CHAPTER XX.
September, 1829.—A chasm of many months in my journal. When last I closed it, little could I have foreseen the terrible blow that awaited me. Well may I exclaim with the French writer whose works I have been just reading, "Nous, qui sommes bornés en tout, comment le sommes-nous si peu quand il s'agit de souffrir." How slowly has time passed since! Every hour counted, and each coloured by care, the past turned to with the vain hope of forgetting the present, and the future no longer offering the bright prospect it once unfolded!
How is my destiny changed since I last opened this book! My hopes have faded and vanished like the leaves whose opening into life I hailed with joy six months ago, little dreaming that before the first cold breath of autumn had tinted them with brown, he who saw them expand with me would have passed from the earth!
October.—Ill, and confined to my chamber for several days, my physician prescribes society to relieve low spirits; but in the present state of mine, the remedy seems worse than the disease.
My old friends Mr. and Mrs. Mathews, and their clever son, have arrived at Paris and dined here yesterday. Mr. Matthews is as entertaining as ever, and his wife as amiable and spirituelle. They are excellent as well as clever people, and their society is very agreeable. Charles Mathews, the son, is full of talent, possesses all his father's powers of imitation, and sings comic songs of his own composition that James Smith himself might be proud to have written.
The Duc and Duchesse de Guiche, the Marquise de Poulpry, Lady Combermere, Madame Craufurd, and Count Valeski, came in the evening, and were all highly gratified with some recitations and songs given us by Mr. Mathews and his son. They were not less pleased with Mrs. Mathews, whose manners and conversation are peculiarly fascinating, and whose good looks and youthfulness of appearance made them almost disbelieve that she could be the mother of a grown-up son.
How forcibly did the recitations and songs bring back former times to my memory, when in St. James's Square, or in his own beautiful cottage at Highgate, I have so frequently been delighted by the performances of this clever and worthy man! The recollection of the past occupied me more last night than did the actual present, and caused me to return but a faint echo to the reiterated applause which every new effort of his drew forth from the party. There are moments when the present appears like a dream, and that we think the past, which is gone for ever, has more of reality in it!
I took Mr. and Mrs. Mathews to the Jardin des Plantes to-day, and was much amused by an incident that occurred there. A pretty child, with her bonne, were seated on a bench near to which we placed ourselves. She was asking questions relative to the animals she had seen, and Mr. Mathews having turned his head away from her, gave some admirable imitations of the sounds peculiar to the beasts of which she was speaking, and also of the voice and speeches of the person who had exhibited them.
Never did he exert himself more to please a crowded and admiring audience than to amuse this child, who, maintaining an immovable gravity during the imitations, quietly observed to her nurse, "Ma bonne, ce Monsieur est bien drôle."
The mortification of Mr. Mathews on this occasion was very diverting. "How!" exclaimed he, "is it possible that all my efforts to amuse that child have so wholly failed? She never moved a muscle! I suppose the French children are not so easily pleased as our English men and women are?"