BOBECHE.
And in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places crammed
With observations, the which he vents
In mangled forms.
Distance of time, like distance of space, gives to everything that sort of indistinctness which excites curiosity and even admiration. The deeds of our forefathers, as they gradually fade away and lose their place among the things that are, become clothed with an unreal splendour, and the habits and customs of other days, however insignificant in themselves, acquire a degree of interest as they recede from us, as much owing to their age as their originality. I will own I am fond of prying into old fashions and peculiarities; there is something attractive in their simplicity; and, in travelling along, whenever I find any vestige of the kind, I am as much rejoiced as ever was antiquary who had fished up a noseless bust out of the Tiber.
Amongst all the usages of former times, none was better than that of the court-fool, or licensed jester; but now-a-days men's vices and their weaknesses have become too irritable, and few are inclined to do penance under the scourge of satire.
Satirical talent is the most dangerous thing in the world. Those who possess it may be admired, but they are seldom liked; and who would barter love for admiration? In other days, none but a wit could be a fool, but now none but a fool would be a wit.
There is a man in France who, by some odd mistake of nature, has been born a couple of centuries too late, and has thus been deprived of an opportunity of turning either his wit or his folly to account. Poor Bobeche found it did not answer in Paris; the scene was too large for him; and he has retired for a time to Bordeaux, to exercise his talents amongst the Gascons; and here every evening he harangues the multitude from a little stage erected in the Alées de Tourny. Sometimes it is a dialogue between the fool and another; sometimes a soliloquy; and the people listen to both with profound respect and attention. I have often mingled with the crowd, and stood for a good hour, not so much to listen to his jests, as to examine the jester; for he is the only approximation to the old court-fool I ever saw. Of course his dress is peculiar to himself. It consists of a small three-cornered cocked-hat, stuck on one side of his head, and a close red coat of the ancient cut. His countenance has a strange mixture of vacancy and meaning, of solemnity and fun. He seems always to be searching for one idea, and stumbling upon another by accident, and appears scarcely to know whether it be wit or nonsense when he has uttered it; and in truth there is, nine times out of ten, somewhat of both. But still, he keeps his imperturbable gravity; and his round unmeaning face, and dull leaden eye, prepossess you in favour of his folly; so that any wit which he displays has the greater effect, from giving no notice of its approach.
Bobeche has the same failing as all his predecessors: he has no respect for the great. In fact, he cares not upon whom or on what subject he breaks his jest. It must have its way, light were it will; and they say that he has more than once been obliged to expiate the offences of his noddle by two or three weeks' cool reflection in prison. If this be true, it has not made him a whit the wiser; for I have heard the very questions most tender in France made the subject of his unlucky witticisms, and the king and every member of the government sported with in turn.
Bobêche is not "le Glorieux," but it is a variety of the same genus. The extraordinary author of Waverley is always true to nature in his depiction of character, and it has been a great subject of interest to me to trace in remote spots and corners of the earth the original lines which he has beautifully copied, and very often to find that realized, which I had before imagined to be merely the conception of a brilliant imagination.
Though I have undertaken to tell my own history, I feel a strange disinclination to speak much of myself, especially during my stay at Bordeaux. My mind was in that vacillating and unsettled state which is perhaps the most painful that human nature can endure. It was at that point where sorrow degenerates into both levity and bitterness, the most dangerous of all conditions; but a letter which I wrote about this time, and which has since fallen into my hands again, will give a better picture of my state of thought than any thing I could write now.
My dear R----,
Surely if I am an odd being, as you say, you are another! What in the name of heaven could induce you to write to any other person at Bordeaux about the letter which lay at the post-office for you? However, I have taken the business out of your friend's hands, and sent it on to you myself. It was in verity my own letter, and, as you will see by the post-marks, has been upon its travels for some time. The truth is, I put it in the post for Boulogne, where I fancied you were, and to which it went without the postage being paid. Some friend of yours at Boulogne, you being gone, put your London address upon it, without affranchissement, and in consequence it was sent back to the postmaster here, and so forth.
What its contents were, I quite forget; some great nonsense, I dare say. But who in this age of the world would write sense, when Feeling has been strangled for a traitor, Virtue publicly whipped for breaking all the commandments, Generosity turned out to beg his bread, and Charity (I do not mean ostentation) sent to the treadmill? In short, when Vice is triumphant, Folly is sure to come in for a share in the administration, and Nonsense becomes the only patron to whom a wise man can apply. There is no such thing, my dear R----, as being mad in this world. It is only being in the minority; and instead of saying that a man has been put in a lunatic hospital, we ought to say that he has been confined by the majority. However, I hope that my letter, which was a sad raw cub when it left my hands, has been improved by travelling, in which case it may give you some amusement.
You ask me a variety of questions, to very few of which I can reply. What has made me stay at Bordeaux so long is a problem which I should be happy if any one could solve for me. It has been from no particular or general attraction. Here the climate is disagreeable, and the society, generally, not much better. There are few that I care about, there is none that I love, there is little to amuse, there is little to interest. It must have been by some law of gravitation that I settled down here, and until some propelling force of sufficient power acts upon me, I suppose I shall not budge.
Your next question is, "When do you return to England?" I cannot tell. The very idea is wretchedness to me. I think it was the Helvetii--was it not?--who, without rhyme or reason, collected together all the provisions they could find, burnt their towns and villages, and left their own country to seek another. But with me it is not from any distaste to England that I leave it. I love it because it is my country. I love it for its free institutions and noble privileges; for its brave spirits and generous hearts; and I am proud of it for its grand pre-eminence over a corrupted world. But it is a country where I have suffered much and lost much, and I cannot calmly think of returning to the scenes which must recall so much bitterness.
But, to change the subject, I have been to see a curious receptacle for our mortality. It is a sort of bone-house, called "Le Caveau des Morts," placed under the tower of an old church, now converted into a station for a telegraph. The first notice we had of such a place being in existence, (for the people of Bordeaux know nothing,) was the sight of the name placarded on the door, and entering, we found ourselves in the inside of an old Gothic building, in company with an animal that at first view might be taken for Caliban. He was a shapeless man, dressed in a rough, shaggy coat, that descended to two feet clad in immeasurable sabots. On his head he wore a large black nightcap, that alone suffered to appear the lower part of his face and two small dark eyes, together with the tips of a pair of elephantine ears. For the first few minutes we could get nothing from him but a kind of growling bark, which proved to be cough, and he himself turned out the sexton and bell-ringer, and very readily, in consideration of a franc, conducted us down a narrow staircase in the wall, to descend which, I was obliged to bow my head, and my companion to go almost double.
On getting to the bottom we entered an almost circular vault, roofed by Gothic arches and paved with the mouldering remains of frail humanity. B---- took the candle from our sexton, and standing in the midst, held it high above his head, looking like some colossal spectre; while the light gleamed faintly round, catching on the groins of the vault and the rows of ghastly dead, half skeleton half mummy, which were ranged along the walls. As soon as he had lighted a lamp in the middle, our guide, in the true tone of a showman at a fair, began to give us an account of the place and what it contained. He told us first, that the ground on which we stood was fifty feet deep in dead. When the family vaults of the cemetery, he said, were full, the bodies which were not found corrupted were removed to this cavern, and took their station against the wall, as we saw them; and pointing to the one next the door, he assured us that it had lain in the earth for five hundred years, although the skin and flesh, dried to a thick kind of leather, were still hanging about its bones. He then went round them all, occasionally giving us little bits of their history, which might or might not be true, sometimes moralising and sometimes jesting, bringing strongly to my mind the grave-digger in Hamlet. It was strange to see him, just dropping into the grave, joking with the grim tenants of the tomb as if he were himself immortal. At length, he conducted us once more into the upper air of the tower, from whence we immediately issued into the most populous part of Bordeaux, swarming with the busy and the gay, the beautiful and the strong, all hurrying through an agitated existence towards the same great receptacle we had just left. It was a strange contrast.
The cathedral here is not so fine as many others we have seen. A few days ago we heard a fine military mass, at which the archbishop assisted. I was pleased with the service, notwithstanding all the overdone stage-effect of the Catholic ceremonies; but after the soldiers had marched out and the church was cleared, it was most disgusting to observe the effects of the French people's bad habit of spitting. There was actually a rivulet of saliva on each side of the church where the military stood. The archbishop is one of the best men in existence, but they say rather superstitious. A good story is told of him here, which, most probably, has its portion of falsehood. His cook-maid, it is said, gave herself out as possessed by a demon. Now, Monseigneur having no taste for such an inmate as this in his cook-maid or his house, proceeded instantly to exorcise the gentleman, ordering his chaplain to put his head to the lady's stomach and collect the devil's answers.
"Does the devil speak?" asked the archbishop, after a long address to the unearthly visitant.
"Yes," replied the chaplain.
"What does he say?" demanded the prelate.
"He says," answered the other, "Je m'en fiche--i. e. I do not care a groat."
So the archbishop gave it up as a bad job.
You say true: it is an extraordinary country, "La belle France;" but yet, in other days, I used to find much in it that gave me pleasure; and amidst the many faults that crowd upon the eye of a stranger on his first visit to any foreign country, I could descry many good qualities. At present my eye is jaundiced, and I dare not judge. I should be sorry to form an opinion of France from Bordeaux, but certainly there is vice enough here to supply a moderate kingdom.
I do not remember whether I have given you any account of Bordeaux before; if so, pardon the repetition. Not satisfied with the ordinary means of gambling, the good people have here invented one for themselves expressly. The price of brandy, you must know, is excessively subject to variation, and upon this they speculate, making bargains for time, as our stock-jobbers do, by which means fortunes are lost and won with extraordinary facility. The life of one of these men is brandy: he rises thinking of brandy--he writes about brandy all the morning--at dinner he talks about it--at the coffee-house he asks the news of brandy--at the theatre he makes a bargain between the acts, and then going to bed he dreams of a hogshead.
The upper classes of the Bordelois have the reputation of being not a little depraved. The next rank is a degree less corrupt; and lower down comes a race rather famous. You have heard of course of the Grisettes of Bourdeaux, and certainly they do appear the prettiest little beings that ever were turned out of a band-box, as they go tripping along the streets with their neat shoes and well-turned ankle and leg, which they do not at all scruple to show somewhat more than necessary. When in their working-dress, they wear a handkerchief shrewdly twisted round their head, a gown of common printed muslin, but cut in the most elegant form, and a little black silk apron, with a pocket on each side before, into which they put their hands to keep them warm in the winter.
Their dress at balls, and on fête days, is of the richest materials that can be found--expensive silks of the brightest colours, and a quantity of lace, which is principally displayed in the cap, that is then substituted for the handkerchief on the head. I am sorry to say that these young ladies are not generally famous for their morals. It is not, indeed, to be expected that they should be so. The same disgrace is not attached to the loss of virtue in this class as it is in England. If I may use the expression, they do not lose cast as they would with us, and are far from being disgraced amongst their fellows, by any degree of immorality except infidelity. All this does not prevent them from marrying when they arrive at a certain period of life, and making often better wives than those who, in the higher ranks, never went astray till they were married.
It is extraordinary, amidst this general dissolution of morals, how our fair countrywomen at Bordeaux keep themselves from all contamination. As you may suppose, there are a multitude of English families here, and I have never yet heard, a whisper against the female part of them. I know several persons here; some very agreeable, some who might be very agreeable if they would; but in general the society is confined to cold formal dinner-parties, which are little calculated to promote sociality. I do not at all thank a man for giving me a dinner. I can always get that for myself; but if he invites me to meet pleasant people, and adds one happy hour to the little stock of enjoyment that man can find in life, he lays me under an absolute obligation.
There are many Protestants in Bordeaux, and consequently a Protestant chapel, which I have attended frequently. Did you ever remark how intolerant a persecuted sect becomes? The horrible severities exercised for long upon the French Protestants have excited in them the most violent hatred to the Church of Rome; and even from the pulpit they do not spare their mother church. There is, however, here one of the best preachers I have ever heard, a Monsieur Vermeille. His sermons are by no means equally good; but I have heard him on many occasions burst into the most powerful strain of eloquence you can conceive. But my own eloquence is becoming rather tedious, and therefore I shall merely bid you farewell.
Your's ever,
J.P.Y.