AN INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF MRS. RADCLIFFE.
Toward the middle of the year 1795, a short time after the deplorable affair of Quiberon, an English lady was taken prisoner just as she was entering France by the Swiss frontier. Her knowledge of French was limited to a few mispronounced words. An interpreter was soon found, and upon his interrogating her as to her motives for attempting so perilous an enterprise without passport, she replied that she had exposed herself to all these dangers for the purpose of visiting the château where the barbarous Sieur de Fayel had made Gabrielle de Vergy eat the heart of her lover. Such a declaration appeared so ridiculous to those who heard it that they were compelled to doubt either the sanity or the veracity of the strange being who ventured upon it. They chose to do the latter, and forwarded the stranger to Paris, with a strong escort, as an English spy. Upon her arrival there, she was safely deposited in the Conciergerie.
Public feeling just then ran very high against the English. The countrywoman of Pitt was loaded with ill-usage; and her terrors, expressed in a singular jargon of English mingled with broken French, served but to augment the coarse amusement of her jailers. After exhausting every species of derision and insult upon their prisoner, they ended by throwing her into the dampest and most inconvenient dungeon they could find. The door of this den was not more than four feet high; and the light that dimly revealed the dripping walls and earthen floor, came through a horizontal opening four inches in height by fifteen in width. The sole movables of the place consisted of a rope pallet and a screen.
The bed served for both couch and chair; the screen was intended as a partial barrier between the inhabitant of the dungeon and the curious gaze of the jailers stationed in the adjoining apartment, who could scrutinize at will, through a narrow opening between the cells, the slightest movements of their prisoner.
The stranger recoiled with disgust, and asked whether they had not a less terrible place in which to confine a woman.
"You are very bad to please, madame," replied her brutal jailer, mimicking her defective French. "You are in the palace of Madame Capet."
And shutting behind him the massive door, barricaded with plates of iron and secured by three or four rusty bolts, he left her, to repeat his joke to his companion, and enjoy with them the consternation of Madame Rosbif.
Meanwhile the prisoner fell upon her knees, and gazed around her with a species of pious emotion.
"What right have I," she cried, "to complain of being cast into this dungeon, once inhabited by the Queen of France—the beautiful, the noble Marie Antoinette? I sought food for my imagination; I undertook a journey to France to visit the most celebrated sojourns of the most celebrated individuals. Fortune has come to my aid. Here is what is better than the château of the Sieur de Fayel, and the terrible history of the bleeding heart. Never did a grander inspiration overflow my spirits. I will to work."
She drew from her pocket a small roll of paper, that had escaped the scrutiny of the jailers; and, passing her hand across her forehead, approached the horizontal opening, in order to make the most of the little remainder of daylight; then, taking out a pencil, she rapidly covered ten or twelve pages with microscopic characters in close lines. The increasing darkness at length compelled her to pause, and she was refolding the MS. to replace it in her pocket, when a rude hand snatched it from her grasp.
"Ah! ah! Madame Rosbif," cried the jailer, triumphantly, "so you believe yourself at liberty to scribble away here, hatching plots against the Republic, and holding intelligence with the enemies of the nation. ous verrons cela! These papers shall be remitted this very day to Monsieur Tallien, and we will know all about this new attack upon liberty. Entendez-vouz? miserable agent of Pitt and Cobourg."
The same evening Tallien received the stranger's manuscript. Being unacquainted with the English language, he rang for his secretary; but the latter was nowhere at hand, so the puzzled minister took the papers and proceeded to his wife's apartments.
Madame Tallien was just completing her toilet for a fancy ball. Leaning forward in a graceful attitude, she was in the act of twining round her slender ankle the fastenings of a purple buskin. Her Grecian tunic, simply clasped upon the shoulder with diamonds, and her hair, knotted like that of the Polyhymnia of the Louvre, harmonized admirably with the classical contour of her features. Monsieur Tallien, as he gazed upon her, half forgot his errand.
The lady uttered a little cry of surprise.
"Upon what grave errand has monsieur deigned to favor me with a visit at this unaccustomed hour?"
"I have here some papers," replied the minister, "that have been seized upon the person of a female spy, and are said to contain proofs of a dangerous conspiracy. They are written in English; my secretary is absent; and I must ask you to do me the favor to translate them to me."
Madame Tallien took the MS., and looked it over.
"Shall I read aloud?" said she, in an amused tone of voice.
Her husband assented.
"The wind howls mournfully through the foliage, and the descending rain falls in torrents. The terrors of my prison become every instant more fearful. Phantoms arise on every side, and wave their snowy winding-sheets. Misfortune, with her cold and pitiless hand, weighs heavily on my youthful brow.'
"Thus spoke the lovely prisoner, as she groped with her trembling hands over the humid walls of the dungeon."
"Here is a singular conspiracy, truly," said Madame Tallien, as she finished reading the above. "Let me see the envelope; 'Chapter XII. The Dungeon of the Château.' And the authoress's name. 'Anne Radcliffe.' Vite, citoyen. Set this woman at liberty, and bring her to me. Your spy is no other than the great English romance-writer, the celebrated authoress of the 'Mysteries of Udolpho!"
Tallien now recalled the romantic intention of the stranger's hazardous journey, as confessed by herself; perceived the mistake of his agents, and laughed heartily. Going quickly out, he issued orders for the immediate liberation of the prisoner, and desired the messenger to bring her straight to the presence of Madame Tallien.
Meanwhile, the beautiful Frenchwoman, forgetting her toilet and the ball, paced the apartment with almost childish delight and impatience. She was about to make the acquaintance—in a manner the most piquant and unexpected—of the authoress of those romances which had so often filled her vivid imagination with ideas of apparitions, and prisoners dying of hunger in horrible dungeons. She consulted her watch perpetually, and counted the very seconds. At length there was a sound of carriage-wheels in the court-yard of the hotel. Madame Tallien rushed to the door; it opened, and the two celebrated females stood face to face.
The minister's wife could not avoid recoiling with surprise, and some degree of consternation, before the singular figure that paused in the open doorway; for Mrs. Radcliffe had stopped short, dazzled and bewildered by the lights of the saloon, which wounded eyes accustomed for some hours past to the humid obscurity of a dungeon. The English authoress presented a striking contrast to the radiant being before her. Dry, cold, and angular, her attire necessarily in some degree of disorder from her arrest, forced journey, and imprisonment, her whole aspect had in it something bizarre and fantastic, that added to her age at least ten years.
A little recovered from her first surprise, Madame Tallien advanced toward the stranger, gave her a cordial welcome in English, and told her how happy she esteemed herself in having been the means of setting at liberty so celebrated an authoress. The Englishwoman made a polite reply to this compliment, and then they seated themselves before the fire, whose clear flame and vivifying heat were very welcome to the liberated prisoner, and quickly restored an activity of mind that appeared to have been benumbed by the coldness of her dungeon. The ensuing conversation was gay, piquant, full of charm and abandon, and was only interrupted by the orders given by Madame Tallien to her femme de chambre to send the carriage away, and deny her to all visitors.
Mrs. Radcliffe had traveled much, and related her adventures with grace and originality. Hours flew by unheeded, and the Englishwoman was in the very midst of some bold enterprise of her journey in Switzerland, when the time-piece struck twelve. She turned pale, and a visible shuddering seized her. Then pausing in her tale, she looked wildly and fearfully around, as if following the movements of some invisible being. Madame Tallien, struck with a species of vague terror, dared not address a single word to her visitor. The latter at length abruptly rose, opened the door, and with an imperative gesture ordered some one by the name of Henry to leave the room, after which she appeared to experience a sudden relief.
The lovely Frenchwoman, with the tact of real kindness, appeared not to notice this strange incident, and the new-made friends soon after separated, Madame Tallien herself conducting her guest to the apartment provided for her, where she took leave of her with an affectionate "au revoir!"
The following evening Mrs. Radcliffe appeared in her hostess's saloon, as soon as the latter had signified that she was ready to receive her. Calm and composed, habited a la Française, the English romancist appeared ten years younger than she had done the evening before, and was even not without a certain degree of beauty. She said not a word on the scene of the preceding evening; was gay, witty, amiable, and took an animated part in the conversation that followed. But as soon as the minute-hand of the time-piece pointed to half-past eleven, her color fled, a shade of pensiveness replaced her former gayety, and a few moments afterward she took her leave of the company.
The same thing happened the next day, and every ensuing evening. Madame Tallien could not avoid a feeling of curiosity, but she had too much politeness to question the stranger confided to her hospitality. In this way a month elapsed, at the end of which time Mrs. Radcliffe could not avoid expressing, one evening when she found herself alone with her new friend, her disappointment at being detained a prisoner in France, without the power of returning to her own country. Upon this Madame Tallien rose, took a paper from a desk, and handed it to the Englishwoman. It was a passport dated from the same evening that Mrs. Radcliffe had been liberated from her dungeon.
"Since you wish to leave your French friends," said her lovely hostess, smiling, "go, ingrate!"
"Oh, no, not ungrateful!" replied the authoress, taking the beautiful hands of her friend, and carrying them to her lips; "but the year is fast waning, and a solemn duty recalls me to my native land. In the church-yard of a poor village near London are two tombs, which I visit each Christmas-day with flowers and prayers. If I return not before then, this will be the first time for five years that they have been neglected. You already know all my other secrets," she continued, lowering her voice; "it is my intention to confide this secret also to your friendly ears." Passing her hand across her brow, the Englishwoman then proceeded to relate a strange and tragic tale, for the particulars of which we have not space in our limited sketch. Suffice it to say, that it had left our authoress subject to a distressing and obstinate spectral illusion. In the reality of this appearance she firmly believed, not having sufficient knowledge of science to attribute her visitation to its true origin—a partial disarrangement of the nervous system. This visitation regularly recurred at midnight, and at once accounted for the singular behavior that had so piqued the benevolent Frenchwoman's curiosity.
Mrs. Radcliffe now returned to London, where she shortly afterward published "The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents."
We can, in our day, realize to ourselves very little of the effect produced by Anne Radcliffe's romances at the time of their appearance. All the contemporary critics agree in testifying to their immense success, only inferior to that of the Waverley novels in more recent times. Now they appear nothing more than the efflux of a morbid imagination, full of hallucinations and absurdities, and insufferably tedious to our modern tastes, accustomed to the condensed writing of the present day. Their unconnected plots are nevertheless not altogether devoid of a certain sort of interest, and are fraught with picturesque situations and melodramatic surprises. The living characters therein introduced present few natural features. We recognize every where the caprices of an unbridled fancy, and a prevailing vitiation of sense and taste.
Anne Radcliffe died near London, on the 7th February, 1823, at the age of 63. The "New Monthly Magazine," for May of that year, announces her decease, and affirms that her death was accompanied by singular visions, which had pursued her ever since a romantic event of her youth.