What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Of all that Anthony there describes I saw nothing. I was attending the “divinity lectures” in Oxford. But as soon as the short course of them was completed, I left England to join my parents at Bruges. And here is the condensed record of the journey as performed in 1834. I suppose that I went by the Thames to Calais, instead of by Dover, as a measure of economy. I left Oxford by the “Rocket” at three in the morning on Tuesday, the 20th May, and on reaching London found that there was no packet to Ostend till the following Saturday. I determined, therefore, to go to Calais by that which left Tower Stairs on the Wednesday. It was the first time I had ever crossed the Channel. The times I have crossed that salt girdle subsequently must be counted by hundreds! I observe that having begun my journey at 3 A.M. did not prevent me from finding “Farren admirable” in both The Minister and the Mercer and in Secret Service, at Drury Lane that Tuesday evening. I slept at the Spread Eagle in Gracechurch Street that night, and left Tower Stairs at 10 A.M. the next morning in the Lord Melville, Captain Middleton (names of ship and captain duly recorded), and had a rough passage of thirteen hours; all hands sick, “even I a little at last,” says the veracious chronicle. I was taken by the victor in a sharp contest with half a dozen rivals over my body, to the Hôtel de Londres, a clean, comfortable, and quiet, but, I suppose, quite second-rate inn. There was no conveyance to Dunkirk before one the next day. So, “after a delicious breakfast on coffee.” (Ah! how la belle France has dégringoléd in respect to coffee and some other matters since those happy days! Then coffee really was always good everywhere in France. Now England has no cause whatever to envy her neighbour in that respect.) I spent the intervening hours in going (of all things in the world) to the top of the church tower. The diligence brought me to Dunkirk in time for supper at the Tête de Flandres Hôtel, at which “a Frenchman, who sat next me, insisted on my sharing his bottle of vin de Bourdeaux, and would not hear of my paying my share of the cost, saying that he was at home in his own country.” I find that I went after supper “to the top of a fine tower” (my second that day! I had a mania, not quite cured yet, for ascending towers), and started at five the next morning for Nieuport “in a vile little barge, in company with two young pedestrianising Belgians,” and arrived there about noon, after a most tedious voyage, and changing, without bettering, our barge three or four times. At Nieuport we found “a sort of immense overgrown gig with two horses, which conveyed eight of us to Ostend.”

There I was most kindly and hospitably received by Mr. Fauche, the English Consul, and his very lovely wife. Mrs. Fauche had been before her marriage one of my mother’s cohort of pretty girl friends, and was already my old acquaintance. She was the daughter of Mr. Tomkisson, a pianoforte manufacturer, who had married the daughter of an Irish clergyman. Their daughter Mary was, as I first knew her, more than a pretty girl. She was a very beautiful and accomplished woman, with one of the most delicious soprano voices I ever heard. I was anxious to join my mother at Bruges, who, despite her literary triumphs, had passed through so much trouble since I had seen her. But it needed the reinforcement of this anxiety by a sense of duty to enable me to resist Mrs. Fauche’s invitation to remain a day or two at Ostend.

I found my father and mother, and my two sisters, Cecilia and Emily, established in a large and very roomy house, just outside the southern gate of the city, known as the Château d’Hondt. It was a thoroughly good and comfortable house, and, taken unfurnished, speedily became under my mother’s hands a very pleasant one. Nor was it long before it became socially a very agreeable one, for the invariable result of my mother’s presence, which drew what was pleasant around her as surely as a magnet draws iron, showed itself in the collection of a variety of agreeable people—some from the other side of the Channel, some from Ostend, and some few from Bruges.

All this made a social atmosphere, which with the foreign flavouring so wholly new to me, was very pleasant; but it seems not to have sufficed to prevent me from seizing the opportunity for a little of that locomotive sight-seeing, the passion for which, still unquenched, appears to have been as strong in me as when I hankered after a place on some one of the “down” coaches starting from the “Cellar” in Piccadilly, or gazed enviously at the outward bound ships in the docks. For I find the record of a little week’s tour among the Belgian cities, with full details of all the towers I ascended, observations of an ecclesiological neophyte on the churches I everywhere visited, and remarks on men and manners, the rawness of which does not entirely destroy the value of them, as illustrating the changes wrought there too by the lapse of half a century.

In one place I find myself tasting the contents of the library of a Carmelite monastery, and remarking on the strangeness of the sole exception to the theological character of the collection having consisted in a Cours Gastronomique, which appeared to me scarcely needed by a community bound by its vows to perpetual abstinence from animal food.

Some pages of the record also are devoted to the statement of “a case” which I lighted on in some folio on casuistry, on the question “whether it is lawful to adore a crucifix, when there is strong ground for supposing that a demon may be concealed in the material of which it is constructed!”

It seems to me on reading these pages (for the first time since they were written), that I was to no small degree seductively impressed by the music, architectural beauties, and splendid ceremonial of the Roman Catholic worship, seen in those days to much better effect in Belgium, than at the present time in Rome. But amid it all, the sturdy Protestantism of Whately’s pupil manifests itself in a moan over the pity, the pity of it, that it should “all be based on falsehood.”

All the pleasant state of things at the Château d’Hondt at Bruges, described above, was of short duration however, for disquieting accounts of the health of my brother Henry, who had been staying at Exeter with that dear old friend, Fanny Bent, to whom the reader has already been introduced, began to arrive from Devonshire.

It was moreover necessary that I should without loss of time set my hand to something that might furnish me with daily bread. So on the 21st of June I “went on board Captain Smithett’s vessel the Arrow and had a quiet passage to Dover.” On arriving there I “hastened to secure my place on a coach about to start, and the first turn for having my baggage examined at the custom-house. This examination was rather a rigid one, and they made me pay 4s. 7d. for two or three books I had with me. We reached Canterbury about nightfall, breakfasted at Rochester, and arrived at Charing Cross at six.” My diary does not say “six P.M.,” and it seems incredible that any coach—though on the slowest road out of London, as the Dover road always was—should have breakfasted at Rochester, and taken the whole day to travel thence to Charing Cross; but it is more incredible still that we should have stopped to breakfast at Rochester, and then reached London at 6 A.M.

It must have been 6 P.M.; but I read that “I started at once to walk to Harrow by the canal (!) where I was received with more than kindness by the Grants.”