Nothing else [but ill health] should have detained me so long at Paris, a place which in cold weather I think excessively disagreeable and peculiarly unwholesome. In fine weather, when a stranger can visit the various works of art which the tempest has assembled here from every quarter of the globe, it is highly interesting; and it is encircled by so many delightful gardens, that one may pass the summer here without feeling one’s absence from the country. Yet I have never seen a spot where I should more grieve at fixing my residence, nor a nation with which I should find it so difficult to coalesce. A revolution does not seem to be favourable to the morals of a people. In the upper classes I have seen nothing but the most ardent pursuit after sensual or frivolous pleasures, and the most unqualified egotism, with a devotion to the shrines of luxury and vanity unknown at any former period. The lower ranks are chiefly marked by a total want of probity, and an earnestness for the gain of to-day, though purchased by the sacrifice of that character which might ensure them tenfold advantage on the morrow.[36] You must not think me infected with national prejudice. I speak from the narrow circle of my own observation and that of my friends; and I do not include the suffering part of the nation, who have little intercourse with strangers, and who form a society apart. I have been presented to Buonaparte and his wife, who receive with great state, ceremony, and magnificence. His manner is very good, but the expression of his countenance is not attractive. Curran says he has the face of ‘a gloomy tyrant.’ Another has compared him to a corpse with living eyes: and a painter remarked to me that the smile on his lips never seemed to accord with the rest of his features. I have the pleasure of sending you a little picture, very like him, which may enable you to form your own opinion.
And now let me thank you a thousand times for your most flattering and beautiful verses, in which you have decked me with merits that I owe entirely to your partial friendship and lively imagination. I do not, however, wish you to awaken from the illusion; on the contrary, I feel a pride and pleasure in reflecting that, strong as is your discernment, your affection for me is still stronger.
Mrs. Leadbeater, to whom this last letter was written, was at this time comparatively a recent friend; this may perhaps explain the absence in it of any reference to the writer’s approaching marriage, which took place at the English Embassy in Paris very shortly after the letter was written. She and my father, who had not very long been called to the bar, were on the point of returning to England, when they were overtaken by the somewhat abrupt termination of the Peace of Amiens. They, like so many other residents and travellers in France, had been quieted in the near prospect of war, by the assurance that, according to the universal rule in such cases, full opportunity would be given for quitting the hostile soil. How far the conduct of our Government palliated, or, as pleaded by Napoleon, justified, the course which he took in detaining the English whom he found in France at the moment when war broke out, need not be entered upon here, and as little the general story of their detention. How they in whom I have nearest interest, found their way to Orleans, a brief memorandum of my father’s will explain. ‘Aug. 7, 1803.—Left Paris with a passport granted by Junot, for Tours; arrived at Orleans on the 10th; waited on the Commandant, to obtain permission to remain in case Mrs. T.’s health should require it. He seemed much surprised we had not preferred Orleans to Tours: “Il est deux fois plus grand.” I replied that Orleans seemed a very charming town. He talked to me on politics, a subject I did not wish to enter on—set out with a profession of impartiality, and blaming both Governments for the war; but could not hold it two sentences: “Pourquoi est-ce que vous-autres Messieurs veuillent garder la Malte?” “Je n’en sais rien, Monsieur, je suis ici prisonnier de guerre.” It was with difficulty I could persuade him of the indelicacy of pressing me on the subject.’
My Mother, as I perceive from letters addressed to her, maintained a tolerably active correspondence with England during the time of this her constrained residence in France, which endured for four years, till the spring of 1807; but with one or two exceptions, the only letters of hers during this period which have reached my hands, are written to her husband, whose detention she shared; and selections from these will follow. A word or two may be necessary to explain the circumstances under which they were written, and some of the references which they contain. While my father was, so to speak,’ascriptus glebæ,’ and confined by his parole to Orleans and its immediate vicinity, she was at liberty to move freely in the interior of the country, with no other restraints than those which she shared with the French themselves; indeed, could at any moment have obtained with little difficulty a passport allowing her to return to England. More than once she had actually obtained one, although when it came to the point, and under the doubt whether she would be permitted to rejoin her husband, she never could bring herself to use it. Every year during their detention at Orleans she paid a visit of several weeks to Paris, and in 1804 two visits—having always on these occasions the same object in view—namely, to make the most of what little interest it was possible there to command, either for the mitigation of the character of his detention, or the bringing of it to an end altogether. Sometimes it was necessary to employ all interest to prevent his being sent to Verdun, where the great body of the English were detained. It was accounted no little favour to be allowed to remain at Orleans, and more than once a relegation to the remoter depot, in all respects a most undesirable residence, seemed imminent. At other times the object was not so much that his position might not be made worse, but that it might be amended, and that he might be permitted to reside, as a few of the more favoured English were, at Paris, instead of in a dull country town—or, if this could not be granted, that he might be allowed to visit Paris for a few weeks, in the hope that, this once permitted, he would not be again sent away. Or if friends seemed willing to exert themselves, and the French Government appeared more favourably disposed, as it was during Fox’s negotiation for peace immediately after his advent to power, a bolder request would be urged; namely, that he might have leave to return to Ireland for six months on his parole, his interests there suffering much through his absence; or even that he might be permitted to return definitively home, with no obligation to replace himself in his captivity. This, as is well known, not a few of the English, one by one, obtained; and at length, early in the year 1807, by exactly what interest I know not, he obtained, after a captivity of four years, such a permission of unconditional return; in this more fortunate than many of his countrymen, whose detention was only brought to an end by the advance of the allied armies into France in 1814.
My Mother’s letters during this period touch very seldom on public matters. The notices of Consular and Imperial France are slight and of no great interest. There is, moreover, about all such notices a visible caution, an evident sense that what was written might very possibly come under other eyes besides those for which it was intended. But in addition to this, she was, in the nature of things, remote from the centres of intelligence. The society in which the detained English could move was of necessity very limited. Attentions to them were not supposed to be favourably regarded by the Emperor. The good French houses which were open to them, were a very few of the old régime; and many circumstances combined to throw the English together, while yet the number of them was too small to allow much selection among them of congenial society. But for all this, the letters do contain glimpses of some of the French celebrities of this time, as the Abbé Delille, Isabey the miniature painter, Mad. Récamier, Mˡˡᵉ Raucourt, Mˡˡᵉ Duchesnois, Berthier, and others; and a lively, though not always a very flattering, picture of those our English compatriots and their way of living among themselves. If it should seem to any that they retail too many of the trivialities of social life, it must be remembered that they were written to cheer and enliven, if possible, a very dull captivity, made at the moment far more cheerless by her own absence; and that everything was welcome which might contribute to this end. The letters are unfortunately—unfortunately that is, for me, who would otherwise have been spared no little trouble—for the most part without their dates, nor have they postmarks to supply this want. Knowing the exact months of each year, during which they must have been written, I have, by one help or another, put most of those which I publish in their right order; but I am not confident that I have done this with all.
TO RICHARD TRENCH, ESQ.
Paris, April, 1804.
I think I live here as if I was under the ban of the Holy Roman Empire. Is not that the phrase? No mortal comes near me. I wish the interdict was raised. I shall expect to be denied fire and water. Indeed, the last is so scarce in this house, and the first is so dear at Paris, that it is almost the same thing. I wish the sentence of excommunication was recalled.