Famous Persons and Places

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

“That last man that went out calls himself a chevalier,” said the thin gentleman.

“Yes,” said his stout friend—“he took me for a Mr. Cooper he had travelled with.”

“The deuce he did,” said the other—“why he took me for a Mr. Cooper, too, and we are not very much alike.”

“I beg pardon, gentlemen,” said I—“he took me for this Mr. Cooper too.”

The Frenchman’s ruse was discovered. It was instead of a snuff-box—a way he had of making acquaintance. We had a good laugh at our triple resemblance (three men more unlike it would be difficult to find,) and bidding the two Messrs. Cooper good-night, I followed the ingenious chevalier up stairs.

The next morning I came down rather late to breakfast, and found my friend chipping his egg-shells to pieces at the table next to the one I had occupied the night before. He rose immediately with a look of radiant relief in his countenance, made a most elaborate apology for having taken me for Mr. Cooper (whom I was so like, cependant, that we should be mistaken for each other by our nearest friends,) and in a few minutes, Mr. Cooper himself, if he had entered by chance, would have returned the compliment, and taken me for the chevalier’s most intimate friend and fellow-traveller.

I remained two or three days at Brighton, and never discovered in that time that the chevalier’s ruse succeeded with any other person. I was his only successful resemblance to “Monsieur Coopair.” He always waited breakfast for me in the coffee room, and when I called for my bill on the last morning, he dropped his knife and asked if I was going to London—and at what hour—and if I would be so obliging as to take a place for him in the same coach.

It was a remarkably fine day; and with my friend by my side outside of “the Age,” we sped on toward London, the sun getting dimmer and dimmer, and the fog thicker and more chilly at every mile farther from the sea. It was a trying atmosphere for the best of spirits—let alone the ever depressed bosom of a stranger in England. The coach stopped at the Elephant and Castle, and I ordered down my baggage, and informed my friend, for the first time, that I was bound to a country-house six miles from town. I scarce knew how I had escaped telling him of it before, but his “impossible! mon ami!” was said in a tone and accompanied with a look of the most complete surprise and despair. I was evidently his only hope in London.

I went up to town a day or two after; and in making my way to Paternoster Row, I saw my friend on the opposite side of the Strand, with his hands thrust up to the wrists in the pockets of his “Taglioni,” and his hat jammed down over his eyes, looking into the shop-windows without much distinction between the trunkmaker’s and the printseller’s—evidently miserable beyond being amused by anything. I was too much in a hurry to cross over and resume my office as escape-valve to his ennui, and I soon outwalked his slow pace, and lost sight of him. Whatever title he had to “chevalier” (and he was decidedly too deficient in address to belong to the order “d’industrie”) he had no letter of recommendation in his personal appearance, and as little the air of even a Frenchman of “quality” as any man I ever saw in the station of a gentleman. He is, in short, the person who would first occur to me if I were to see a paragraph in the Times headed “suicide by a foreigner.”

Revenons un peu. Brighton at this season (November) enjoys a climate, which, as a change from the heavy air in the neighborhood of London, is extremely exhilarating and agreeable. Though the first day of my arrival was rainy, a walk up the west cliff gave me a feeling of elasticity and lightness of spirits, of which I was beginning to forget the very existence, in the eternal fogs of the six months I had passed inland. I do not wonder at the passion of the English for Brighton. It is, in addition to the excellence of the air, both a magnificent city and the most advantageous ground for the discomfiture of the common enemy, “winter and rough weather.” The miles of broad gravel walk just out of reach of the surf of the sea, so hard and so smoothly rolled that they are dry in five minutes after the rain has ceased to fall, are, alone, no small item in the comfort of a town of professed idlers and invalids. I was never tired of sauntering along this smooth promenade so close to the sea. The beautiful children, who throng the walks in almost all weathers, (and what children on earth are half as beautiful as English children?) were to me a constant source of pleasure and amusement. Tire of this, and by crossing the street you meet a transfer of the gay throngs of Regent street and Hyde Park, with splendid shops and all the features of a metropolis, while midway between the sea and this crowded sidewalk pours a tide of handsome equipages, parties on horseback, and vehicles of every description, all subservient to exercise and pleasure.