stop. Go and tell Ethel to come down; bring her down with you. Do you
understand?"
The unconscious infants toddle upstairs to their sister; and Lady Kew
blandly says, "Ethel's engagement to my grandson, Lord Kew, has long been
settled in our family, though these things are best not talked about
until they are quite determined, you know, my dear Mr. Newcome. When we
saw you and your father in London, we heard that you too-that you too
were engaged to a young lady in your own rank of life, a Miss--what was
her name?--Miss MacPherson, Miss Mackenzie. Your aunt, Mrs. Hobson
Newcome, who I must say is a most blundering silly person, had set about
this story. It appears there is no truth in it. Do not look surprised
that I know about your affairs. I am an old witch, and know numbers of
things."
And, indeed, how Lady Kew came to know this fact, whether her maid
corresponded with Lady Anne's maid, what her ladyship's means of
information were, avowed or occult, this biographer has never been able
to ascertain. Very likely Ethel, who in these last three weeks had been
made aware of that interesting circumstance, had announced it to Lady Kew
in the course of a cross-examination, and there may have been a battle
between the granddaughter and the grandmother, of which the family
chronicler of the Newcomes has had no precise knowledge. That there were
many such I know--skirmishes, sieges, and general engagements. When we
hear the guns, and see the wounded, we know there has been a fight. Who
knows had there been a battle-royal, and was Miss Newcome having her
wounds dressed upstairs?
"You will like to say good-bye to your cousin, I know," Lady Kew
continued, with imperturbable placidity. "Ethel, my dear, here is Mr.
Clive Newcome, who has come to bid us all good-bye." The little girls
came trotting down at this moment, each holding a skirt of their elder
sister. She looked rather pale, but her expression was haughty--almost
fierce.
Clive rose up as she entered, from the sofa by the old Countess's side,
which place she had pointed him to take during the amputation. He rose up
and put his hair back off his face, and said very calmly, "Yes, I'm come
to say good-bye. My holidays are over, and Ridley and I are off for Rome;
good-bye, and God bless you, Ethel."
She gave him her hand and said, "Good-bye, Clive," but her hand did not
return his pressure, and dropped to her side, when he let it go.
Hearing the words good-bye, little Alice burst into a howl, and little
Maude, who was an impetuous little thing, stamped her little red shoes
and said, "It san't be good-bye. Tlive san't go." Alice, roaring, clung
hold of Clive's trousers. He took them up gaily, each on an arm, as he
had done a hundred times, and tossed the children on to his shoulders,
where they used to like to pull his yellow mustachios. He kissed the
little hands and faces, and a moment after was gone.
"Qu'as-tu?" says M. de Florac, meeting him going over the bridge to his
own hotel. "Qu'as-tu, mon petit Claive? Est-ce qu'on vient de t'arracher
une dent?"
"C'est ca," says Clive, and walked into the Hotel de France. "Hulloh! J.
J.! Ridley!" he sang out. "Order the trap out and let's be off." "I
thought we were not to march till to-morrow," says J. J., divining
perhaps that some catastrophe had occurred. Indeed, Mr. Clive was going a
day sooner than he had intended. He woke at Fribourg the next morning. It
was the grand old cathedral he looked at, not Baden of the pine-clad
hills, of the pretty walks and the lime-tree avenues. Not Baden, the
prettiest booth of all Vanity Fair. The crowds and the music, the
gambling-tables and the cadaverous croupiers and chinking gold, were far
out of sight and hearing. There was one window in the Hotel de Hollande
that he thought of, how a fair arm used to open it in the early morning,
how the muslin curtain in the morning air swayed to and fro. He would
have given how much to see it once more! Walking about at Fribourg in the
night, away from his companions, he had thought of ordering horses,
galloping back to Baden, and once again under that window, calling Ethel,
Ethel. But he came back to his room and the quiet J. J., and to poor Jack
Belsize, who had had his tooth taken out too.
We had almost forgotten Jack, who took a back seat in Clive's carriage,
as befits a secondary personage in this history, and Clive in truth had
almost forgotten him too. But Jack having his own cares and business, and
having rammed his own carpet-bag, brought it down without a word, and
Clive found him environed in smoke when he came down to take his place in
the little britzska. I wonder whether the window at the Hotel de Hollande
saw him go? There are some curtains behind which no historian, however
prying, is allowed to peep.
"Tiens, le petit part," says Florac of the cigar, who was always
sauntering. "Yes, we go," says Clive. "There is a fourth place, Viscount;
will you come too?"
339
"I would love it well," replies Florac, "but I am here in faction. My
cousin and seigneur M. le Duc d'Ivry is coming all the way from Bagneres
de Bigorre. He says he counts on me:--affaires mon cher, affaires
d'etat."
"How pleased the duchess will be! Easy with that bag!" shouts Clive. "How
pleased the princess will be!" In truth he hardly knew what he was
saying.
"Vous croyez; vous croyez," says M. de Florac. "As you have a fourth
place, I know who had best take it."
"And who is that?" asked the young traveller.
Lord Kew and Barnes, Esq., of Newcome, came out of the Hotel de Hollande
at this moment. Barnes slunk back, seeing Jack Belsize's hairy face. Kew
ran over the bridge. "Good-bye, Clive. Good-bye, Jack." "Good-bye, Kew."
It was a great handshake. Away goes the postillion blowing his horn, and
young Hannibal has left Capua behind him.
CHAPTER XXXI
Madame la Duchesse
In one of Clive Newcome's letters from Baden, the young man described to
me, with considerable humour and numerous illustrations as his wont was,
a great lady to whom he was presented at that watering-place by his
friend Lord Kew. Lord Kew had travelled in the East with Monsieur le Duc
and Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry--the prince being an old friend of his
lordship's family. He is the "Q" of Madame d'Ivry's book of travels,
Footprints of the Gazelles, by a daughter of the Crusaders, in which she
prays so fervently for Lord Kew's conversion. He is the "Q" who rescued
the princess from the Arabs, and performed many a feat which lives in her
glowing pages. He persists in saying that he never rescued Madame la
Princesse from any Arabs at all, except from one beggar who was bawling
out for bucksheesh, and whom Kew drove away with a stick. They made
pilgrimages to all the holy places, and a piteous sight it was, said Lord
Kew, to see the old prince in the Jerusalem processions at Easter pacing
with bare feet and a candle. Here Lord Kew separated from the prince's
party. His name does not occur in th
e last part of the Footprints; which,
in truth, are filled full of strange rhapsodies, adventures which nobody
was but the princess, and mystic disquisitions. She hesitates at nothing,
like other poets of her nation: not profoundly learned, she invents where
she has not acquired: mingles together religion and the opera; and
performs Parisian pas-de-ballet before the gates of monasteries and the
cells of anchorites. She describes, as if she had herself witnessed the
catastrophe, the passage of the Red Sea: and, as if there were no doubt
of the transaction, an unhappy love-affair between Pharaoh's eldest son
and Moses's daughter. At Cairo, apropos of Joseph's granaries, she enters
into a furious tirade against Putiphar, whom she paints as an old savage,
suspicious and a tyrant. They generally have a copy of the Footprints of
the Gazelles at the Circulating Library at Baden, as Madame d'Ivry
constantly visits that watering-place. M. le Duc was not pleased with the
book, which was published entirely without his concurrence, and which he
described as one of the ten thousand follies of Madame la Duchesse.
This nobleman was five-and-forty years older than his duchess. France is
the country where that sweet Christian institution of mariages de
convenance (which so many folks of the family about which this story
treats are engaged in arranging) is most in vogue. There the newspapers
daily announce that M. de Foy has a bureau de confiance, where families
may arrange marriages for their sons and daughters in perfect comfort and
security. It is but a question of money on one side and the other.
Mademoiselle has so many francs of dot; Monsieur has such and such rentes
or lands in possession or reversion, an etude d'avoue, a shop with a
certain clientele bringing him such and such an income, which may be
doubled by the judicious addition of so much capital, and the pretty
little matrimonial arrangement is concluded (the agent touching his
percentage), or broken off, and nobody unhappy, and the world none the
wiser. The consequences of the system I do not pretend personally to
know; but if the light literature of a country is a reflex of its
manners, and French novels are a picture of French life, a pretty society
must that be into the midst of which the London reader may walk in twelve
hours from this time of perusal, and from which only twenty miles of sea
separate us.
When the old Duke d'Ivry, of the ancient ancient nobility of France, an
emigrant with Artois, a warrior with Conde, an exile during the reign of
the Corsican usurper, a grand prince, a great nobleman afterwards, though
shorn of nineteen-twentieths of his wealth by the Revolution,--when the
Duke d'Ivry lost his two sons, and his son's son likewise died, as if
fate had determined to end the direct line of that noble house, which had
furnished queens to Europe, and renowned chiefs to the Crusaders--being
of an intrepid spirit, the Duke was ill disposed to yield to his
redoubtable energy, in spite of the cruel blows which the latter had
inflicted upon him, and when he was more than sixty years of age, three
months before the July Revolution broke out, a young lady of a sufficient
nobility, a virgin of sixteen, was brought out of the convent of the
Sacre Coeur at Paris, and married with immense splendour and ceremony to
this princely widower. The most august names signed the book of the civil
marriage. Madame la Dauphine and Madame la Duchesse de Berri complimented
the young bride with royal favours. Her portrait by Dubufe was in the
Exhibition next year, a charming young duchess indeed, with black eyes,
and black ringlets, pearls on her neck, and diamonds in her hair, as
beautiful as a princess of a fairy tale. M. d'Ivry, whose early life may
have been rather oragious, was yet a gentleman perfectly well conserved.
Resolute against fate his enemy (one would fancy fate was of an
aristocratic turn, and took especial delight in combats with princely
houses; the Atridae, the Borbonidae, the Ivrys,--the Browns and Joneses
being of no account), the prince seemed to be determined not only to
secure a progeny, but to defy age. At sixty he was still young, or seemed
to be so. His hair was as black as the princess's own, his teeth as
white. If you saw him on the Boulevard de Gand, sunning among the
youthful exquisites there, or riding au Bois, with a grace worthy of old
Franconi himself, you would take him for one of the young men, of whom
indeed up to his marriage he retained a number of the graceful follies
and amusements, though his manners had a dignity acquired in old days of
Versailles and the Trianon, which the moderns cannot hope to imitate. He
was as assiduous behind the scenes of the opera as any journalist, or any
young dandy of twenty years. He "ranged himself," as the French phrase
is, shortly before his marriage, just like any other young bachelor: took
leave of Phryne and Aspasie in the coulisses, and proposed to devote
himself henceforth to his charming young wife.
The affreux catastrophe of July arrived. The ancient Bourbons were once
more on the road to exile (save one wily old remnant of the race, who
rode grinning over the barricades, and distributing poignees de main to
the stout fists that had pummelled his family out of France). M. le Duc
d'Ivry, who lost his place at court, his appointments which helped his
income very much, and his peerage would no more acknowledge the usurper
of Neuilly, than him of Elba. The ex-peer retired to his terres. He
barricaded his house in Paris against all supporters of the citizen king;
his nearest kinsman, M. de Florac, among the rest, who for his part
cheerfully took his oath of fidelity, and his seat in Louis Philippe's
house of peers, having indeed been accustomed to swear to all dynasties
for some years past.
In due time Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry gave birth to a child, a daughter,
whom her noble father received with but small pleasure. What the Duke
desired, was an heir to his name, a Prince of Moncontour, to fill the
place of the sons and grandsons gone before him, to join their ancestors
in the tomb. No more children, however, blessed the old Duke's union.
Madame d'Ivry went the round of all the watering-places: pilgrimages were
tried: vows and gifts to all saints supposed to be favourable to the
d'Ivry family, or to families in general:--but the saints turned a deaf
ear; they were inexorable since the true religion and the elder Bourbons
were banished from France.
Living by themselves in their ancient castles, or their dreary mansion of
the Faubourg St. Germain, I suppose the Duke and Duchess grew tried of
one another, as persons who enter into a mariage de convenance sometimes,
nay, as those who light a flaming love-match, and run away with one
another, will be found to do. A lady of one-and-twenty, and a gentleman
of sixty-six, alone in a great castle, have not unfrequently a third
guest at their table, who comes without a card, and whom they cannot shut
out, though they keep their doors closed ever so. His name is Ennui, and
m
any a long hour and weary night must such folks pass in the
unbidden society of this Old Man of the Sea; this daily guest at the
board; this watchful attendant at the fireside; this assiduous companion
who will walk out with you; this sleepless restless bedfellow.
At first, M. d'Ivry, that well-conserved nobleman who never would allow
that he was not young, exhibited no sign of doubt regarding his own youth
except an extreme jealousy and avoidance of all other young fellows. Very
likely Madame la Duchesse may have thought men in general dyed their
hair, wore stays, and had the rheumatism. Coming out of the convent of
the Sacre Coeur, how was the innocent young lady to know better? You see,
in these mariages de convenance, though a coronet may be convenient to a
beautiful young creature, and a beautiful young creature may be
convenient to an old gentleman, there are articles which the
marriage-monger cannot make to convene at all: tempers over which M. de
Foy and his like have no control; and tastes which cannot be put into the
marriage settlements. So this couple were unhappy, and the Duke and
Duchess quarrelled with one another like the most vulgar pair who ever
fought across a table.
In this unhappy state of home affairs, madame took to literature,
monsieur to politics. She discovered that she was a great unappreciated
soul, and when a woman finds that treasure in her bosom of course she
sets her own price on the article. Did you ever see the first poems of
Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry, Les Cris de l'Ame? She used to read them to
her very intimate friends, in white, with her hair a good deal down her
back. They had some success. Dubufe having painted her as a Duchess,
Scheffer depicted her as a Muse. That was in the third year of her
marriage, when she rebelled against the Duke her husband, insisted on
opening her saloons to art and literature, and, a fervent devotee still,
proposed to unite genius and religion. Poets had interviews with her.
Musicians came and twanged guitars to her.
Her husband, entering her room, would fall over the sabre and spurs of
Count Almaviva from the boulevard, or Don Basilio with his great sombrero
and shoe-buckles. The old gentleman was breathless and bewildered in
following her through all her vagaries. He was of old France, she of new.
What did he know of the Ecole Romantique, and these jeunes gens with
their Marie Tudors and Tours de Nesle, and sanguineous histories of
queens who sewed their lovers into sacks, emperors who had interviews
with robber captains in Charlemagne's tomb, Buridans and Hernanis, and
stuff? Monsieur le Vicomte de Chateaubriand was a man of genius as a
writer, certainly immortal; and M. de Lamartine was a young man extremely
bien pensant, but, ma foi, give him Crebillon fils, or a bonne farce of
M. Vade to make laugh; for the great sentiments, for the beautiful style,
give him M. de Lormian (although Bonapartist) or the Abbe de Lille. And
for the new school! bah! these little Dumass, and Hugos, and Mussets,
what is all that? "M. de Lormian shall be immortal, monsieur," he would
say, "when all these freluquets are forgotten." After his marriage he
frequented the coulisses of the opera no more; but he was a pretty
constant attendant at the Theatre Francais, where you might hear him
snoring over the chefs-d'oeuvres of French tragedy.
For some little time after 1830, the Duchesse was as great a Carlist as
her husband could wish; and they conspired together very comfortably at
first. Of an adventurous turn, eager for excitement of all kinds, nothing
would have better pleased the Duchesse than to follow MADAME in her
adventurous courses in La Vendee, disguised as a boy above all. She was
persuaded to stay at home, however, and aid the good cause at Paris;
while Monsieur le Duc went off to Brittany to offer his old sword to the
mother of his king. But MADAME was discovered up the chimney at Rennes,
The Newcomes Page 46
