’s private opinion was that his mother had ‘no doubt originally conceived’ The Wanderer in French;50 but while this may account for some of the novel’s stiltedness, it doesn’t excuse the insistent sentimentality of the writing, nor its peculiarly unpleasant fusion of hyperbole with euphemism. There had been elements of this in Camilla, in Brief Reflections and in the Court dramas. Much worse was to come in Memoirs of Doctor Burney.

  Monsieur d’Arblay had rushed over to England to be with his wife when he heard the news of her father’s death in April 1814. The peace was signed on 30 May and Napoleon, apparently vanquished for ever, was exiled to Elba. With the imminent restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, it was time for Fanny and her husband to make important decisions about the future. They both harboured fantasies of d’Arblay landing an important diplomatic post in England, but there was in reality never any chance of that for the humble civil servant. Fanny clearly did not want to go back to live in France, but d’Arblay at last saw a chance for promotion and perhaps restoration for himself to his old status under the new regime. Though he had sworn allegiance to the Republic in 1800 in order to get a passport, and had accepted the post offered him on the Santo Domingo expedition by Napoleon in 1802, d’Arblay now proudly claimed that he had been ‘constant dans mes refus’51 throughout the period. All he had actually refused was to serve against his wife’s country, whichever system was in power, but now he wanted some political credit for his years in the doldrums.

  That chance seemed to come in June 1814 when d’Arblay (who had returned to France alone the previous month) was offered a place in the Garde du Corps of the new King, Louis XVIII, brother of the murdered Louis XVI. D’Arblay was thrilled and honoured, though it is hard to see why: he was ranked only as a Sub-Lieutenant and the pay was derisory, scarcely enough to cover the expenses of his elaborately embroidered new uniform, plumed helmet, weapons and the two warhorses required. The Garde du Corps, made up of middle-aged émigrés and ci-devants like d’Arblay, was in fact a bit of a joke amongst professional soldiers and was never taken seriously as a fighting unit. D’Arblay’s satisfaction with his new position indicates that he was significantly out of touch with matters both military and political. His old acquaintance Talleyrand, at this date the most powerful man in France, was certainly not impressed by d’Arblay’s preferment. The two men met frequently at the house of Madame Laval, where d’Arblay kept petitioning the Foreign Minister on the subject of his hoped-for ‘consulship’. It is a mark of d’Arblay’s naivety that he thought he was making progress with this scheme when Talleyrand told him that his name had been ‘put on a list’.52

  As for being a Constitutionalist, as he claimed in the 1790s, it seems that Chevalier d’Arblay was emerging at the other end of the revolutionary period as an out-and-out monarchist and reactionary. Of course, many of his former associates had moved with the times – notably Narbonne, who had died serving as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, and Talleyrand, whose astonishing series of pragmatic volte-faces almost beggared belief. Mathieu de Montmorency-Laval was the only one of d’Arblay’s old associates to have ended up further to the right than he – Montmorency had ‘got religion’ and helped to found a Masonic-style order of ‘Chevaliers de la Foi’ in the service of Church and King. Madame de Staël was, if anything, more liberal than before, and her new salon, which included Lafayette and her current lover, Benjamin Constant, was actively critical of the restored monarch.

  D’Arblay’s commitment to a career in the army was constantly compromised by his tender solicitude for the feelings of his pacifist wife. She contemplated his return to military service with horror. D’Arblay had turned sixty in the summer of 1814 and was not particularly fit or healthy. He hadn’t ridden a warhorse for twenty-two years. Fanny understood how ‘highly gratifying’ the new position in the royal service was to her husband, but privately hoped for a speedy return to ‘civil domestic life’.53 Unfortunately, d’Arblay was so happy with his appointment to the ‘Maison du Roi’ that he began to drop hints that Alex should join him in the same service. The boy had, after all, miserably failed his end-of-year exams at Cambridge, and perhaps it was time to call a halt to his expensive English education. As a Lieutenant in the Garde du Corps, Alex could earn about 12,000 francs a year and possibly gain preferment in the royal household or the diplomatic service. Such a move would give him ‘inexprimable bonheur’, d’Arblay wrote to his wife; in fact, he had to admit, he had already put Alex’s name down for it.

  Alex him
self resisted this offer firmly, and Fanny thought it so impractical that she was almost dismissive. The question remained of what was to be done about their son, though, and d’Arblay’s impatience to act exercised Fanny all through the summer of 1814. She had reached some conclusions about Alex’s character which must have been painful to admit: ‘he thought – & still thinks – he could, & can, do what he pleases when he pleases. This perverse secret vanity casts him upon indolence & whim, & he never begins any thing, little or Great, in time, or with sufficient diligence to make it even possible to obtain Success.’54 To her sympathetic brother Charles, who had become one of the most highly respected Greek scholars of his day, Fanny confided that she thought her son had ‘something morbid in his constitution that paralyzes his character’.55 She wondered whether or not to remove Alex with her to France, begging the excuse of his name being on the Duc de Luxembourg’s list of supernumerary officers, or else move herself to Cambridge to oversee Alex’s studies personally. Both Alex and his father were unequivocally against this. D’Arblay came over to England again in October 1814 in order to take Fanny home with him to Paris, and Alex was left to his own strange devices and desires.

  When Monsieur and Madame d’Arblay returned to France in November 1814 they expected to enjoy their first ever period of peace and comfort there together, with a Bourbon King once more on the throne and a new regime opening out the prospect of honour and promotion for the ageing Chevalier. But everything seemed to go wrong from the first. On the way from the boat to the hotel in Calais, d’Arblay was the victim of a hit-and-run accident when a cart knocked him down and landed him a severe blow on the chest. His recovery was slow and the effects of the injury long-lasting. Back in Paris, the couple soon faced the threat of separation again when d’Arblay was ordered to a four-month residence at the garrison in Senlis, thirty miles north of Paris. While he was at home arranging for Fanny to join him there (she was not looking forward to life in the officers’ mess), news reached Paris of Napoleon’s daring escape from Elba on 26 February. It was received in the city with a curious apathy, which Fanny was puzzled to share. Even when it was known that Napoleon had re-entered France with his small army of followers, Parisians went about their business as usual and the d’Arblays carried on taking their daily drives in the Bois de Boulogne in the elegant calèche Monsieur had bought the previous year. Fanny tried to account for this ‘species of stupor’ in terms of over-exposure to such alarms during the previous twelve years:

  the idea of Napoleon was blended with all our Thoughts, our projects, our Actions. The greatness of his Power, the intrepidity of his Ambition, the vastness of his conceptions, & the restlessness of his spirit, kept suspense always breathless, & Conjecture always at work. […] how could I for a moment suppose he would re-visit France without a consciousness of success, founded upon some secret conviction that it was infallible [?…] Unmoved, therefore, I reposed in the general apparent repose, which, if it were as real in those with whom I mixt as in myself, I now deem for All a species of Infatuation.56

  However, as Napoleon moved quickly northwards meeting little if any resistance, royalist troops began to gear themselves for action. D’Arblay warned his wife to be prepared to leave the city without him at short notice and made her promise to use the protection of their old friend Madame d’Hénin (who had resumed her pre-Revolutionary title of Princesse) in such an eventuality. Fanny agreed with extreme reluctance. Privately, she was determined to hang on as near her husband as possible until the last minute.

  D’Arblay himself was in his barracks at the Tuileries with the Garde du Corps during most of these anxious days in March 1815, expecting any minute to set out to fight Bonaparte. He came back to the rue Miroménil on the nineteenth exhausted and depressed by the collapse of confidence in the loyalist camp, and spent the afternoon in ‘military business’ which Fanny took care to avoid overhearing. The couple seem to have had a compact not to offend each other’s sensibilities on the extremely delicate matter of Fanny’s pacifism: ‘I was always silent upon this subject’, she wrote later, detailing the events of this day. ‘[I was] well aware that while his Honour was dearer to him than his life, my own sense of Duty was dearer to me also than mine.’57 Dutiful ‘acquiescent stillness’ was, however, only really achievable when Fanny kept herself in willed ignorance. When d’Arblay received his orders to march later that day and had to part from his wife, very unsure whether they would ever see each other again, she could not resist watching his departure from the window:

  There, indeed, behold him I did – but Oh with what anguish! just mounting his War Horse – […] loaded with pistols, & equip’d completely for immediate service on the field of Battle – […] I had not the most distant idea he was thus armed & encircled with Instruments of Death – Bayonets – Lances – Pistols – Guns – Sabres – Daggers – oh! gracious God! what horrour assailed me at the sight! I had only so much sense & self-controul left as to crawl softly & silently away[.]58

  Fanny had hitherto dwelt on the dangers which her husband would face as a soldier; here, on the eve of the troubled ‘Hundred Days’ of Napoleon’s return, she contemplated, as if for the first time, his active participation in the process of war that so appalled her. D’Arblay seemed such a gentle man in peacetime, with his poetry-writing habits and fondness for painting and gardening, that Fanny found it very difficult to accept his professional manner (of which she had seen so little) as anything other than an aberration. The contrast had struck another observer, the English dramatist Bertie Greatheed, when he met d’Arblay at a menonly dinner in Paris in 1803. Greatheed described d’Arblay as ‘a pleasant and a handsome man, very intelligent and bears a most excellent character […] kind hearted, even tender, I believe, till on the command of another man he thinks it his duty to banish every feeling of humanity from his soul, and become more terrible than the tigre of Sumatra’.59 After-dinner conversation probably revealed more of this side of d’Arblay’s character to Greatheed in an hour than Fanny ever saw in their whole married life. She would have been horrified by Greatheed’s description of her beloved ami as ‘a thorough soldier with all his open rough virtues, and honourable murders on his head’.60 Honour was the virtue by which she excused all her husband’s military activity, but it was safely abstract; the idea of him ever having actually killed or even harmed another human being would have been too much for her to bear. When she did have intimations of her husband’s part in the brutal ‘exterminating contest’ of war, as on the occasion of their parting in Paris, he appeared to her almost monstrous, ‘so cold, so hard, so changed’.61 Her desolation after he left had as much to do with this sudden revelation as with the separation itself:

  The street was empty. The gay constant Gala of a Parisian Sunday was changed into fearful solitude. No sound was heard, but that of here & there some hurried footstep, on one hand hastening for a passport, to secure safety by flight; on the other rushing abruptly from, or to some secret concealment, to devize means of accelerating & hailing the entrance of the Conqueror. Well in tune with this air of impending crisis was my miserable mind, which from Grief little short of torture sunk, at its view, into a state of morbid quiet, that seemed the produce of feelings totally exhausted.62

  It is little wonder that the ‘bewildered’ Madame d’Arblay scarcely knew what to do when the Princesse d’Hénin called soon afterwards to tell her they would be leaving the capital that evening. With only one spare dress (she was still in mourning for her father) and a basket of clean underclothes, she set out to say goodbye to Madame de Maisonneuve, at whose house she received a hurried note from her husband: ‘My dearest amie, all is lost! – I can say no more at present. For God’s sake leave as soon as possible’.63 At the Princesse’s house, Lally-Tolendal was begging his mistress to hurry, but another difficulty had arisen: there were no horses for hire to pull the Princesse’s heavily-laden Berlin, the government having requisitioned them all. The anxious party, including Fanny, the Princesse, a femme de
chambre, valet and two postillions, was only able to leave Paris at about eleven at night when they secured the loan of four horses for the first stage out of town.

  Unknown to his wife, d’Arblay had left the city in similar confusion. At the review of troops at the Tuileries that day, the Garde du Corps had been expecting, with all the other royalist brigades, to march south to join the Duc de Berry and stage a battle against Napoleon. In fact the King, galloping past their ranks in an open carriage, was on his way north to Lille. Napoleon was already at Auxerre (very near d’Arblay’s native Joigny), and the Duc’s army had disintegrated. Suddenly, the whole army was on the run, the Maison du Roi straggling after the King’s party with the vague idea of regrouping in Lille.

  At the same time, Fanny and the Princesse wound their way towards the Belgian border in a zigzag route through Roi, Amiens, Arras, Douai and Tournai, using the Princesse’s passport and passing Fanny off as ‘famille’, or, on one tricky occasion, as another ‘femme de chambre’. The roads were oddly empty in the early stages but after Douai the women passed some groups of soldiers whom they peered at with anxious enquiry. The troops hardly seemed to know which side they were on. ‘Some times they called out a “Vive!-”’, Fanny noted, ‘but without finishing their wish; and we repeated – that is we bowed to the same hailing exclamation, without knowing, or daring to enquire its purport.’64

  It wasn’t until they reached Tournai that they heard Louis XVIII had fled northwards. There was no information about his entourage, but while Fanny was wandering about the town trying to find a way to post letters, she saw a liveried carriage which she found out belonged to the Prince de Condé. Hoping to get information about the Maison du Roi from the Prince or his companion the Comte de Vioménil, she accepted the help of a man to whom the Princesse had been talking. This ‘benevolent strange Chevalier’ was, unknown to Fanny at this point, none other than François-René de Chateaubriand, the famous writer and controversialist, on his way to join the King’s government in exile. Together they found de Vioménil eating his supper at an inn, but, without taking his eyes off his plate, the Count would only divulge that the King had by now crossed to Ghent. Fanny returned disappointed to her lodgings with the obliging stranger.