‘My wife was in ecstasy to be the Frow Vanderstradentendonk, with a fish-pond before the door, and twelve gods and goddesses in lead around it. To have a brace of asthmatic peacocks on a terrace, and a dropsical swan on an island, were strong fascinations—not to speak of the straight avenues leading nowhere, and the winds of heaven blowing everywhere; a house with a hundred and thirty windows and half as many doors, none of which would shut close; a garden, with no fruit but crab-apples; and a nursery, so called, because the playground of all the brats for a league round us. No matter, I had resolved to live abroad for a year or two, and one place would do just as well as another; at least, I should have quietness—that was something; there was no neighbourhood, no town, no highroad, no excuse for travelling acquaintances to drop in, or rambling tourists to bore one with letters of introduction. Thank God! there was neither a battlefield, a cathedral, a picture, nor a great living poet for ten miles on any side.
‘Here, thought I, I shall have that peace Piccadilly cannot give. Cincinnatus-like, I’ll plant my cabbages, feed my turkeys, let my beard grow, and nurse my rental. Solitude never bored me; I could bear anything but intrusive impertinence. So far did I carry this feeling, that on reading Robinson Crusoe I laid down the volume in disgust on the introduction of his man Friday!
‘It mattered little, therefore, that the couleur de rose picture the lawyer had drawn of the château had little existence out of his own florid imagination; the quaint old building, with its worn tapestries and faded furniture, suited the habit of my soul, and I hugged myself often in the pleasant reflection that my London acquaintances would be puzzling their brains for my whereabouts, without the slightest clue to my detection. Now, had I settled in Florence, Frankfort, or Geneva, what a life I must have led! There is always some dear Mrs. Somebody going to live in your neighbourhood, who begs you ‘ll look out for a house for her—something very eligible; eighteen rooms well furnished; a southern aspect; in the best quarter; a garden indispensable; and all for some forty pounds a year—or some other dear friend who desires you ‘ll find a governess, with more accomplishments than Malibran and more learning than Porson, with the temper of five angels, and a “vow in heaven” to have no higher salary than a college bed-maker. Then there are the Thompsons passing through, whom you have taken care never to know before; but who fall upon you now as strangers in a foreign land, and take the “benefit” of the “Alien Act” in dinners at your house during their stay. I stop not to enumerate the crying wants of the more lately arrived resident, all of which are refreshed for your benefit; the recommendations to butlers who don’t cheat, to moral music-masters, grave dancing-masters, and doctors who never take fees—every infraction by each of these individuals in his peculiar calling being set down as a just cause of complaint against yourself, requiring an animated correspondence in writing, and concluding with an abject apology and a promise to cut the delinquent that day, though you owe him a half-year’s bill. These are all pleasant; not to speak of the curse of disjointed society, ill-assorted, ill-conceived, unreasonable pretension, vulgar impertinence, and fawning toadyism on every side, and not one man to be found to join you in laughing at the whole thing, which would amply repay one for any endurance. No, thought I, I ‘ve had enough of this! I ‘ll try my barque in quieter waters, and though it’s only a punt, yet I’ll hold the sculls myself, and that’s something.
‘So much for the self-gratulation I indulged in, as the old chaise de poste rattled over the heavy pavement, and drew up short at the portico of my future dwelling. My wife was charmed with the procession of villagers who awaited us on the steps, and (although an uglier population never trod their mother earth in wooden slippers) fancied she could detect several faces of great beauty and much interest in the crowd. For my part, I saw nothing but an indiscriminate haze of cotton nightcaps, striped jackets, blouses, black petticoats and sabots; so, pushing my way through them, I left the bassoon and the burgomaster to the united delights of their music and eloquence, and shutting the hall door threw myself on a seat, and thanked Heaven that my period of peace and tranquillity was at length to begin.
‘Peace and tranquillity! What airy visions! Had I selected the post of cad to an omnibus, a steward to a Greenwich steamer, were I a guide to the Monument or a waiter at Long’s my life had been one of dignified repose in comparison with my present existence.
‘I had not been a week in the château when a travelling Englishman sprained his ankle within a short distance of the house. As a matter of course he was brought there, and taken every care of for the few days of his stay. He was fed, housed, leeched, and stuped, and when at length he proceeded upon his journey was profuse in his acknowledgments for the services rendered him; and yet what was the base return of the ungrateful man? I have scarcely temper to record it. During the very moment when we were most lavish in our attention to him, he was sapping the very peace of his benefactors. He learned from the Flemish servants of the house that it had formerly been the favourite residence of Van Dyck; that the very furniture was unchanged since his time; the bed, the table, the chair he had sat on were all preserved. The wretch—am I not warranted in calling him so?—made notes of all this; before I had been three weeks in my abode, out came a Walk in Flanders, in two volumes, with a whole chapter about me, headed “Château de Van Dyck.” There we were, myself and my wife, in every window of the Row: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Blue, had bought us at a price, and paid for us; there we were—we, who courted solitude and retirement—to be read of by every puppy in the West End, and every apprentice in Cheapside. Our hospitality was lauded, as if I kept open house for all comers, with “hot chops and brown gravy” at a moment’s notice. The antiquary was bribed to visit me by the fascinations of a spot “sacred to the reveries of genius”; the sportsman, by the account of my “preserves”; the idler, to say he had been there; and the guide-bookmaker and historical biographer, to vamp up details for a new edition of Belgium as it was, or Van Dyck and his Contemporaries.
‘From the hour of the publication of that horrid book I never enjoyed a moment’s peace or ease. The whole tide of my travelling countrymen—and what a flood it is!—came pouring into Ghent. Post-horses could not be found sufficient for half the demand; the hotels were crowded; respectable peasants gave up their daily employ to become guides to the château; and little busts of Van Dyck were hawked about the neighbourhood by children of four years old. The great cathedral of Ghent, Van Scamp’s pictures, all the historic remains of that ancient city were at a discount; and they who formerly exhibited them as a livelihood were now thrown out of bread. Like the dancing-master who has not gone up to Paris for the last pirouette, or the physician who has not taken up the stethoscope, they were reputed old-fashioned and passé; and if they could not describe the Château de Van Dyck, were voted among the bygones.
‘The impulse once given, there was no stopping; the current was irresistible. The double lock on the gate of the avenue, the bulldog at the hall door, the closed shutters, the cut-away bell-rope, announced a firm resolution in the fortress not to surrender; but we were taken by assault, escaladed, and starved out in turns.
‘Scarcely was the tea-urn on the breakfast-table when they began to pour in—old and young, the halt, the one-eyed, the fat, the thin, the melancholy, the merry, the dissipated, the dyspeptic, the sentimental, the jocose, the blunt, the ceremonious, the courtly, the rude, the critical, and the free and easy. One came forty miles out of his way, and pronounced the whole thing an imposition, and myself a humbug; another insisted upon my getting up at dinner, that he might sit down in my chair, characterised by the confounded guides as “le fauteuil de Van Dyck”; a third went so far as to propose lying down in our great four-post bed, just to say he had been there, though my wife was then in it. I speak not of the miserable practice of cutting slices off all the furniture as relics. John Murray took an inventory of the whole contents of the house for a new edition of his guidebook; and Holman, the blind traveller, felt me all over with his hand as I sat at tea with my wife; and last of all, a respectable cheesemonger from the Strand, after inspecting the entire building from the attics to the cellar, pressed sixpence into my hand at parting, and said, “Happy to see you, Mr. Van Dyck, if you come into the city!”
‘Then the advice and counsel I met with, oral and written, would fill a volume, and did; for I was compelled to keep an album in the hall for the visitors’ names. One suggested that my desecration of the temple of genius would be less disgusting if I dined in my kitchen, and left the ancient dining-room as the great artist had left it. Another hinted that my presence in my own house destroyed all the illusion of its historic associations. A third, a young lady—to judge by the writing—proposed my wearing a point-beard and lace ruffles, with trunk hose and a feather in my hat, probably to favour the “illusion” so urgently mentioned by the other writer, and, perhaps, to indulge visitors like my friend the cheesemonger. Many pitied me—well might they!—as one insensible to the associations of the spot; while my very servants, regarding me only as a show part of the establishment, neglected their duties on every side, and betook themselves to ciceroneship, each allocating his peculiar territory to himself, like the people who show the lions and the armour in the Tower.