What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Much has been said, especially in England, of the great writer’s historical inaccuracy in treating of English matters. But an anecdote which my mother gives in her book is worth reproducing for the sake of the evidence it gives that in truth Victor Hugo was equally ignorantly and carelessly inaccurate when speaking of home matters, on which, at least, it might have been thought that he would have been better informed.

“An able lawyer, and most accomplished gentleman and scholar, who holds a distinguished station in the cour royale” (in all probability Berryer), “took us to see the Palais de Justice. Having shown us the chamber where criminal trials are carried on, he observed that this was the room described by Victor Hugo in his romance, adding, ‘He was, however, mistaken here, as in most places where he affects a knowledge of the times of which he writes. In the reign of Louis XI. no criminal trials ever took place within the walls of this building, and all the ceremonies as described by him resemble much more a trial of yesterday than of the age at which he dates his tale.’”

Georges Sand, certainly upon the whole the most remarkable literary figure in the French world at the time of my visit to Paris, vidi tantum. That I had an opportunity of doing on various occasions. She was a person on whom, quite apart from her literary celebrity, the eye of any observer would have dwelt with some speculative curiosity. She was hardly to be called handsome, or even pretty, but was still decidedly attractive. The large eyes à fleur de tête, and the mobile and remarkably expressive mouth rendered the face both attractive and stimulative of interest. The features were unmistakably refined in character and expression, and the mouth—the most trustworthy evidence-giving feature upon that point—was decidedly that of a high-bred woman.

She was at that period of her varied career acting as well as writing in a manner which attracted the attention of Louis Philippe’s very vigilant and abnormally suspicious police. She had recently left Paris for an excursion in the tête-à-tête company of the well known Abbé de Lamenais, who was at that time giving much trouble and disquietude to the official guardians of the altar and the throne. His comings and goings were the object of vigilant supervision on the part of the police authorities; and it so happened by a strange chance that the report of the official observers of this little excursion, which reached the official head-quarters, reached me also. And all the watchers had to tell was that the abbé and the lady his companion shared the same bedchamber at the end of their first day’s journey. Now the Abbé de Lamenais was an old, little, wizened, dried-up, dirty—very dirty—priest. It is possible, but I have reason to think highly improbable, that economy was the motive of this strange chamber comradeship. But I was then, and am still, very strongly convinced that the sole purpose of it was to outrage the lady’s (and the priest’s) censors, to act differently from everybody else, and to give evidence of superiority to conventionality and “prejudice.”

I wrote very carefully and conscientiously some few years subsequently a long article on Georges Sand in the Foreign Quarterly which attracted some attention at the time. I should write in many respects differently now. The lady in subsequent years put a considerable quantity of “water into her wine”—and though not altogether in the same sense,—I have done so too.

To both Guizot and Thiers I had the honour of being introduced. If I were to say that neither of them seemed to me to have entirely the manners and bearing of a gentleman, I should probably be thought to be talking affected and offensive nonsense. And I do not mean to say so in the ordinary English every-day use of the term. What I mean is that they were both of them very far from possessing that grand seigneur manner, which as I have said so markedly distinguished Chateaubriand, and many another Frenchman whom I knew in those days; by no means all of them belonging to the aristocratic caste, party, or class. Guizot looked for all the world like a village schoolmaster, and seemed to me to have much the manner of one. He stooped a good deal, and poked his head forwards. I remember thinking that he was, in manner, more like an Englishman than a Frenchman; and that it was a matter of curious speculation to me at the time, whether this effect might have been produced by the fact that he was a Protestant, and an earnest one, instead of being a Roman Catholic. Possibly my impression of his schoolmaster-like deportment may have been the result of his manner to me. I was but a boy, with no claim at all to the honour of being noticed by him in any way. But I remember being struck by the difference of the manner of Thiers in this respect.

All my prejudices and all that I knew of the two men disposed me to feel far the higher respect for Guizot. And my opinion still is that I judged rightly, whether in respect to character or intellectual capacity. Not but that I thought and think that Thiers was the brighter and in the ordinary sense of the term the cleverer man of the two. There was no brightness about the premier abord of Guizot, though doubtless a longer and more intimate acquaintance than was granted to me would have corrected this impression. But Thiers was, from the bow with which he first received you to the latest word you heard from him, all brightness. Of dignity he had nothing at all. If Guizot might have been taken for a schoolmaster, Thiers might have been mistaken for a stockbroker, say, a prosperous, busy, bustling, cheery stockbroker, or any such man of business. And if Guizot gave one the impression of being more English than French, his great rival was unmistakeably and intensely French. I have no recollection of having much enjoyed my interview with M. Guizot. But I was happy during more than one evening spent in Thiers’s house in Paris.

Of Madame Récamier I should have said the few words I have to say about the impression so celebrated a woman produced upon me, when I was speaking of her salon in a previous page. But they may be just as well said here. Of the beauty for which she was famed throughout Europe, of course little remained, when I saw her in 1835. But the grace, which was in a far greater degree unique, remained in its entirety. I think she was the most gracefully moving woman I ever saw. The expression of her face had become perhaps a little sad, but it was sweet, attractive, full of the promise of all good things of heart and mind. If I were to say that her management of her salon might be compared in the perfection of its tactical success with that of a successful general on the field, it might give the idea that management and discipline were visible, which would be a very erroneous one. That the perfection of art lies in the concealment of it, was never more admirably evidenced than in her “administration” as a reine de salon. A close observer might perceive, or perhaps rather divine only, that all was marshalled, ordered, and designed. Yet all was, on the part at least of the guests, unconstrained ease and enjoyment. That much native talent, much knowledge of men and women, and exquisite tact must have been needed for this perfection in the art of tenir salon cannot be denied. Finally it may be said that a great variety of historiettes, old and new, left me with the unhesitating conviction that despite the unfailing tribute to an éclat such as hers, of malicious insinuations (all already ancient history at the time of which I am writing), Madame Récamier was and had always been a truly good and virtuous Christian woman.

Miss Clarke, also, as has been said an inmate of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, and a close friend of her celebrated neighbour, I became intimate with. She was an eccentric little lady, very plain, brimfull of talent, who had achieved the wonderful triumph of living, in the midst of the choicest society of Paris, her own life after her own fashion, which was often in many respects a very different fashion from that of those around her, without incurring any of the ridicule or anathemas with which such society is wont to visit eccentricity. I remember a good-naturedly recounted legend to the effect, that she used to have her chemises, which were constructed after the manner of those worn by the grandmothers of the present generation, marked with her name in full on the front flap of them; and that this flap was often exhibited over the bosom of her dress in front! She too was a reine de salon after her fashion—a somewhat different one from that of her elegant neighbour. There was, at all events, a greater and more piquant variety to be found in it. All those to be found there were, however, worth seeing or hearing for one reason or another. Her method of ruling the frequenters of her receptions might be described as simply shaking the heterogeneous elements well together. But it answered so far as to make an evening at her house unfailingly amusing and enjoyable. She was very, and I think I may say, universally popular. She subsequently married M. Mohl, the well-known Orientalist, whom I remember to have always found, when calling upon him on various occasions, sitting in a tiny cabinet so absolutely surrounded by books, built up into walls all round him, as to suggest almost inevitably the idea of a mouse in a cheese, eating out the hollow it lived in.

Referring to my mother’s book on Paris and the Parisians for those extracts from it which I have given in the preceding pages, I find the following passage, the singular forecast of which, and its bearing on the present state of things in France, tempts me to transcribe it. Speaking in 1835, and quoting the words of a high political authority, whom she had met “at the house of the beautiful Princess B——” (Belgiojoso), she writes: “‘You know,’ he said, ‘how devoted all France was to the Emperor, though the police was somewhat tight, and the conscriptions heavy. But he had saved us from a Republic, and we adored him. For a few days, or rather hours, we were threatened again five years ago by the same terrible apparition. The result is that four millions of armed men stand ready to protect the prince who chased it. Were it to appear a third time, which Heaven forbid! you may depend upon it, that the monarch who should next ascend the throne of France might play at “le jeu de quilles” with his subjects and no one be found to complain.’” (My italics.) On the margin of the page on which this is printed, my mother has written in the copy of the book before me, “Vu et approuvé. Dec. 10th, 1853. F. T.”