No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be whilst some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!
Like Queen Margaret, Ulrica is unable actively to work for the destruction of her malefactor, having to content herself with ineffective wailings and execrations; while Marie de Mortemar—who also most terribly curses her oppressors—finds opportunity of ‘meddling’ as much as she pleases. Yet Ulrica, by accident, succeeds in setting fire to the magazine of fuel beneath the castle of Reginald Front-de-Boef and thus has, like Marie de Mortemar, the satisfaction of witnessing the dying agonies of her enemy. Their gloomy triumph is the same; Ulrica cries to the perishing Reginald: ‘Summon thy vassals around thee, doom them that loiter to the scourge and the dungeon—But know, mighty chief — — — thou shalt have neither answer, nor aid, nor obedience at their hands.’ Marie de Mortemar exults at the death-scene of the bishop of Toulouse: ‘Hark — — — hark to thy knell. Thine enemies are around thee—thine allies in blood and crime are perishing. Chain me to the stake: burn me an’ ye will; but, ere I am in ashes, thou wilt be in flames.’ The unhappy women willingly perish themselves at the moment their vengeance is fulfilled.
The picture drawn of the life and manners of the Albigenses is, in some essentials, inspired by the descriptions of the Covenanters in Old Mortality—a circumstance which, besides being pointed out by critics both contemporary and modern,[175] was admitted by Maturin himself; he observes, when introducing the sect for the first time: ‘It is — — — a curious, but indisputable matter of fact, that the majority of them were as tenacious of certain texts and terms of the Old Testament, as their legitimate descendants, the English Puritans, were some centuries later; and that, like them, they assumed Jewish names, fought with Jewish obduracy, and felt with Jewish hostility, even towards those of their community who differed from them in a penumbra of their creed.’ Hence the speeches and opinions of Boanerges—the leader of the sterner Albigenses—are the same, only less poignantly expressed, as Balfour’s; they quote the Old Testament as their chief authority, evince a mind equally relentless and unforgiving, and Boanerges rejects the appeals of Pierre to common humanity on the same arguments which Balfour uses in his dispute with Morton. The passages treating of the Albigenses are, however, vividly written and not wholly lacking in originality. The deacon Mephibosheth has no counterpart in Scott, and the little love-story of Amand is both natural and skilfully introduced, while the character of Pierre is entirely conventional.—
This last romance of Maturin was soon forgotten, nor was it ever reprinted, notwithstanding the benevolent critiques.[176] What the renumeration amounted to is not known, but Maturin’s last months were, by all accounts, about the gloomiest in his existence. Cares and anxieties had already begun to prey upon his health—never very robust—and the unfavourable circumstances under which The Albigenses was composed, at the expense of the night’s rest during a long time, completely broke it down, his pecuniary difficulties remaining as threatening as ever. There are, in Mangan’s article, a few recollections relative to the closing period of Maturin’s life; and although the writer, no doubt, shares the old tendency of his subject ‘of darkening the gloomy, and of deepening the sad,’ it is clear enough that there was, at this time, very little left of the well-dressed dandy who had once so greatly excelled in quadrille-parties and private theatricals:
The second time I saw Maturin he had been just officiating, as on the former occasion, at a funeral. He stalked along York Street with an abstracted, or rather distracted air, the white scarf and hat-band which he had received remaining still wreathed round his beautifully-shaped person, and exhibiting to the gaze of the amused and amazed pedestrians whom he almost literally encountered in his path, a boot upon one foot and a shoe on the other. His long pale, melancholy, Don Quixote, out-of-the-world face would have inclined you to believe that Dante, Bajazet, and the Cid had risen together from their sepulchres, and clubbed their features for the production of an effect. But Maturin’s mind was only fractionally pourtrayed, so to speak, in his countenance. The great Irishman, like Hamlet, had that within him which passed show, and escaped far and away beyond the possibility of expression by the clay lineament. He bore the ‘thunder-scars’ about him, but they were graven, not on his brow, but on his heart.
The third and last time that I beheld this marvellous man I remember well. It was some time before his death, on a balmy autumn evening, in 1824. He slowly descended the steps of his own house — — — and took his way in the direction of Whitefriars Street, into Castle Street, and passed the Royal Exchange into Dame Street, every second person staring at him and the extraordinary double-belted and treble-caped rug of an old garment—neither coat nor cloak—which enveloped his person. But here it was that I, who had tracked the footsteps of the man as his shadow, discovered that the feeling to which some individuals, rather over sharp and shrewd, had been pleased to ascribe this ‘affectation of singularity,’ had no existence in Maturin. For, instead of passing along Dame Street, where he would have been ‘the observed of all observers,’ he wended his way along the dark and forlorn locality of Dame Lane, and having reached the end of this not very classical thoroughfare, crossed over to Anglesea Street, where I lost sight of him. Perhaps he went into one of those bibliopolitan establishments wherewith that Paternoster Row of Dublin then abounded. I never saw him afterwards.
In the beginning of October 1824 Maturin was seized by an acute malady which the physicians, considering his impaired health in general, apprehended to be mortal. On the 5:th Sir Charles Morgan wrote to Cyrus Redding:[177]
My dear R.—Poor Maturin is ill, severely ill; we (the Drs.) have sent him into the country, I fear, to die. Not contented with drawing the ‘saints’ down upon him, he has attacked the ‘papishes’ and is now in the condition somewhat of a nut between the two blades of a nutcracker. If the poor fellow should live, and the two parties abuse him into a good living, there might be some good for it, for he has a family of fine children. I fear, however, there is little chance of either.