What could I say? My father’s gravity, my love and respect for him, the temptation of the long-coveted flute, were altogether too much for me. Muttering a strangled “Yes,” I rushed away to throw myself on my bed in the depths of misery.
Be a doctor! Learn to dissect! Help in horrible operations! Bury myself in the hideous realities of hospitals, wounds, and death, when I might tread the clouds with the immortals!—when music and poetry wooed me with open arms and divine songs.
No, no, no! Such a tragedy could not happen!
Yet it did.
My cousin, A. Robert—now one of the first doctors in Paris—was to share my father’s lessons. Unluckily he played the violin well, being a member of my quintette party, and, of course, we spent more time over music than over osteology. Still he worked so hard at home that he was always ready with his demonstrations, and I was not. Hence frequent scoldings and the vials of my father’s wrath poured out on my poor head. Nevertheless, by hook or by crook, I managed to learn all that my father could teach me without dissections, and when I was nineteen, I consented to go with Robert to Paris to embark on a medical career.
Before beginning to tell of the deadly conflict that, almost immediately on my arrival in Paris, I began with ideas, people and things generally, and which has continued unremittingly up to this day, I must have a short breathing space.
Moreover, to-day—the 10th April 1848—has been chosen for the great Chartist demonstration. Perhaps, in a few hours, these two hundred thousand men will have upset England, as the revolutionists have upset the rest of Europe, and this last refuge will have failed me. I shall know soon.
8 P.M.—Chartists are rather a decent sort of revolutionists. Those powerful orators—big guns—took the chair, and their mere presence was so convincing that speech was superfluous. The Chartists quite understood that the moment was not propitious for a revolution, and they dispersed quietly and in order. My good folks, you know as much about organising an insurrection as the Italians do about composing symphonies.
12th July.—No possibility of writing for the last three months, and now I am going back to my poor France—mine own country, after all! I am going to see whether an artist can live there, or how long it will take him to die amid those ruins beneath which Art lies—crushed, bleeding, dead!
Farewell, England!