Fanny Burney

by Claire Harman

  The generation gap exacerbated these difficulties. Alex’s parents were actually old enough to be his grandparents, and he was obviously more influenced by the taste and manners of his own age than theirs. He idolised the work of his romantic contemporaries Byron and Lamartine, and was the first person (of many) to recommend to his mother a novel called Waverley. The immediate success of Scott’s novel must have made a painful contrast with the reception accorded The Wanderer in the same year. Alex may have felt ashamed by the bad reviews his mother’s book had attracted; he was staying with his uncle James all through the spring and summer of 1815 when Hazlitt’s stinging attack on Madame d’Arblay was published in the Edinburgh Review, provoking James to break off his friendship with the reviewer. Alex’s response was very different. On 1 May he sat down, ‘for want of any better occupation’, to write a long private critique of ‘the last work of The Author of Evelina’, pointing out some of the ‘spots in her Sun’:

  The Author seems to have found it necessary to concentrate [the English language] with painful conciseness, and to shorten off with elaborate quaintness that which literally translated from the French sentence, as she no doubt originally conceived, would not have had in English the same elegance.94

  Amusing as it is to see the phrase ‘painful conciseness’ applied to The Wanderer, a novel of some 400,000 words, one understands what Alex means when he translates one of the book’s phrases into French and it suddenly becomes elegant. ‘The Author of Evelina’, to use Alex’s impersonal term, had described one of her characters as having ‘the strong recommendation of being wholly natural; a recommendation as rare in itself as success is in its deviations’.95 ‘Its deviations’ particularly irritated Alex, but he showed that in translation the phrase could be turned into a neat French apothegm: ‘Il est aussi rare d’être naturel que de reussir sans l’être.’ There is no evidence that Alex ever showed his mother his critique of The Wanderer – which is notably more concerned with minutiae like the above than with the book’s larger meaning. It was probably much more satisfying not to show her. Given their quarrel over ‘strained’ and ‘natural’ style, his choice of example seems a particularly subtle form of revenge.

  By early July in Brussels, Madame d’Arblay was tentatively looking forward to a reunion with her husband and a return to Paris, though, as she wrote to Mary Ann Waddington, ‘the changes which this country has now for so long a time gone through, have been so astonishing, so sudden, so unexpected, That they take at least away all presumption, if not all confidence in public transactions. This is no siecle for those who love their home, or who have a home to love’, she continued. ‘’Tis a siecle for the Adventurous, to whom Ambition always opens resources; or for the New, who guess not at the Catastrophes that hang on the rear, while the phantom Expectation allures them to the front.’96

  Unknown to Fanny, a catastrophe that would put back all their plans had befallen her husband the day before she wrote her wistful letter to Mrs Waddington. A new horse had dealt d’Arblay a violent kick to the right leg as he approached it in the stables (where the horse was eating oats), and the injury had become infected. D’Arblay had developed a fever, and by the time Fanny heard about all this ten days later he was very ill and desperate for her to join him. She packed her few things and set off immediately in a diligence to Liège, the first stage towards Trèves.

  Later, Fanny was to wonder at the rash speed with which she set off from Brussels alone on the two-hundred-mile journey across the Netherlands and the Prussian Rhineland via Liège, Cologne, Bonn, and then south to Coblenz and Trèves. ‘I can scarcely myself now conceive how I found the courage to combat the obstacles I continually encountered’, she wrote nearly ten years later when she was composing her lengthy ‘Journey to Trèves’;97 ‘But I was so absorbed by an anxiety that had nothing to do with myself, or my situation, that both were nearly driven from my thoughts & my calculations’.98 With no protection, no contacts in any of the towns on the way, very little money and very little knowledge of German, it is certainly remarkable that Fanny – a woman, it must be remembered, who was once rendered hysterical by a sedanchair ride from one end of St James’s Palace to the other – undertook this long and hazardous journey. She had problems with the authorities all the way: every stop seemed to harbour some power-crazed minor bureaucrat ready to find fault with her papers and threatening to send her back in the direction from which she had come. She dealt with these people with surprising sang froid, dropping the name of d’Arblay’s commander, General Kleist, as often and in as authoritative a manner as possible. In Cologne she passed herself off as a Frenchwoman to avoid the delays and alarms of red tape. In Coblenz she had to trail round the town at night in the rain trying to get the necessary visas. In Bonn she almost missed the coach when she got lost in the city’s winding streets and only found her way back to her hotel when she recognised a gaudily-painted statuette in a corner niche. It was a damned close-run thing:

  I saw that the Coach was just departing! The Horses harnessed, every passenger entered, & the Drivers with their whips in hand extended! – Oh my God! what an escape! & what thankful Joy & Gratitude I experienced!99

  The remarkable views from the coach window of the famous river Rhine as she travelled from Bonn to Coblenz made Fanny believe she was entering ‘regions of enchantment’:

  we passed through such stupendous mountains on each side, that the Rhine & its Banks, which constituted our Road, made the whole of the valley; while stately Rocks, of striking forms, & hanging woods, of exquisite beauty, invited, on one side, our gaze & admiration; & prospects eternally diversifying varied our delighted attention on the other.100

  But this was no Grand Tour. The picturesque splendour of the ‘falling Turrets & scattered fragments, moss grown, & widely spread around’ on the summit of almost every hill were not ‘the indispensible effect of all conquering, irresistible Time’ but war ruins, as Fanny understood all too well. They gave ‘as much interest & as great a charm to the scene, as they caused, on the other hand, sorrow, resentment: & even horror to the reflections’.101

  After Coblenz, all pleasure went out of the journey. Fanny had almost entirely run out of money and was only able to secure a place on the coach by deferring payment until Trèves. After the ‘exquisite felicity’ of her reunion with d’Arblay on the evening of 24 July, she was able to see for herself the damage done by his accident. He was still in great pain, had round-the-clock nursing and had to keep his leg raised all the time. In the morning, he was lifted from his bed onto a sofa and wheeled to the window, where he remained all day, ‘the poor tortured Leg always lifted up, & immoveable, & the whole person in a state of cruel constraint from apprehension of any motion that might cause a fresh shock’.102 To pass the time until her husband was well enough to leave Trèves, Fanny took day trips alone around the city and down the Moselle. D’Arblay was meanwhile trying to secure a recall from duty, but as before, he had great difficulty getting any response from his superiors in Paris, who had lost all interest in the few men scattered on the Prussian frontier. Eventually he received confirmation of his recall and the papers necessary to get himself and his wife back to Paris. He also received, simultaneously, confirmation of his promotion to Lieutenant-General and his retraite: d’Arblay was being officially retired.

  Thus d’Arblay’s unspectacular military career came to an end. He and Fanny left Trèves in mid-September and began an arduous journey back to France in their own calèche, with all d’Arblay’s luggage hanging off the back to allow maximum leg-room under the leather apron. Perhaps there was some prestige to be had from returning home from the war dramatically wounded – however those wounds had actually been received. But there was little honour or glory in d’Arblay’s return. The insolence of the Allied border-guards, and of a Prussian sub-officer at Thionville in particular, enraged the Lieutenant-General and embarrassed his wife. The humiliation of having to re-enter his native land by the permission of foreigners and to see, as
Fanny put it, ‘the vision of Henry V revived, & Paris in the Hands of the English!’,103 must have hurt him far more even than his mangled leg.

  The d’Arblays were relieved to find their possessions in the rue Miroménil intact and the town full of their former friends and neighbours. They did not intend to stay in Paris long, however. With the Lieutenant-General’s retirement and the continuing instability in France, they had decided to move back to England, to some spa town perhaps, where they could attend to d’Arblay’s health. They didn’t tell their friends their long-term plans, but passed off their impending departure as a temporary expedient; the many visits they received in Paris that month therefore took on the nature of secret last farewells. The Latour-Maubourgs, Madame de Maisonneuve, the Princesse de Poix and Madame La Tour du Pin were all friends who ‘had wrought themselves, by innumerable kindnesses’ into Fanny’s affections, and she was extremely sorry to leave them. ‘The vivacity & obligingness of the Really high bred French’ had led her to prefer French society in many ways to English, even during the extremely volatile period she had lived through in that country. In polite society, politics could always be overridden by manners (or trampled underfoot by manners, depending on your point of view); it was therefore easy to associate again with the Princesse d’Hénin and Madame de Maurville, ‘who had not yet forgiven my escape from them at Brussells [i.e. her moving out of the shared house]—but came to me with unfailing kindness’.104 Lafayette, too, was among the callers to d’Arblay’s sick-bed who despite political differences retained a real affection for his former comrade-in-arms; and Monsieur Larrey, another political opponent, but revered by Fanny for his surgical expertise (and created a Baron by Napoleon for his remarkable services on the field), was on hand to tend the injured leg. Even Talleyrand was not completely beyond the pale. Fanny, who hadn’t seen him since his visit to the Juniper colony in 1793, recognised the great man when she attended Madame de Laval’s drawing room, and stopped by his chair on her way out. ‘Monsieur de Talleyrand has forgotten me, but no one forgets him,’105 she said, and left immediately. ‘[I] saw a movement of surprize by no means unpleasant break over the habitual placidity, of the nearly imperturbable composure of his general – & certainly made up countenance,’ she remarked uncharitably.106 But she was glad to have spoken to him, for old times’ sake: ‘O what Days were those of conversational perfection! of Wit, ingenuity, gaiety, repartee, information, badinage, & eloquence!’

  The d’Arblays left Paris for Calais in the calèche and arrived in Dover on 17 October 1815, both terribly ill and shaken by a rough crossing. They went straight to Deptford to visit Charles, then on to meet Alex at Sablonière’s Hotel in Leicester Square. Fanny never set foot on French soil again.

  * * *

  * Sally Burney, his wife, was affectionately caricatured by Lamb in his essay ‘Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist’ in Elia. The essay is a celebration of how to take one’s pleasures seriously.

  * It is worth noting that Austen was passing on this news to her sister Cassandra from Cassandra Cooke, the Austens’ and d’Arblays’ mutual friend in Great Bookham, who while on holiday in Brighton had been discussing both novelists with Dr Edmund Isham (then Warden of All Souls). Austen goes on to remark: ‘Mrs C[ooke]. invented it all of course.’ Assuming ‘it’ to refer to The Wanderer, not to Dr Isham’s opinion of Pride and Prejudice, this sounds like a sly jibe against Madame d’Arblay, suggesting that there was already a joke current between the Cookes and the Austens connected with Mrs Cooke’s ideas being plagiarised. Mrs Cooke was by this time an author herself. Her novel Battleridge was published in 1799.

  14

  Keeping Life Alive

  On their return to England in 1815, the d’Arblays settled in a pleasant terraced house at 23 Great Stanhope Street, Bath. The fashionable spa town suited Fanny and her ‘poor Boiteux’1 very well, being cheaper than London and more genteel. In Louis XVIII’s lavish dispersal of honours during the Hundred Days d’Arblay had been made a Count, but he chose not to use his title in England (except at the bank and the War Office). He and Fanny simply couldn’t live up to the social expectations of being ‘titled’ – nor did they want to.

  Soon after arriving in Bath Fanny discovered that there were several of her old acquaintances from her travels with Mrs Thrale and Mrs Ord still living in the city ‘in perfect preservation’,2 and in the autumn of 1815 Mrs Piozzi herself was living in Gay Street, a few hundred yards from the d’Arblays’ lodgings just north of the Circus. Fanny felt compelled to call on her, but the reception she met with was frosty. Mrs Piozzi was wearing mourning, as she had done permanently in the six years since Piozzi’s death, and other people’s attitudes to her late husband remained the benchmark by which she judged them overall. When Mrs Piozzi sold off the contents of Streatham Park in 1816, she kept only two of the magnificent set of portraits by Reynolds, those of Henry Thrale and Arthur Murphy, the latter ‘the only friend who had been equally attached to both my husbands’.3 All the others, including the portraits of Dr Burney, Garrick (both bought by the acquisitive Charles Burney junior), Dr Johnson and the double portrait of herself and Queeney were ultimately disposable.*

  Fanny, on the other hand, still carried with her ‘whithersoever I go’4 a locket which Mrs Thrale had given her years before, containing a lock of Hester’s hair wound together with a lock of Susan’s. Two years later, Fanny and Mrs Piozzi had another meeting which was more successful – in Fanny’s view, at least. To the end of her life, Fanny believed that some sort of restitution had been made, but the older woman revealed in her commonplace book that she remained cynically unmoved:

  My perfect Forgiveness of l’aimable Traitresse, was not the act of Duty, but the impulsion of Pleasure rationally sought for, where it was at all Time sure of being found – In her Conversation. I will however not assist her Reception in the World a Second Time –5

  Life in Bath was never comfortable for d’Arblay, whose wound continued to pain him and who had many reservations about settling in England. He saw little reason for staying if their son did not make a success of his university career; Madame d’Arblay therefore made it clear to Alex that it was for her sake as much as his own that he should ‘procure Honour & Independence’6 – she certainly did not want to live in France again, although she conceded (in theory) to a yearly visit.

  Alex did not respond well to being nagged, as his mother well knew: ‘he pines, he sickens, or rebels, under mental or intellectual restraint’, she wrote to Lady Keith.7 Though she monitored his work relentlessly and made him socialise in Bath during the vacations, Alex responded with ‘sighing & moaning’,8 and returned to his obsessive life of recreational mathematics, chess and solitude as soon as he was back in Cambridge. He distressed his mother by rarely answering her letters until she was in a complete panic (this did not necessarily take long), but perhaps reasoned that there was not much to answer to communications such as this:

  Have you Cocoa?

  Have you got Shoes?

  Do you take a Rhubarb pill from time to time?

  an analeptic if you have any headache?

  a black one if Nature is coy?9

  Alex had difficulty applying himself to learning – it was not something he had ever had to do. His memory was as astonishing as his mother’s (at about this time he recited to Charlotte Barrett the whole of Pope’s ‘Lines to an Unfortunate Lady’ to illustrate a point about his translation of it into French, which he also recited), but he lacked any particle of her drive towards self-improvement.

  Alex was forced to transfer from Caius to Christ’s College in the Michaelmas term of 1816, and at the same period had to resign the Tancred scholarship because neither he nor his parents had understood it was for students taking a medical degree. Fanny knew that without the entree to a Cambridge fellowship granted by a high degree Alex’s chances in life were not going to be good, and that there was not enough money to maintain him otherwise. D’Arblay had the same worries about his son, but
thought of a different solution. Despite his poor health, d’Arblay made a three-month visit to France in the summer of 1816 to visit his family (Fanny stayed behind to watch over Alex), during which he rapidly evolved a scheme for Alex to marry the beautiful daughter of one of his wealthy old friends from Joigny. The attraction of this idea to the ageing and ailing General is easy to see – it would have re-established the d’Arblay blood-line in its native country, solved the problem of money-earning for Alex and possibly, by removing that worry and making him take on responsibilities he had hitherto shirked, woken the dreamy youth out of his indolence. But Fanny objected strongly to any marriage of convenience, a shockingly old-fashioned, even barbaric practice in her view (as d’Arblay should have known from her works). Apart from thinking that Alex was far too young and immature to be married, she insisted on him ‘seeing, selecting, chusing, wholly for himself’10 when the time came, just as his parents had been able to do. She urged d’Arblay to keep even the suggestion of such a match secret from their son, and he reluctantly gave in. He returned to England in November with little to show for his troublesome journey apart from a small amount of back-pay and an attack of jaundice.

  Continuing problems with his pension – which was reduced because he was living abroad and which he was required to collect in person – necessitated d’Arblay’s return to France in the summer of 1817. It was on this, his last journey home, that he arranged for the completion of his portrait painted in oils by father and son Carle and Horace Vernet.* Posterity was on his mind: ‘People will always remind Alex who his mother is, but not who his father was!’ he said rather sadly. ‘I have had this portrait made and dedicate it to him so that he doesn’t forget me.’12

  In the Vernets’ picture, the Lieutenant-General appears in full dress uniform and medals, seated as if on the edge of a battlefield, with a warhorse behind him looking nobly animated, and a battle scene featuring a dragoon and guns in the background. Even making allowances for convention, this representation could only seem absurd, not to say fraudulently self-aggrandising, to anyone who knew the history of d’Arblay’s war. The horse, certainly, recalled the source of his injury, but not its banal circumstances. The obvious implication of the picture is that d’Arblay had been at Waterloo or one of the other major battles of the Hundred Days, instead of being posted about as far away from the action as possible, doing little more than keeping his equipment polished and having dinner with General Kleist.