He left it to mamma;
The office paid most cheerfully,
How happy now we are!”
This touching effusion was received with great waving of handkerchiefs, and some sobs, indeed, on the part of the ladies, and I have no doubt that many of those fair ones on returning home did that night incite, command, and compel their liege lords and masters forthwith to assure their lives in the “Amiable and General Fire and Life Assurance Company” (with which are incorporated the “Good-natured and Law Life,” the “Equitable and Jocular Fire,” and the “Compassionate and Confidential Deposit and Loan Association”). The friendly meeting of the “Amiable and General” was distinguished above other conversaziones by the fact, that when the ladies had taken their departure, a capital cold supper, and abundant libations of champagne, were provided for the directors and their friends, at which repast, which lasted to a very advanced hour, everybody drank everybody else’s health with all the honours, and everybody was made a preferential shareholder. I know that I was; though I am not quite aware at the present moment of the exact locality of the “Amiable and General’s” offices, or, indeed, whether that most promising company is still in existence.
The strange conversaziones a man may from time to time visit! I have been to one at the Hanover Square Rooms given by the confraternity of dentists. Slim gentlemen of Carker-like dental developement held forth on the transcendant merit of the art of pulling out people’s teeth, and fiercely denounced the quacks and impostors who ignorantly tampered with the jaws of her Majesty’s subjects; the room itself was hung round with the most hideous coloured cartoons, representative of diverse phases of dental surgery, and I came away haunted by visions of pink beeswax, thin gold plates, morocco easy chairs, springs, dents osanores, artificial gums, and those dreadfully clean hands, the wrists garnished by wristbands as clean, which seem to be the exclusive property of dentists. I congratulated myself, too, on my departure, on the fact that no visitor to the conversazione had, for the pure love of art, pulled out one of my few remaining teeth, just as, after dining with a schoolmaster, I felicitate myself for having escaped a caning. There is something in the whiteness of a dentist’s hand, and in the twinkling of a schoolmaster’s gray eye, that would make me tremble were I Lord Chancellor of Great Britain.
But the oddest conversazione I ever attended was not in this country, but in a foreign land. It was in Paris—and I am speaking seriously—a conversazione of coiffeurs, of barbers, hair-dressers, and wig-makers. I declare that I have seldom passed a more agreeable evening in my life. Everything was conducted on the most intensely genteel footing, and everybody was ceremoniously polite; although I must be candid in admitting that a decided odour of pomatum and freshly-frizzled curls pervaded the salon, which was, indeed, the upstairs room of a restaurant at Montmartre. There were ladies present, too; and after some pleasant little discourse, all tending to the glorification of hair-dressing, an eminent professor of the philocomal art there present proceeded to a series of practical and illustrative experiments on the heads of some of the young ladies, in order to show the different styles of dressing and arranging the head which had prevailed from the time of François, premier jusqu’ à nos jours, to our own days. The ladies submitted with charming equanimity to the operation, and the experimentalist was enabled to submit to public inspection and admiration a full-blown Ninon d’Enclos, a Mademoiselle de Montpensier, a Duchesse de Longueville, a Madame de Maintenon, together with several Du Barris, De la Vallières, Pompadours, Madame Talliens, Mademoiselle Mars, Charlotte Cordays, and Théroigne de Méricourts. At the conclusion of the experiments, there was a grand procession of the ladies variously coiffées round the room, followed by the triumphant hair-dressers, waving their tongs and combs, and redolent of puff-powder; then we had orgeat and anisette; and then I went and supped in the restaurant downstairs with one of the hair-dressers, who went me halves in a bottle of Beaune, and swore eternal friendship to me over a Mayonnaise de homard.
But to return to the conversazione world of London. Suppose we take a literary one to begin with: say one of Mrs. Van Umbug’s Thursdays. Mrs. Van Umbug lives at that classically severe mansion, the “Arena. Gladiator’s Crescent, Nero Square.” Mr. Van Umbug is a member of Parliament, and sits on the Liberal side of the House, but nobody takes much notice of him, and he is usually alluded to as Mrs. Van Umbug’s husband. If you ask the coachman in the adjacent mews whose horses are those the helper is harnessing to the brougham, he will probably answer, “Mrs. Van Umbug’s.” The servants in the house in Gladiator Street, talk continually of “Missus” (who makes her presence not only seen but felt), but scarcely ever mention “Master.” The tradespeople usually send in their bills to Mrs. Van Umbug; and it is certain that it is that lady who issues the invitations and receives the company at her Thursday conversaziones. Mr. Van Umbug, M.P., is scarcely ever seen at those gatherings, and when he is, rarely, manifest, it is in a very meek and subdued manner. He sneaks in and out as if the house didn’t belong to him (which, indeed, it does not), and appears desperately afraid of the portly man in black with the white Berlin gloves who hands round the tea and coffee.
Mrs. Van Umbug’s mansion is supposed to be furnished in the highest style of taste and virtu. Hers is quoted as an abode of all that is elegant, recherché, and distingué. What are taste and virtu, I wonder? what makes things elegant, distingué, and recherché? Do chairs that you can’t sit down upon, and spindled-shanked tables, tottering beneath the weight of gaudily-bound books, containing specimens of chromo-lithography? do a sham pre-Raphaelite picture or two, in which a long-legged swain is courting a lady with yellow hair and a striped dress falling in unnatural folds, under the lee of a marvellously-executed waterbutt—a curiously-manipulated mangold-wurzel, and a minutely finished frying-pan occupying the foreground? do scraps of armour and oak-carvings, supposed to be ancient, but in reality manufactured the week before last in Wardour Street? do odds and ends, and Chinese monsters in porcelain, and a Louis Quinze clock, and the model of a Swiss châlet in box-wood, and an imitation grotto and aquarium in an ante-room? I suppose these things do.
This present Thursday at Mrs. Van Umbug’s is a great literary one.