What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

One used to go from Bruges to Ostend in those days by “Torreborre’s” barge, which was towed by a couple of horses. There was a lumbering but very roomy diligence drawn by three horses abreast. But the barge, though yet slower than the diligence, was the pleasanter mode of making the journey. The cost of it, I well remember, was one franc ten centimes, which included (in going by the morning barge, which started, if I remember rightly, at six A.M.), as much bread and butter and really excellent café au lait as the traveller chose to consume—and I chose in those days to consume a considerable quantity. What the journey cost without any breakfast, I forget, if I ever knew. I fancy no such contingency as any passenger declining his bread and butter and coffee was contemplated, and that the charge was always the same whether you took breakfast or not. It was not an unpleasant manner of travelling, though specially adapted for the inmates of the Castle of Indolence. The cabin was roomy and comfortably furnished, and infinitely superior to the accommodation of any of the Dutch trekschuyts of the present day. One took one’s book with one. And a cigar on the well-seated cabin roof was in excellent keeping with the lazy smoothness of the movement, and the flat sleepy monotony of the banks.

And these visits to Ostend were very pleasant. Consul Fauche’s hospitable door was always open to me, and there was usually sure to be something pleasant going on within it—very generally excellent music. I have already spoken of Mrs. Fauche’s charming voice. Any pleasant English, who might be passing through, or spending the bathing season at Ostend, were sure to be found at the Consul’s—especially if they brought voices or any musical dispositions with them. But Mary Fauche herself was in those days a sufficient attraction to make the whitest stone evening of all that when no other visitor was found there. Noctes cœnæque Deûm!

But those pleasant Ostend days were before the summer ended overshadowed by a tragedy, which I will not omit to record, because the story of it carries a valuable warning with it.

We had made acquaintance at Paris with a Mrs. Mackintosh and her daughter, very charming Scotch people. Mrs. Mackintosh was a widow, and Margaret was her only child. She was an extremely handsome girl, nineteen years of age, and as magnificent a specimen of young womanhood as can be conceived. “More than common tall,” she showed in her whole person the development of a Juno, enhanced by the vigour, elasticity and blooming health of a Diana. She and her mother came to Ostend for the bathing season. Margaret was a great swimmer; and her delight was to pass nearly the whole of those hot July days in the water. Twice, or even thrice every day she would return to her favourite element. And soon she began to complain of lassitude, and to lose her appetite and the splendour of her complexion. Oh! it was the heat, which really only the constant stimulus of her bath and swim could render tolerable. She was warned that excess in bathing, especially in salt water, may sometimes be as dangerous as any other excess, but the young naiad, who had never in her life needed to pay heed to any medical word or warning, would not believe, or would not heed. And before the September was over we followed poor Margaret Mackintosh to the little Ostend cemetery, killed by over bathing as decidedly as if she had held her head under water!

This sad tragedy brought to a gloomy end a season which had been, if not a very profitable, a very amusing one. There was a ci-devant Don Quixote sort of a looking man, a Count Melfort, whose young and buxom wife boasted some strain of I forget what noble English blood, and who used to give the Consul good dinners such as he particularly affected, which his wife was neither asked nor cared to share, though the ladies as well as the gentlemen were excellent good friends. There was a wealthy Colonel Dickson who also used to give dinners, at one of which, having been present, I remember the host fussing in and out of the room during the quarter of an hour before dinner, till at last he rushed into the drawing-room with his coat sleeves drawn up to his elbows, horror and despair in his mien, as he cried, “Great heaven! the cook has cut the fins off the turbot!” If any who partook of that mutilated fish survive to this present year of grace (which, I fear, is hardly likely to be the case) I am sure they will recall the scene which ensued on the dreadful announcement. There was the very pretty and abnormally silly little banker’s wife, who supplied my old friend, Captain Smithett, with billets doux and fun, and who used to adapt verses sent her by a still sillier youthful adorer of her own to the purpose of expressing her own devotion to quite other swains.

It was a queer and not very edifying society, exceedingly strange, and somewhat bewildering to a lad fresh from Oxford who was making his first acquaintance with Continental ways and manners. All the married couples seemed to be continually dancing the figure of chassée croisez, and I, who had no wife of my own, and was not yet old enough to know better, thought it extremely amusing.

When October came, and I had not heard anything from Birmingham of the appointment to a mastership in the school there, for which I had been all this time waiting, I thought it was time to look up my Birmingham friends and see how matters stood there. At Birmingham I found that the governors of King Edward’s School were still shilly-shallying; but I heard enough to convince me that no new master would be appointed till the very fine new building which now ornaments the town, but was then in course of construction, should be completed.

Having become convinced of this, in which it eventually turned out that I was right, it only remained to me to return to Bruges, with the assurance from Dr. Jeune and several of the governors that I and nobody else should have the mastership when the appointment should be made. I returned to Bruges, passing one day with the dear Grants at Harrow, and an evening with my brother Anthony in London by the way, and reached the Château d’Hondt on the 15th of October, to find my father very much worse than I had left him. He was in bed, and was attended by the Dr. Herbout of whom I have before spoken. But he was too evidently drawing towards his end; and after much suffering breathed his last in the afternoon of the 23rd of October, 1835. On the 25th I followed his body to his grave, close to that of my brother Henry, in the cemetery outside the Catherine Gate of the town.

The duty was a very specially sad one. When I followed my mother to the grave at Florence many years afterwards my thoughts were far from being as painfully sad, though she was, I fear, the better loved parent of the two. She died in a ripe old age after a singularly happy, though not untroubled, life, during many years of which it was permissible to me to believe that I had had no small share in ministering to her happiness. It was otherwise in the case of my father. He was, and had been, I take it, for many years a very unhappy man. All had gone wrong with him; misfortunes fell on him, one on the back of the other. Yet I do not think that these misfortunes were the real and efficient causes of his unhappiness. I do not see what concatenation of circumstances could have made him happy. He was in many respects a singular man. Ill-health and physical suffering, of course, are great causes of an unhappy life; but all suffering invalids are not unhappy. My father’s mind was, I think, to a singular degree under the dominion of his body. The terrible irritability of his temper, which sometimes in his latter years reached a pitch that made one fear his reason was, or would become, unhinged, was undoubtedly due to the shattering of his nervous system, caused by the habitual use of calomel. But it is difficult for one who has never had a similar experience to conceive the degree in which this irritability made the misery of all who were called upon habitually to come into contact with it. I do not think that it would be an exaggeration to say that for many years no person came into my father’s presence who did not forthwith desire to escape from it. Of course, this desire was not yielded to by those of his own household, but they were none the less conscious of it. Happiness, mirth, contentment, pleasant conversation, seemed to fly before him as if a malevolent spirit emanated from him. And all the time no human being was more innocent of all malevolence towards his fellow creatures; and he was a man who would fain have been loved, and who knew that he was not loved, but knew neither how to manifest his desire for affection nor how to conciliate it.

I am the more convinced that bodily ailment was the causa causans of most, if not of all, of this unhappy idiosyncrasy, that I have before me abundant evidence that as a young man he was beloved and esteemed by his cotemporaries and associates. I have many letters from college friends, fellows of New College, his cotemporaries, several of them thanking him for kindnesses of a more or less important kind, and all written in a spirit of high regard and esteem.