Whatever she thought of Eliza’s present, Eliza herself was quite a different matter. Jane attached herself then and there, and the friendship was maintained until the end of her cousin’s life. Four years later, when she was fourteen, she dedicated to Eliza one of her most ambitious early stories, Love and Freindship, the one everyone remembers for the scene in which the two heroines “fainted alternately on a sofa.” This particular joke was cribbed from Sheridan, but many of the other jokes are crisp enough to be worthy of him, and the humour does not flag in all its thirty-three pages.7 Laura, who tells her own story in a series of letters, has a background to match Eliza’s: she was “born in Spain and received my Education at a Convent in France,” her father an Irishman and her mother “the natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an italian Opera-girl.” She writes to the daughter of a middle-aged friend, as Eliza might tell her story to Aunt Austen’s daughter, and with a touch of Eliza’s insouciance. Most of it consists of travels, often with her friend Sophia, and both meet with sentimental and violent adventures, including carriage crashes fatal to their loved ones. In one episode a venerable old gentleman makes a sudden discovery of four separate and hitherto unknown grandchildren, to each of whom he gives a £50 banknote, only to abandon them again immediately afterwards: a hint of Eliza’s expectations from her godfather, Warren Hastings, for little Hastings?
Laura and Sophia fly in the face of every lesson Berquin spells out. They not only fail to take parental advice, they manage not even to notice the deaths of parents. They encourage friends and lovers to “disentangle themselves from the shackles of Parental Authority.” A fifteen-year-old girl is persuaded to elope with a fortune-hunting officer, and two other young men, the illegitimate sons of well-born ladies, rob their mothers, leave them to starve, and take to the stage, first as strolling actors and then as stars at Covent Garden. All the young people steal, run up debts and refuse to settle them. It is black comedy, absurd and riotous, rejecting domestic virtue and decorum with élan and authority. For Jane to dedicate it to her cousin, she must have felt confident that Eliza would see and enjoy the jokes with her.
Eliza was well aware of Jane’s “kind partiality to me,” and enjoyed her company more than Cassandra’s: “still My Heart gives the preference to Jane.”8 Clearly, they were friends and talked together; Jane must have questioned her, Eliza must have told her about her experiences at home and abroad. James too would have described Capot de Feuillide’s character and estates; and Henry came to know every aspect of Eliza’s life and character. The cousins’ stories were woven together; but Eliza’s history was more like something out of a novel than anything you expect of a cousin.
Eliza’s childhood memories went back to the years in London with her young mother and old father, and the great personage of her godfather in the background. When she was six Mr. Hancock disappeared back to India. Affectionate, grumbling letters came from him which she rarely answered. As for her young godfather, he also soon went away, also back to India. Eliza was not sent away to school. She lived with her mother in a fashionable London street, and had good teachers. She learnt to ride, to sing, to play the harp and the pianoforte, to dance, to write a good hand and to do simple arithmetic. She performed in little plays with other children; she studied French, read poetry and was taken to the theatre. She wore beautiful, well-made clothes. She went to church and gave to the poor. She was attached to her Austen uncle and aunt, and visited them with her mother, as we have seen; and also to her Kentish cousins the Walters. Cousin Philadelphia Walter—who was also Jane Austen’s cousin, and was named for Eliza’s mother—carefully kept the affectionate, teasing letters Eliza wrote her; they are our main source of information about her. 9
The expensive life in London continued, but there was something unsatisfying to Mrs. Hancock about it, perhaps because she did not know quite where she belonged in society. People were snobbish about Indian money unless it was amassed in such outrageous amounts that its lowly origins could be overlooked, which was not quite the case with the Hancocks. When Eliza was ten, the distant figure of her godfather came into clearer focus, as her mother told her he had provided her with a small fortune. Mr. Hancock warned his wife not to talk of it to anyone: “Let me caution you not to acquaint even the dearest friend you have with this circumstance. Tell Betsy only that her godfather has made her a great present, but not the particulars: let her write a proper letter on the occasion.”10 Perhaps she wondered about her parentage then; she was a bright child in an odd situation.
Her presumed father, Mr. Hancock, died when she was thirteen, and at the same time her godfather doubled the amount of money he was giving her. She was now possessed of £10,000, placed in trust under the care of Mr. Hastings’s brother-in-law Mr. Woodman, and her Uncle Austen. So Eliza grew up with an awareness that she was different, mysterious in her Indian origins, set apart by them and by the money.
It may have been the uncertainty of their social position that led her mother to take her abroad when she was fifteen; also the encouragement of another friend, Sir John Lambert, an Anglo-French baronet with whom Mrs. Hancock had many dealings.11 She and Eliza visited Germany, were in Brussels in June 1778, and went on to Paris, where they began to move in glittering society, their connection with “Lord Hastings,” as the French liked to call him, a subject for comment. Eliza was made a fuss of, and felt she had entered a world as splendid as the Arabian Nights. Her letters to her Cousin Phila became very conscious accounts of the grand and glamorous company in which she found herself. Marie Antoinette is described in Turkish dress at a ball, covered in diamonds, feathers, flowers, silver gauze and jewels of all kinds. She gave the fashion gossip, hats, hairstyles, earrings, and the Queen’s favourite new colour, “a kind of Pompadour shot with black,” wittily known as la mort de Marlborough. She evoked Longchamps, “a monastery situated in the Bois de Boulogne,” with its parade of élégants and équipages , and a new opera house at “the Thuilleries,” big enough to hold “a troop of five hundred horse,” although she had not actually attended an opera yet. She saw the balloonist Monsieur Blanchard ascend, with wings and rudder. She mocked the French for “murdering” Shakespeare with their translations of Romeo and Juliet, Lear, Macbeth and Coriolanus; and reported the tremendous success of Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage de Figaro. She declared her heart “entirely insensible” to any sentiments “but those of friendship,” and enjoyed a particular friendship with a Paris convent girl, with whom she exchanged pictures; and when she and Mrs. Hancock left Paris for Combs-la-Ville, near Fontainebleau, in the heat of the summer of 1780, she said she would write weekly to her convent friend, like any romantic heroine.
Her letters are energetic, and conscientious in describing what she thought would amuse; but it is not always easy to learn her real feelings from them. The first great event of her adult life, her marriage to a French officer at nineteen, seems to have taken her by surprise. It was not a love match. She claimed she did not choose him for herself but acted “much less from my own judgment than that of those whose councils & opinions I am the most bound to follow,” people she referred to as “advisers of rank & title.”12 Who were these advisers? Certainly not the two trustees of her fortune, well out of the way in England. The most likely person is her mother’s friend Sir John Lambert. Eliza had asked Cousin Phila to address her letters care of “le chevalier Lambert” in Paris.13 He had the rank and title Eliza spoke of, and the influence with her mother. He was also more than half French by blood; his father had taken French citizenship, and they had connections with south-west France.14
Whether Sir John had reasons of his own for wanting to make the match we don’t know, but someone presented Eliza to the thirty-year-old Jean François Capot de Feuillide as a wealthy heiress, related to “Lord Hastings,” and presumed to have more expectations from him; and he was presented to her as an aristocrat with large estates in the south. Both descriptions had an element of truth in them, but neither was entirely true. Eliza’s fortu
ne, though good, was not great. Capot de Feuillide was the son of a lawyer who had risen from modest beginnings to become mayor of Nérac and been placed in charge of the “Eaux et Forêts” in his region, the remote and unprosperous Landes where they touch on the Bas-Armagnac. He had no title, and Eliza’s claim that she was becoming a countess by marrying him was based either on fantasy or, more likely, on some misrepresentation. Capot de Feuillide presumably hoped to be ennobled, helped by his bride’s fortune, and did a bit of Gascon boasting on the subject. Perhaps Sir John expected to benefit from the matchmaking. There is no doubt that he was involved in the affairs of Capot de Feuillide, for years after Eliza’s death Henry Austen was doing business with Lambert’s heirs.15
Eliza was introduced to de Feuillide when he was serving in one of the French Queen’s regiments. He was known as the handsomest officer in the army; he attended court balls and, in the festive atmosphere of the French court in the early 1780s, seems to have been a captivating figure. Mrs. Hancock liked him well enough to give her assent to the match, and soon to lend him her own money. This was exactly what Eliza’s trustees feared. “They [the de Feuillide family] seem already desirous of draining [her] of every shilling she has,” wrote Mr. Woodman to Warren Hastings, after complaining that Eliza’s marriage was not very advantageous, although Mrs. Hancock “says it is entirely to her satisfaction, the gentleman having great connections & expectations.”16
Mr. Austen was also concerned that Eliza might convert to Catholicism—and indeed she does mention a nun who tried to convert her, perhaps at her friend’s convent—but he need not have worried on that score. Nérac had a strong Protestant tradition, and some Capots were Protestants, however they conformed outwardly.17 Capot de Feuillide was also an Anglophile; “the Comte has the greatest desire to see England,” wrote Eliza. Later he expressed a wish that his child should be “a native of England.”18 This is so unusual for a Frenchman that you seek a reason. It could be a religious one, though more likely the hope that the birth of the child would interest “Lord Hastings,” who had no legitimate children and might look kindly on Eliza’s offspring—a conjecture supported by the naming of the baby.
Eliza made jokes about her husband: “he is young & reckoned handsome, in the Military & a Frenchman besides—how many reasons to doubt his constancy”; although at the same time “he literally adores me.”19 In truth, Jean Capot de Feuillide was a man with an obsession that had nothing to do with Eliza. He wanted money, not for équipages or high living in Paris, but to carry out a project in his native Landes. This was the draining of a large area—5,000 acres—of mostly useless and insanitary swamp near Nérac, known as “le Marais,” in order to turn it into profitable agricultural country. The idea is likely to have come from his father, from his time in charge of the Eaux et Forêts; the French government was eager to encourage land improvement, and granted exemption from taxes to those carrying out such work. De Feuillide applied to the King for permission to take the land and drain it, and for exemption from taxes. It was a good plan, likely to make him rich if it succeeded; but it needed a very large amount of capital.
His father had left him some land and money at his death in 1779, but not enough. In 1780 he went on half-pay, and in 1781 he married Eliza Hancock. At the beginning of 1782 he got his licence from the King to embark on his project, and went south to supervise the work, leaving his bride and her mother in Paris. The work did not proceed entirely smoothly, partly because local land-owners disputed his right to some of the land, still more because the peasantry began to object to their common land, where they had pastured beasts and collected reeds from time immemorial, being enclosed. Everything cost far more than he had expected. The whole of his inheritance went into it, plus some of his wife’s income; he borrowed more from Mrs. Hancock.
Eliza’s story becomes an economic romance at this point, providing a fine example of how money was moved about the world in the late eighteenth century. The English bride was the conduit for money made in India—or plundered from its people—reaching the French Landes; and there it served to drain the ancient swamps, a good purpose but also enraging to the ordinary local people, since the financial benefits were all for Capot de Feuillide. This was by no means the end of the story of the money or the land improvement. In May 1784 Eliza and her mother travelled south to observe the work in progress. To receive them suitably, Capot de Feuillide was obliged to find a house, because he had none of his own good enough for Eliza. He contrived to rent one fit for a countess, and installed his mother, who prepared a warm welcome for her rich daughter-in-law. The Château de Jourdan, which became their residence for the next two years, was (and is) a preposterously romantic place, more like a setting for the Sleeping Beauty than a base for a land reclamation project. It stands between Nérac and the area of the Marais, and is a château strictly in the French sense, not a fortified building but a large, stone-built three-storey gentleman’s house with a mansard roof, shuttered windows and pepper-pot turrets at the corners of the façade. Set on the top of a steep hill, it looks out over woodland to miles of empty countryside and sky. In the 1780s the area was wild and the nearest town twenty miles away.
Mrs. Hancock and Eliza made the 450-mile journey south in June. Eliza spent so much time out and about that she began to acquire the “tan with which I have contrived to heighten the native brown of my complexion. ” 20 There were a few aristocratic families within driving distance to be called on, otherwise only a sparse population of peasants speaking an unintelligible patois and living in conditions so primitive they seemed almost another species: this was provincial life in the Landes. Winter drove her indoors, and struck most of the household down with fever; and as winter ended her mother-in-law died suddenly. Her husband, grieving and feverish himself, remained deeply absorbed in his travaux. You can appreciate the scale of what he undertook by walking across the area; the canals can be seen today, there are fields of corn, vines and miles of woodland, in which you stumble on stone marker blocks engraved with the date “1785.”
He was also building a château of his own, a square, unromantic house on a road; and, undeterred by mounting debts, many other buildings, stables, farms, cottages and a house for a brother currently in the West Indies. Eliza began to take so much interest in the works that she wrote to Phila, and no doubt to the Austens too, enthusiastically explaining that the land was a gift from the King to “Mons. de Feuillide & his heirs for ever.”21 What’s more, an heir now seemed in prospect. Then she had a miscarriage, which upset her badly. She was now committed to the place. Encouraged by her account, James Austen began to plan a visit.
Before he could set off, Eliza and her husband took themselves and Mrs. Hancock to the Pyrenees for their health. Bagnères-de-Bigorre was a spa much favoured by English families, and Eliza boasted of meeting young Lord Chesterfield, remembered now chiefly for being so lackadaisical that, appointed Ambassador to Spain, he never managed to reach Madrid. 22 Bagnères had the desired effect. Capot de Feuillide recovered from his illness, and she became pregnant again. This did not deter her from planning another trip in the new year, this time to visit friends for a house party to be devoted to amateur theatricals: “I have promised to spend the carnival . . . in a very agreeable society who have erected an elegant theatre for the purpose of acting plays amongst ourselves.”23 After this her husband seems to have reminded her of the importance of their child being born in England, especially now that Warren Hastings was in London. Unfortunately the work on the Marais made it out of the question for him to accompany her; so Eliza and Mrs. Hancock packed up the coach once more and set off at the end of May, trundling over the hundreds of miles of bad roads, making the ever unpredictable crossing from Calais to Dover, for which you had to be carried from small boat to shipboard; all particularly difficult and exhausting for a woman far advanced in pregnancy. They reached London just in time for the birth of the baby in June.
This was Eliza’s story so far; and at Christmas 1786, as
she told it, or part of it, everything seemed to be going as well as possible for her. Her cousin James Austen was on his way to Nérac, bringing the two families closer together. She had given her husband a son and heir, and her mother, still the dearest person in her life, was with her to help and advise. Meanwhile the Count proceeded with works that would enrich him and his heirs for generations to come. At this stage no one seems to have noticed that the six-month-old Hastings, who was fat, fair and pretty according to his Aunt Austen, had anything wrong with him. Yet in the new year it became gradually apparent that, once again, the family was to go through the bitter experience of finding a child, apparently healthy at birth, failing to develop as expected. At two Hastings could neither stand up nor speak, though he made a great noise. He had frequent convulsive fits. His eyes looked odd; anyone could see this was not a normal little boy. Eliza reacted differently from her aunt. Whether she wrote the bad news to her husband we don’t know, but she kept her son with her and did everything she could to encourage him to develop. Touchingly, she insisted that he was always acquiring new accomplishments, even if it was only “doubling his prodigious fists” and boxing “quite in the English style.” Cousin Phila wrote to her brother expressing fears of “his being like poor George Austen,” but Eliza continued to boast of “the wonderful endowments of my wonderful brat,” and never considered putting little Hastings into care away from home. For all her cultivated reputation as frivolous and pleasure-loving, Eliza had a streak of stubborn goodness.
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