It is a problem à la Mérimée why women will forgive any but really compromising reflections on their morals, sooner than the slightest depreciatory allusion to their looks. Sir Robert Walpole used to say that he could always make up a quarrel between two women if neither had called the other ugly or old. It would seem that Mérimée's charmer was rather pleased than the contrary with his ringing the changes on her falsehood, hypocrisy, and infernal coquetry (his favourite phrase), so long as he is as warm and eloquent as ever on the subject of the hair, the figure, and the eyes. In this same letter he traces her a route for a meditated tour in Italy: My Minister has given me leave of absence for three months, and I have passed five in travelling between Malta, Athens, Ephesus, and Constantinople. During these five months, I have not felt bored for five minutes. You to whom I gave such a fright long ago, what would have become of you had you seen me during my expedition in Asia, with a belt of pistols, a big sabre, and-would you believe it?-moustaches reaching beyond my ears? It is possible that we may meet at the corVanity apart, I should have frightened the ner of a temple or a circus. I advise you to boldest brigand of melodrama. At Constanti-go straight to Naples. M. Buonnici will take nople I saw the Sultan in polished leather you to Pompeii. You will go to Pæstum, and boots and black frock coat, all covered with you will think of me: in the temple of Nepdiamonds, at the procession of the Bairam. tune, you may say to yourself that you have There, a fine lady, on whose slipper I had trod-seen Greece. From Naples you will go to den by accident, gave me the grandest of fisticuffs, calling me giaour. This was my nearest approach to intimacy with the Turkish beauties. At Athens, and in Asia, I saw the finest monuments in the world, and the most beautiful (if possible) landscapes. The drawback consisted in fleas and gnats as big as larks; so that I never slept. In the middle of all this, I have grown quite old. My firman gives me hair colour of turtle dove: a pretty oriental metaphor to say ugly things. Picture your friend quite grey. They manage a meeting on his return, and he writes: Rome, where you will pass a month in saying to yourself that it is useless to see everything because you will return. Then you will go to Florence, where you will remain ten days. Then you will do what you like. . . . Probably I shall then be at Arles or Orange. If you stop there you will ask for me, and I will explain a Greek theatre to you, which will not interest you much. You have promised me something in return for my Turkish looking-glass. I rely religiously on your recollection. Ah! great news! The first Academician who dies out of forty will be the casue of my paying thirty-nine visits: I shall pay them as awkwardly as possible, and I shall doubtless gain thirty-nine enemies. It would be tedious to explain to you the pourquoi of this fit of ambition. Suffice it that the Academy is now my blue cachemire. If I must be frank, and you know that this defect in me is incorrigible, I will own that you struck me as much improved physically, not at all morally; you have a very fine complexion, and admirable hair, which I looked at The allusion to the blue cachemire is more than your cap, which probably was worth looking at, since you seemed angry at my ina- explained in the next letter: "A propos bility to appreciate it. But I could never dis- of your blue cachemire, I suspected you tinguish lace from calico. You have always of devotion, because devotion in 1842 is the figure of a sylph, and, blasé as I am with a fashion like the blue cachemires. This black eyes, I never saw finer at Constantinople, is the analogy which you did not catch: nor at Smyrna. Now, for the reverse of the medal. You it is clear enough, however." His inhave continued a child in many things, and structions for reading Homer are more you have become hypocritical into the bargain. serious and detailed than his outline of You do not know how to conceal your first the Italian tour; and the mocking tone impulses; but you think to mend matters by a is kept under, if not entirely subdued, host of petty expedients. What do you gain by the enthusiasm of the scholar for by them? Remember this great and fine Greek: maxim of Jonathan Swift: "That a lie is too good a thing to be wasted." This magnanimous sin of being hard to yourself will certainly carry you a long way, and a few years hence you will find yourself as happy as the Trappist, who, after having scourged himself time out of mind, should discover some fine morning that there is no such thing as Paradise. I am very sorry that you read Homer in Pope. Read the translation of Dugas-Montbel: it is the only readable one. If you had the courage to brave the ridicule, and the time to spare, you would take the Greek grammar of Planche and the dictionary of the same. You would read the grammar for a month to make you sleep. It would not fail in this ef- | his writings which it is impossible to translate fect. At the end of two months you would into French. We see plainly enough what love amuse yourself by looking out in the Greek was at Rome about the year 50 before J. C. It the word translated (in general) literally was, however, a little better than love at Athens enough by M. Montbel: two months after-in the time of Pericles. The woman were alwards you would easily perceive from the embarrassment of his phrase, that the Greek says something different from what the translator makes it say. At the end of a year, you would read an air; the air and the accompaniment: the air is the Greek, the accompaniment the translation. It is possible that this would give you the wish to study Greek seriously, and you would have admirable things to read. But I suppose you with neither dresses to occupy you nor people to show them to. ready something. They made men commit follies. Their power has come, not, as is commonly said, from Christianity, but I think through the influence which the barbarians of the North exercised over Roman society. The Germans had exaltation. They loved the soul. The Romans loved little but the body. It is true that for a long time women had no souls. They still have none in the East, and it is a great pity. You know how two souls speak to one another. But yours hardly listens to Everything in Homer is remarkable. The mine. I am glad you value the verses of Musepithets, so strange in French, are admirably set, and you are right in comparing him to appropriate. I remember his calling the sea Catullus. Catullus wrote his native tongue "purple," and I never understood this word. better, and Musset has the fault of not believLast year I was in a little caique on the Gulfing in the soul more than Catullus, whom his of Lepanto, going to Delphi. The sun was time excused. setting. As soon as it had disappeared, the sea took for ten minutes a magnificent tint of dark violet. This requires the air, the sea, the sun, of Greece. I hope that you will never become artist enough to enjoy the discovery that Homer was a great painter. A little farther on he writes out for her a regular course of Greek reading: 46 If you have the courage to read history, you will be charmed with Herodotus, Polybius, and Xenophon. Herodotus enchants me. I know nothing more amusing. Begin with the Anabasis," or "The Retreat of the Ten Thousand": take a map of Asia and follow these ten thousand rogues in their journey: it is Froissart gigantesque. Then you will read Herodotus: then Polybius and Thucydides: the two last are very serious. Next get Theocritus and read "The Syracusans." I would also fain recommend Lucían, who is the Greek with most wit (esprit), or rather most of our wit; but he is a sad rake, and I dare not. As to the pronunciation, if you wish I will send you a page that I had written out for your use, which will teach you the best, that is, the pronunciation of the modern Greeks. That of the schools is easier, but absurd. We began writing to each other en faisant l'esprit; then we have done, what? I will not remind you. We are now at work on erudition. Whilst playing tutor he affects towards his pupil the same tone in which Cadenus speaks of Vanessa: He now could praise, esteem, approve, It would seem that the Roman classics divided her attention with the Greek: You have done well not to speak of Catullus. He is not an author to be read during the holy week, and there is more than one passage in Would you believe that a Roman could say pretty things, and could be tender? I will show you on Monday some Latin verses, which you will translate yourself, and which fit in like wax à propos of our ordinary disputes. You will see that antiquity is better than your Wilhelm Meister. He falls ill, and asks her what she would say if he became (in Homeric phrase) the guest of the gloomy Proserpine: I should be delighted if you were saddened by it for a fortnight. Do you think this an extravagant pretension? I pass a part of my nights in writing, or in tearing up what I have written the night before, so that I make small progress. What I am doing amuses me, but will it amuse others? I believe that the ancients were more amusing than we they had not such mean ends: they were not preoccupied by a mass of silliness (niaiseries) like us. I find that my hero, Julius Cæsar, was guilty of follies (bêtises) for Cleopatra at fiftythree, and forgot all for her, so that he was within an ace of drowning himself actually and figuratively. What man of our generation, I mean amongst the statesmen, is not completely case-hardened, completely insensible, at the age (forty) at which he can aspire to be a deputy? I should like to show the difference of that world from ours, but how to set about it? He must have set about it by a different line of argument and illustration, if he wished to produce conviction. There have been modern Mark Antonys, if not Cæsars, who would have deemed the world well lost for Cleopatra's eyes. Mérimée must have known an eminent French statesman, with a character for austerity, who when long past forty could hardly meet a very celebrated lady in a room without betraying his feelings by a flutter or a flush; and it is clear from Gentz's "Diary" that the select few who had undertaken the settlement of Europe at the Congress of Vienna, were quite as much occupied with their own love affairs as with the destinies of nations.* Her tears prove the warm interest he had inspired in her, despite her assumed coldness. the Give smiles to those who love you less, There was a crisis towards the end of year: Mérimée tries in vain to pass off his candidature for the Academy with an air of unconcern. He is deeply interested It is evident that we can no longer meet in the result, and submits, with a grim-without quarrelling horribly. We both of us ace, to the (to him) especially repugnant desire the impossible: you that I should be ceremonies imposed by it. It is the in- a statue; I-that you should cease to be one. exorable rule for the candidate to call on Every fresh proof of this impossibility (of each academician for the personal solici- which at bottom we have never doubted) is tation of his vote; and some of these cruel for both. For my part, I regret all the compulsory visits have given rise to pain I have caused you. I give way too often to impulses of absurd anger: as well get angry amusing and characteristic scenes. with ice for being cold. When Victor Hugo called on RoyerCollard, he was received with a bow and a stare. "Je me nomme Victor Hugo." "Connois pas." "L'auteur de Notre Dame de Paris, &c. &c." "Je ne les ai jamais lu." "Permettez moi de vous en offrir des exemplaires." "Je ne lis plus les livres nouveaux." Exit Hugo in a rage. Mérimée had no reason to complain of his reception. I find people very polite, quite accustomed to their parts, acting them very seriously. Does it not strike you as ridiculous to say to a man: "Monsieur, I believe myself one of the forty cleverest men of France; I am as good as you," and other drolleries? It is necessary to translate this into polite and varied language, according to the persons. He was elected on the 14th March, 1843, and on the 17th he writes: Why do you weep? The forty chairs (fauteuils) were not worth one little tear, I am worn out, broken-down, demoralized, and completely "out of my wits." Then, Arsène Guillot (his novel) makes a palpable fiasco, and excites the indignation of all the so-called virtuous people, and particularly the women of fashion who dance the polka and listen to the sermons of the Père Ravignan; they go so far as to say that I act like the monkeys who climb to the top of the trees, and having reached the topmost branch make grimaces at the world. I believe I have lost votes by this (so-called) scandalous story: on the other side, I have gained some. Sept. 12, 1814. "Went to Prince Metternich; long conversation with him not (unhappily) on public affairs, but on his and my relations with Madame (the Duchess) de Sagan." Sunday, Nov. 6.-"Went out at ten. Conversations of different kinds with Metternich. Returned at mid-day. Count Clam: long talk with him on his new passion for Dorothée (Madame de Périgord)." Friday, 11th. "Visit to the King of Denmark talked an hour with him. Then Metternich: long conversation, constantly turning more on the confounded women than on business." He had obtained a high reputation as an archæologist by his " Notes of Travel" in the South and West of France, which contain the pith cf his official Reports, and towards the end of 1843, he was a successful candidate for admission to the Academy of Inscriptions. This second candidature seems to have been more annoying than the first : You are wrong to be jealous of Inscriptions. My self-love is to a certain extent engaged, as in a game of chess with a skilful adversary; but I do not believe that the loss or gain will affect me a quarter as much as one of our quarrels. But what a wretched calling is this of solicitor! Did you ever see dogs enter the hole of a badger? When they have any experience, they have an appalling look on entering, and they often come out faster than they went in, for he is a most disagreeable brute to visit, is your badger. I always think of the badger when about to ring the bell of an academician, and, as seen "in the mind's eye," I present an exact likeness of the dog. Early in 1843 he formed one of a dinner party, given by an academician to introduce Rachel to Béranger. After dinner Béranger told her that she was wrong to waste her talent in salons, that there was for her only one veritable public, that of the Théâtre Français. She listened with an assenting air, and to show how much she had benefited by the advice, played the first act of "Esther." Some one was required to give her the réplique, and she caused a Racine to be formally presented to me by an academician who was doing the duties of cicisbeo. I rudely replied that I knew nothing about verses, and that there were people in the room who, being in that line, would scan them much better. Hugo excused himself on account of his eyes; another for some reason or other. The mas ... ter of the house devoted himself. Imagine ese pueblo, no hay porvenir (In this country Rachel in black, between a piano and a tea- there is no chance of rising). table, with a door behind her, preparing a theatrical effect! This preparation before our eyes was very amusing and very fine: it lasted about two minutes, then she began: "Est-ce toi, chère Elise?" The confidant, in the middle of his reply, lets fall his spectacles and his book: it takes him ten minutes to recover his page and his eyes. The audience see that Esther is getting angry. She resumes. The door behind opens: it is a servant coming in. He is signed to withdraw. He makes a hurried retreat, and cannot manage to shut the door. The said door keeps swinging backwards and forwards, accompany ing Rachel with a melodious and very diverting creak. As there seemed no, end to this, Mademoiselle placed her hand on her heart and grew faint, but, like a person accustomed to die on the stage, giving time for people to come to the rescue. During the interlude, Hugo (Victor) and M. Thiers came to words on the subject of Racine. Hugo said that Racine was un petit esprit and Corneille un grand. "You say that," replied Thiers, "because you are un grand esprit: you are the Corneille-here Hugo looked the picture of modesty — of an epoch of which Casimir Delavigne is the Racine." You may guess what became of the modesty. However, the faint passes off and the act is finished, but fiascheggiando. One who knows Mademoiselle well, remarked: "How she must have sworn this evening on going away." The remark set me thinking. A still more mortifying mishap once befell Mrs. Siddons in a drawing-room, where she was acting Constance in "King John." "Here I and sorrow sit : Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it." Through some untoward accident in suiting the action to the word, instead of sinking gracefully to the ground, she lost her balance, and came to the sitting posture with a bump that shook the floor and fairly put tragedy to flight. In November, 1845, he is at Madrid, which he finds changed for the worse since his last visit in 1840. "The bulls have no longer any heart, and the men are not much better than the bulls." Writing again from Madrid in October, 1853, he says: He The marriage of the Countess de Téba was the turning-point in his life. was an old and attached friend of her mother, Madame de Montijo, through whom he was named senator, and became an habitual guest of their Imperial Majesties at the Tuileries, Biarritz, Compiègne, and Fontainebleau. Although there is no allusion to the fact in these letters, there is no doubt that he was a valuable assistant to the Emperor in the composition of the "Vie de César." The drawback to the advantages of his new position was the estrangement from many old friends: the majority of the French men of letters, and especially the academicians, having proudly held aloof from the dynasty to the last. The consciousness that he was regarded with suspicion and distrust will go far to account for the increasing cynicism with which his letters are seasoned as we proceed. He literally spares nobody. From Madrid again: — It is the custom here to offer everything that is praised. The fair friend of the Prime Minister sat next me at dinner the other day. She is bête comme un choux, and very fat. She displayed tolerably fine shoulders, on which rested a garland with beads of metal or glass. Not knowing what to say, I praised both shoulders and beads, and she replied: Todo ese á la disposicion de V. He is almost always in his caustic mood during his visits to England. Admitting that there was something grand tion of the Crystal Palace, he terms it and simple in the invention and execuperfectly ridiculous as regards art and taste: "a plaything which costs twentyfive millions, and a cage in which several great churches might waltz.” The last days I passed in London (July, I have 1854) have amused and interested me. seen and associated with (vu et pratiqué) all the political men. I have attended the debates on the Supplies in the Houses of Lords and Commons, and all the renowned orators have spoken, but very badly, as I thought. Lastly, I have eaten an excellent dinner. They give excellent dinners at the Crystal Palace, and I recommend them to you you who are No one reads at Madrid. I have asked my-gourmande. I have brought from London a self how the women pass their time when they pair of garters, which come, I am assured, are not making love, and I find no plausible from Borrin (of Paris). I do not know with reply. They are all thinking of being em- what Englishwomen keep up their stockings, presses. A demoiselle of Granada was at the nor how they procure this indispensable artiplay when she heard in her box that the Com-cle, but I believe it to be a very difficult affair, tesse of Téba was to marry the Emperor. and very trying to their virtue. The shopman She rose with impetuosity, exclaiming: En who gave me these garters blushed up to the eyes. Mérimée has here fairly outdone the German traveller who, describing the Boyle Farm fête, stated that only the wings of the chicken were placed upon the refreshment-tables, because the English ladies could not bear to hear of the leg or cuisse. The fact is, Mérimée saw and knew little of English society. He did not lay himself out for it. His manners were reserved, and his name was not one of those which create a sensation in a salon. But he had good introductions, and was taken to a few of the best houses by his friends; who will hardly be pleased at the use he made of his opportunities: Edinburgh, Douglas Hotel, 26 juillet 1856. I am going with a Scotchman to see his chateau, but I cannot tell you where we shall stop on the route, which he promises me with abundance of castles, ruins, landscape, &c. I have passed three days at the Duke of Hamilton's in an immense chateau and a very fine country. . . . All over this chateau are pictures by great masters, magnificent Greek and Chinese vases, and books with bindings of the greatest amateurs of the last century. All this is arranged without taste, and one sees that the proprietor derives small enjoyment from it. I now understand why the French are so much in request in foreign countries. They take pains to be amused, and, in doing so, amuse others. I found myself the most amusing of the very numerous society where we were, and I had at the same time the consciousness of hardly being so. We never heard before that the French are or were so much in request. A culti vated and agreeable Frenchman, like any other cultivated and agreeable foreigner, would be in high request; but unless he spoke English fluently (which is rarely the case with Frenchmen), there are very few English country houses in which, except from motives of politeness, he would be pressed to prolong his stay. Mérimée could be a most pleasing companion when he thought fit; and he does himself great injustice in supposing that he owed his English welcome to an all-pervading sense of wearisomeness or vacuity: London, 20th July, 1856. I have found people here so amiable, so pressing, so overwhelming, that they are evidently much bored. Yesterday I saw two of my former beauties; the one has become asthmatic, and the other methodist: then I made the acquaintance of eight or ten poets, who struck me as a little more ridiculous even than ours. The Right Hon. Edward Ellice: printed twice over "Ellné." Speaking of Edinburgh, he says: The accent of all the natives is odious to me. The women are in general very ugly. The country demands short petticoats, and they conform to the fashion, and to the exigencies of the climate, by holding up their gowns, with both hands, a foot from their petticoats, showing sinewy legs and half-boots of rhinoceros leather, with feet to match. I am shocked at the proportion of red-haired and the weather has been warm and clear for women whom I meet. The site is charming, two days. In a letter dated from a country house, near Glasgow, August 3, 1856, after bearing testimony to the hospitality with which he is everywhere received, he says: I am contracting bad tastes. Arriving here the guest of poor people who have hardly more than thirty thousand pounds a year, I thought myself neglected on finding that they gave me a dinner without wind instruments and a piper in grand costume. Breadalbane's, in driving about in a carriage in I passed three days at the Marquis of his park. There are about two thousand deer, besides eight or ten thousand others in his forests not adjacent to the chateau. There are also, for singularity's sake, at which every one aims here, a herd of American bisons, very fierce, which were inclosed in a peninsula, and one goes to see through the clefts of their palisades.t All the world there, marquis and that their pleasure (bisons included?) consists bisons, had the air of being bored. I believe in making people envious, and I doubt whether this makes up for the flurry they are in to be hotel-keepers to gentle and simple. Among all this luxury, I observe from time to time little instances of stinginess which amuse me. We should not have thought it possible for even a cynical Frenchman to carry away such an impression from Taymouth Castle in 1856. There could hardly be more magnificent hospitality, or a grand seigneur more free from pretension, assumption, or the littleness of wishing to excite envy, than the host. He had a keen sense of humour, with a blunt rough way of giving expression to it, not much unlike Lord Melbourne's; and the fre At Taymouth Castle, in the time of the late Marquis of Breadalbane, a piper, placed behind a recess, played during the first course, and a complete band of wind instruments during the second; the programme of the music being placed by the side of each plate with the menu. A Frenchwoman who heard the bagpipe for the first time at Taymouth, turned to her neighbour with a cry: "Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, est-ce que cela s'appelle musique?" The domain of Taymouth is so large that it would require seven-league boots to walk over it in three days. ↑ There were three or four in an inclosure, bounded on one side by a river. |