‘Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake,
For death takes everything away, but these he cannot take.’
A hundred musical notes keep green the memory of the last Prince of Romance, the beloved, the beautiful, the brave Prince Charlie—everso missus succurrere saeclo. The overturned age was not to be rescued by charms and virtues which the age itself was to ruin and destroy. Loyal memories are faithful, not to what the Prince became under stress of exile, and treachery, and hope deferred, and death in life, de vivre et de pas vivre—but to what he once was, Tearlach Righ nan Gael.
Of one character in this woful tale a word may be said. The Princesse de Talmond was visited by Horace Walpole in 1765. He found her in ‘charitable apartments in the Luxembourg,’ and he tripped over cats and stools (and other things) in the twilight of a bedroom hung with pictures of Saints and Sobieskis. At last, and very late, the hour of her conversion had been granted, by St. François Xavier, to the prayers of her husband. We think of the Baroness Bernstein in her latest days as we read of the end of the Princesse. She had governed Charles ‘with fury and folly.’ Of all the women who had served him—Flora Macdonald, Madame de Vassé, Mademoiselle Luci, Miss Walkinshaw—did he remember none when he wrote that he understood men, but despaired of understanding women, ‘they being so much more wicked and impenetrable’? [323]
FOOTNOTES
[3] Edition of 1832, i. p. x.
[12a] History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. London, 1838, iii. 279.
[12b] An authentic account of the conduct of the Young Chevalier, p. 7. Third edition, 1749.
[13] London, 1879.
[15a] Letters from Italy by an Englishwoman, ii. 198. London 1776. Cited by Lord Stanhope, iii. 556. Horace Mann to the Duke of Newcastle. State Papers. Tuscany. Jan. ½½, 174¾. In Ewald, i. 87. Both authorities speak of blue eyes.
[15b] A false Charles appeared in Selkirkshire in 1745. See Mr. Craig Brown’s History of Ettrick Forest. The French, in 1759, meant to send a false Charles to Ireland with Thurot. Another appeared at Civita Vecchia about 1752. The tradition of Roderick Mackenzie, who died under English bullets, crying ‘You have slain your Prince,’ is familiar. We shall meet other pseudo-Charles’s.