The discovery of her true vocation belongs, then, to a later period of our story; and it was not the result of childish fancy, or the accomplishment of early incident; it was the fruit of long and earnest study. What did come to Florence Nightingale early in life—perhaps, as one entry in her autobiographical notes suggests, as early as her sixth year—was the sense of a “call”; of some appointed mission in life; of self-dedication to the service of God. “I remember her,” wrote Fanny Allen in 1857 to her niece Elizabeth Wedgwood, “as a little girl of three or four, then the girl of sixteen of high promise. When I look back on every time I saw her after her sixteenth year, I see that she was ripening constantly for her work, and that her mind was dwelling on the painful differences of man and man in this life, and on the traps that a luxurious life laid for the affluent. A conversation on this subject between the father and daughter made me laugh at the time, the contrast was so striking; but now, as I remember it, it was the Divine Spirit breathing in her.”[10] In an autobiographical fragment written in 1867 Florence mentions as one of the crises of her inner life that “God called her to His service” on February 7, 1837, at Embley; and there are later notes which still fix that day as the dawn of her true life. But as yet she knew not whither the Spirit was to lead. For three months, indeed, as she notes in another passage of retrospect, she “worked very hard among the poor people” under “a strong feeling of religion.”
V
Presently, however, a new direction was given to her thoughts and interests. She was now seventeen, her sister eighteen. Their home education had been far advanced, and might seem to require only such “finishing” as masters and society in France and Italy could supply. Mr. Nightingale had, moreover, decided to carry out extensive alterations at Embley. With his wife and daughters, he crossed from Southampton to Havre on September 8, 1837, and they did not return to England till April 6, 1839. Those were days of leisurely travel, such as Ruskin describes, in which “distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent.” There were many such hours during the journeys which the Nightingales took with a vetturino through France and Italy; and Florence, writing at a later date, when all her life was fixed on doing, noted that on this tour there was “too much time for dreaming.” Yet it is clear from her diaries that she entered heartily, and with a wider range of interest than some English travellers show, into the life of foreign society and sight-seeing. A love of statistical method which became one of her most marked characteristics may already be seen in an itinerary which she compiled; noting, in its several columns, the number of leagues from place to place, with the day and the hour both of arrival and of departure. They went leisurely through France, visiting, besides many other places, Chartres, Blois, Tours, Nantes, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Carcassonne, Nîmes, Avignon, and Toulon, and then going by the Riviera to Nice. There they stayed for nearly a month (Dec. 1837–Jan. 1838). A month was next spent at Genoa, and two months were given to Florence. The late spring and summer were devoted to travel in the cities of Northern Italy, among the lakes, and in Switzerland. They spent the month of September in Geneva, and reached Paris on October 8, 1838. Miss Nightingale preserved her diary of the greater part of the tour, and it shows her keenly interested alike in scenery and in works of art. It contains also, what records of sentimental pilgrimages often lack, an admixture of notes and statistics upon the laws, the land systems, the social conditions and benevolent institutions of the several states or cantons. Her interest in the politics of the day was keen wherever she was; and the society of many refugees into which she was thrown at Geneva gave her a particularly ardent sympathy with the cause of Italian freedom. The diary contains many biographical notes upon Italian patriots, whose adventures she heard related by their own lips. “A stirring day,” she wrote on September 12 (1838), “the most stirring which we have ever lived.” It was the day on which the news reached Geneva that the Emperor of Austria had declared an amnesty in Italy. The Nightingales attended an evening party at which the Italian refugees assembled and the Imperial decree was read out amidst loud jubilation; which, however, was afterwards abated when it turned out that the “general amnesty” contained many conditions and some exceptions. The Nightingales had the entrée to all the learned society of Geneva. Florence records an evening spent with M. de Candolle, the famous botanist; and the diary gives many glimpses of Sismondi, the historian, who was then living in his native city. He escorted the Nightingale party up the Salève. They made that not very formidable ascent first on donkeys and then “in a sledge covered with straw and drawn by four oxen.” Florence was present on another occasion when “all the company gathered round Sismondi who, sitting on a table, gave us a lecture on Florentine history.” The conscientious Florence made a full note in her diary of the great man's discourse. “All Sismondi's political economy,” she also noted, “seems to be founded on the overflowing kindness of his heart. He gives to old beggars on principle, to young from habit. At Pescia he had 300 beggars at his door on one morning. He feeds the mice in his room while he is writing his histories.” Presently there was a new excitement in Geneva. “What a stirring time we live in,” Florence wrote on September 18; “one day to decide the fate of the Italians, to-morrow to decide the fate of Switzerland.” “To-morrow” was the day fixed for the meeting of the Conseil Représentatif which was to take into consideration the demand of Louis Philippe for the expulsion of Louis Napoleon, the future Emperor. Many pages of Miss Nightingale's diary are given up to this affair. She analysed all the pros and cons, and recorded day by day the course of the debate. Sismondi thought that the refugee ought to be surrendered—on principle because he was a pretender, in expediency because Geneva would be unable to withstand a French assault. He “spoke for an hour” in this sense. The Genevois radicals, on the other hand, while entertaining no great love for the pretender, thought that, cost what it might, “the sacred right of asylum” should be maintained. And so the debate continued. The French Government began to move troops from Lyons; the Genevois, to throw up fortifications. Whereupon Mr. Nightingale, like many other English visitors, thought it time to take his family across the frontier. Miss Nightingale's diary written en route to Paris shows her excitement to obtain news of the crisis. When she learnt that it had been solved by Louis Napoleon being given a passport for England, she did not see that Louis Philippe had gained very much; the pretender would be nearer, and not less dangerous, in London than in Geneva—a very just prediction. Not every girl of eighteen, when taking her first tour abroad, shows so lively an interest in political affairs.
Politics and social observations mingle in the diary with artistic and architectural notes. The city which seems most to have appealed to her imagination was not Florence; though she said that she “would not have missed it for anything,” and, curiously, her sojourn in her birthplace was the occasion of a characteristic incident. An English lady, who afterwards became Princess Reuss Köstritz, was staying in the same lodgings and fell ill, and Florence Nightingale volunteered to nurse her. But the city which she most admired was Genoa La Superba. She notes indeed the excessive indolence of the nobles and excessive poverty of the people, but the palaces “realized an Arabian Nights story” for her. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale had many friends and brought many introductions. In the various towns where they stayed they mixed in the best society, and their daughters were thrown into a lively round of picnics, concerts, soirées, dancing:
| Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day, When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow— |
There were Court balls at which Grand Dukes were “exceedingly polite” to Florence Nightingale and her sister. They went to an evening Court at Florence, and found “everyone most courteous and agreeable.” There was a ball at the Casino in Genoa, at which, writes Florence in her diary, “my partner and I made an embrouillement, and a military officer came up with a very angry face to challenge me for having refused him and then not dancing.” But the music was not all to the tune of “A Toccata of Galuppi's.” What gave Florence the greatest pleasure on this tour was the Italian opera. In those days the reigning singers were Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and Tamburini. Florence Nightingale heard them all. Her Italian diary is nowhere so elaborate as in descriptions of the operas and in notes on the performers. She kept a separate book in which she wrote tabulated details of all the performances. “I should like to go every night,” she said in her diary; and for some time after her return from the Continent she was, as she wrote to Miss Clarke, “music-mad.” She took music-lessons at Florence, and in London studied under German and Italian masters. She played and sang. It was as yet uncertain whether “the call”—to what, as yet also unknown—might not be drowned in the tastes, interests, and pursuits which fill the life of other young ladies in her position.
VI
The fascination of social life must have been brought vividly before her during the winter (1838–39) which they spent in Paris, in apartments in the Place Vendôme (No. 22). She was now introduced into the brilliant circle of the last of the salons. Mary Clarke, afterwards Madame Mohl, was by descent half Irish, half Scottish; by education and residence, almost wholly French. “A charming mixture,” said Ampère of her, “of French vivacity and English originality.” Full at once of esprit and of espièglerie, well read and artistic yet wholly devoid of pedantry, without regular beauty of feature, but alert and piquante, Mary Clarke had gathered round her what Ticknor in 1837 had found the most intellectual circle in Paris. For seven years she and her mother lived in apartments in the Abbaye-au-Bois, adjoining those of Madame Récamier, and Mary was a daily visitor to the famous salon during the reign of Chateaubriand, whose closing years she did much to brighten and amuse. At the time when the Nightingales arrived in Paris, Mrs. and Miss Clarke had left the Abbaye-au-Bois and established themselves in those apartments in the Rue du Bac which for nearly forty years were a haunt of all that was brilliant in the intellectual life of Paris. Mary Clarke took most affectionately to the Nightingale family, who, with some of their connections, remained for long years among her closest friends. She used to pay a yearly visit to Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale, either at Embley or at Lea Hurst, generally staying three weeks or a month; and to her many of Florence's most interesting letters were, as we shall find, addressed. To her other and more superficial qualities, Mary Clarke added great warmth of lasting affection for her intimate friends, and her sympathetic kindness to the Nightingale circle was unfailing. The attraction of Paris to Florence lay principally in its hospitals and nursing sisterhoods, but partly also in that it was the home of “Clarkey,” as they called her. And it was the same with other members of the family. There is a letter from Lady Verney to Clarkey which describes how some one asked Mr. Nightingale, “Are you going to Paris?” “Oh, no,” he replied; “Madame Mohl is ill.” “Then does Paris mean Madame Mohl?” “Yes, certainly,” he replied gravely. During the winter of 1838–39 Miss Clarke, writes Lady Verney, was “exceedingly kind to Florence and me, two young girls full of all kinds of interests, which she took the greatest pains to help. She made us acquainted with all her friends, many and notable, among them Madame Récamier. I know now, better than then, what her influence must have been thus to introduce an English family (two of them girls who, if French, would not have appeared in society) into that jealously guarded sanctuary, the most exclusive aristocratic and literary salon in Paris. We were asked, even, to the reading by Chateaubriand, at the Abbaye-au-Bois, of his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, which he could not wait to put forth, as he had intended when writing them, until after his death—desiring, it was said, to discount the praises which he expected, but hardly received. This hearing was a favour eagerly sought for by the cream of the cream of Paris society at that time.”[11] In Miss Clarke's own apartments, the Nightingales met many distinguished men. The intimates who were always there, and who assisted their hostess in making the tea, were MM. Fauriel and Mohl—Claude Fauriel, versed in mediæval and Provençal lore, a man exceedingly handsome, who had captivated Madame de Staël and other ladies besides Mary Clarke in his friendships; and Julius Mohl, one of the first Orientalists in Europe, a more ardent lover whom, after a probation of eighteen years, Miss Clarke married in 1847. M. Mohl was once asked by Queen Victoria why, loving Germany so much, he had given up his native country for France. “Ma foi, madame,” he replied, “j'ètais amoureux.” With M. Mohl, no less than with his wife, Florence Nightingale was on terms of affectionate friendship. Among the frequent visitors whom she and her sister met at Miss Clarke's were Madame Tastu (the poetess), Élie de Beaumont (the geologist), Roulin (the traveller and naturalist), Cousin, Mignet, Guizot, Tocqueville, Barthélemy St. Hilaire, and Thiers. The last-named was one of Miss Clarke's earliest admirers; and many years later, after the Franco-German war, when Thiers was at the head of affairs, Lady Verney heard M. Mohl say to his wife, “Madame, why did you not marry M. Thiers instead of me, for now you would have been Queen of France?”
In such circles as that which gathered around Miss Clarke, Florence Nightingale was well qualified to hold her own and even to play a brilliant part. Her life of gaiety on the Riviera and in Italy must have rubbed away much of the shyness from which she had suffered. If not beautiful, she was elegant and distinguished. She was both widely and deeply read. She had many and varied interests. She had powers of expression, in which clearness was not unmixed with a note of humorous subacidity. These are social advantages, and she was not without the inclination to use them. She chose in the end another path—a path which was beset by many obstacles of circumstance; but there were obstacles in herself also, and one of the last “temptations” to be overcome, before she was free to interpret her call and to act upon it, was (as she wrote in many a page of confession and self-examination) “the desire to shine in society.”