Whenever I recall this eventful day there readily springs to my mind the circumstance that I found my father busily engaged in modelling a new portrait of the Prince of Wales—the late King Edward—for whose recovery from a very dangerous illness the nation had recently held a Day of Thanksgiving.
From this day onward I may claim to have acted as something more than a mere spectator of that long procession of models wrought by my father’s diligent hands. Each one necessitated the making of some small sketch, some characteristic study, that has helped to swell as strange a collection of memorials as ever existed of men and events of bygone days.
It is amid these surroundings that I now sit to begin the writing of these chapters; and a strangely engrossing retrospect they reveal. Five generations of my family have contributed towards them, and now, on a modelling stool by my side, there stands the promising work of a son who will, I trust, one day follow me to carry on the work.
During the quietude of those hours that succeed the labours of the day, and when the last studio hand has closed the door behind him, I take the opportunity of penning this brief history. Often in the moving shadows of the twilight or in the flickering flame of a falling ember I fancy I see life and movement in the faces that gaze down upon me, quickened, as it were, to respond to the memories their features evoke.
But for me, at least, there is little that is disquieting in their scrutiny. For the most part they are old familiars, and a long acquaintance has set us wonderfully at our ease.
As the eye passes from the semblance of one celebrity to that of another, how vividly they carry one’s thoughts back through King Edward’s reign, the long years Queen Victoria sat upon the throne, the days of William IV, the reign and regency of “The First Gentleman of Europe,” and far back into the days of good “Farmer George”!
Even though set among the strong and characteristic features of the leading men of these memorable reigns, the striking countenance of Napoleon can be discerned without hesitation, and his familiar features force me in imagination to undergo the ordeal of crossing the Channel to retrace the course this narrative takes and discover my ancestress under the domination of the First Consul, then pushing in hot haste his fortune at the point of the bayonet, and fast traversing the hazardous road leading to the throne of France.
Somehow we do not find this long and curious retrospect illumined by any very strong ray of human happiness. Even the overshadowing head and shoulders of the great Napoleon do not conceal from our vision the dismal heads of the revolutionists; indeed, if they had been hidden from our sight, could these ghoulish impressions ever be effaced from our memory? And so, behind Bonaparte, one’s eyes sight the sinister heads of Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, Carrier, Hébert—merciless creatures who gambled with the lives of their fellow men for high positions, and multiplied these awful human stakes that they might hold themselves secure.
There, too, in the falling light, one perceives the faces of Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, the two most notable and pitiful victims of the Reign of Terror—a reign, forsooth, in which these ill-starred sovereigns, the descendants of generations of kings, were but the poorest and saddest of subjects.
The vista is long and hazy, but it is not too dim for one to observe upon a bracket the visage of the great Voltaire, with its leering eyes and sardonic grin. His bust is vis-à-vis with the ponderous head of the idealist Rousseau, with its heavy forehead and its short, narrow chin.