“Dec. 8.—Sat by Sir George Dasent at breakfast. A Mr. Frere passed through the room. ‘He comes from Roffham,’ said Sir G., ‘one of those places of which the name has such a rough East Anglian sound, and he is member of the family which possessed the Paston Letters without knowing it. There were six volumes of letters. Two of them were sent up, by request, for Queen Charlotte to look at, and they were lost. She was very accurate herself, that old woman, especially about things that were lent to her, and there is no doubt that she had given them to one of her ladies to return: anyhow they were lost. Afterwards, however, duplicate copies of many of the lost letters were found to be still in the possession of the family, and their existence quite disproved an assertion that the letters had been forgeries.
“‘They were wonderful people, those old Pastons. They used to thrash their daughters like anything if they did not behave themselves, and then, when they had flogged them well, they would say, “And now they must have silk dresses, rich, red, and beautiful!”’
“Dec. 9.—Dined with M. B., who told me of Lady Vane[433] being quite worn-out by the ghastly noises at their place in Cumberland: it was as if some one were always trying to climb up a disused chimney in the wall, and then falling violently down again. But lately, when Sir Henry Vane was away, she had the wall opened. Inside she found a wide and very lofty closet, narrowing into a funnel as it reached the roof, where it opened by a very small hole to the sky. In it were human bones, a broken water-bottle, and the cover of an old Bible, which bore a date. Lady Vane had the bones gathered up and put into a box, which was left in a corner of Sir Henry Vane’s room till his return.
“When Sir Henry Vane came home, he was exhausted by a long journey and went at once to rest. Lady Vane did not intend to tell him of her discovery till the next day. But suddenly, late in the afternoon, she heard a tremendous noise in her husband’s room. She rushed in, and found Sir Henry in a state of the greatest agitation. He said, ‘I have seen the most frightful apparition—a woman in that corner,’ pointing to where the box of bones had been deposited.
“From old family archives they found that, some years before, exactly at the date upon the Bible cover, a woman had been walled up in the house. She had made desperate efforts to escape up the funnel of the disused chimney, and had always fallen down again. Sir Henry and Lady Vane themselves buried the bones in the churchyard, and the house has been at peace ever since.”
“Thorncombe, Dec. 13.—Miss Montgomery is here, a lady of the most impassive countenance, though she is the authoress of ‘Misunderstood.’”
“Warwick Castle, Jan. 30, 1887.—A delightful visit to this beautiful place. I came off suddenly on a telegram from Lady Warwick,[434] and found several pleasant people, besides the family. More than ever have I been charmed by Lady Warwick, who has the rarest of all attractions—absolute simplicity, and ‘rien n’est difficile comme le simple,’ as Madame de Maintenon used to say. Then most glorious in position is the castle, with the river close underneath, so that the family feed the swans daily from the aërial balcony outside the breakfast-room window. Pilgrim-visitors constantly pour through the rooms with the pictures, of which the finest are a grand Morone, and a Raffaelle finished by Ghirlandajo. The visitors are conducted through the rooms by the housekeeper, who is a great character in her way. When the Prince of Wales was here, she showed him a relic which ‘belonged to King James III.’—‘Ah! the old Pretender,’ said the Prince. ‘We do not think so, your Royal Highness,’ she replied very stiffly. The pictures at Warwick are a real enjoyment, not only important and valuable, which is generally thought enough, but each individually lovely and suggestive. And the happy family life is perfection—such a sharing of interests, the hunting sons not entirely engrossed by it, and no single member of the family talking scandal or looking for motes in their neighbours’ eyes. The old town is charming, with the Leicester hospital, and the great church, chiefly renaissance, but with a fine gothic choir. One evening there was a dance, and after it Mrs. Bob Lyttelton (Miss Santley), who lives in the town, sang most gloriously.
“We have driven to see the exceedingly curious old house of Badeley Clinton, of which my distant cousin, Mr. Dering, has married the widowed owner. It is a most singular and poetical place, and there are many curious stories about it. Handsome, refined, and naturally, not affectedly, poetical and picturesque, Edward Dering is wonderfully suited to the place, and its very solitariness facilitates his leading a life there of almost mediaeval saintliness.”[435]
On the 26th of February 1887 I left England again for my French work, and spent a month in Paris at a primitive and economical inn in the Rue d’Amboise. Living here, I spent my days entirely amongst the historic quarters, seeing nothing of the Boulevards or Rue de Rivoli, but making great progress with a work—my “Paris”—which had no interruptions, and in which I became increasingly interested as I knew more of my subject. On the fine days of early March many excursions were very pleasant, involving long walks to the Abbaye du Val, Nogent les Vierges, &c. Unfortunately the weather changed before I set out on a tour through the Bourbonnais; and in Provence, where many long excursions were necessary, the mistral was quite terrific. Mounting into the wild fastnesses of the Maritime Alps above S. Maximin, to visit the cave in which the Magdalen is believed to have died, I caught a terrible chill, from which I was afterwards very ill at Manosque. But the kindly though rough proprietors of the inn—M. and Mme. Pascal—persuaded me to try the remedy of taking no nourishment whatever except hot tea, and letting nature lie absolutely at rest for forty-eight hours, and, as often since, I found this quite answer, though during that time I drove in an open carriage for eight hours to visit the Roman remains at Riez.
