What I Remember, Volume 2

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

The incident was entirely characteristic of her. She was furiously angry with all things in heaven above and on the earth below because she was at the moment inconvenienced.

Here is the beginning of a letter from her of a date some months anterior to the Boboli adventure:

"Illustrissimo Signor Tommaso" (that was the usual style of her address to me), "as your book is just out you must feel quite en train for puffs of any description. Therefore I send you the best I have seen for a long while, La Physiologie du Fumeur. But even if you don't like it, don't put it in your pipe and smoke it. Vide Joseph Fume."

A little subsequently she writes: "Signor Tommaso, the only revenge I shall take for your lecture" (probably on the matter of some outrageous extravagance) "is not to call you illustrissimo and not to send you an illuminated postillion" (a previous letter having been ornamented with such a decoration at the top of the sheet), "but let you find your way to Venice in the dark as you can, and then and there, 'On the Rialto I will rate you,' and, being a man, you know there is no chance of my over-rating you."

The following passage from the same letter refers to some negotiations with which she had entrusted me relative to some illustrations she was bent on having in a forthcoming book she was about to publish:—"As for the immortal Cruikshank, tell him that I am sure the mighty genius which conceived Lord Bateman could not refuse to give any lady the werry best, and if he does I shall pass the rest of my life registering a similar wow to that of the fair Sophia, and exclaiming, 'I vish, George Cruikshank, as you vas mine.'"

The rest of the long, closely-written four-paged letter is an indiscriminate and bitter, though joking attack, upon the race of publishers. She calls Mr. Colburn an "embodied shiver," which will bring a smile to the lips of those—few, I fear—who remember the little man.

Here are some extracts from a still longer letter written to my mother much about the same time: "I hear Lady S—— has committed another novel, called The Three Peers, no doubt l'un pire que l'autre!… I have a great many kind messages to you from that very charming person Madame Récamier, who fully intends meeting you at Venice with Chateaubriand in October, for so she told me on Sunday. I met her at Miss Clarke's some time ago, and as I am a bad pusher I am happy to say she asked to be introduced to me, and was, thanks to you, my kind friend! She pressed me to go and see her, which I have done two or three times, and am going to do again at her amiable request on Thursday. I think that her fault is that she flatters a little too much. And flattery to one whose ears have so long been excoriated by abuse does not sound safe. However, all is right when she speaks of you. And the point she most eulogised in you is that which I have heard many a servile coward who could never go and do likewise" [no indication is to be found either in this letter or elsewhere to whom she alludes], "select for the same purpose, namely, your straightforward, unflinching, courageous integrity…. Balzac is furious at having his new play suppressed by Thiers, in which Arnauld acted Louis Philippe, wig and all, to the life; but, as I said to M. Dupin, 'Cest tout naturel que M. Thiers ne permetterait à personne de jouer Louis Philippe que lui-même.' … There is a wonderful pointer here that has been advertised for sale for twelve hundred francs. A friend of mine went to see him, and after mounting up to a little garret about the size of a chessboard, au vingt-septième, he interrogated the owner as to the dog's education and acquirements, to which the man replied, 'Pour ca, monsieur, c'est un chien parfait. Je lui ai tout appris moi-même dans ma chambre'[1] After this my friend did not sing 'Together let us range the fields!' … Last week I met Colonel Potter M'Queen, who was warm in his praises of you, and the great good your Michael Armstrong" (the factory story) "had done…. Last Thursday despatches arrived and Lord Granville had to start for London at a moment's notice. I was in hopes this beastly ministry were out! But no such luck! For they are a compound of glue, sticking-plaister, wax, and vice—the most adhesive of all known mixtures."

[Footnote 1: "As for that, sir, the dog is perfect. I have myself taught him everything in my own room!">[

Before concluding my recollections of Rosina, Lady Lytton Bulwer, I think it right to say that I consider myself to have perfectly sufficient grounds for feeling certain that the whispers which were circulated in a cowardly and malignant fashion against the correctness of her conduct as a woman were wholly unfounded. Her failings and tendency to failings lay in a quite different direction. I knew perfectly well the person whose name was mentioned scandalously in connection with hers, and knew the whole history of the relationship that existed between them. The gentleman in question was for years Lady Bulwer's constant and steadfast friend. It is quite true that he would fain have been something more, but true also that his friendship survived the absolute rejection of all warmer sentiments by the object of it. It was almost a matter of course that such a woman as Lady Bulwer, living unprotected in the midst of such a society as that of Florence in those days, should be so slandered. And were it not that there were very few if any persons at the time, and I think certainly not one still left, able to speak upon the subject with such connaissance de cause as I can, I should not have alluded to it.

She was an admirably charming companion before the footlights of the world's stage—not so uniformly charming behind its scenes, for her unreasonableness always and her occasional violence were very difficult to deal with. But she was, as Dickens's poor Jo says in Bleak House, "werry good to me!"