Et couverte de boue,
Où les hommes connoissent pas l’honneur,
Ni les femmes la vertu.”
Rousseau.
The Willoughby family, as has been already said, left England for the Continent; and the spring which succeeded Sir John’s death found them temporarily residing in Paris. It was very far from the Colonel’s intention, however, to remain there long; the household was only incomplete, as yet, without Francis, who in a few weeks would join it on leaving Oxford; and there had to be some consideration before finally settling, from among no slight variety of advertisements in the public journals, what district of the provinces might be best suited for a retreat, probably during some years. One or two points of business, also, requiring attention to his English letters, continued to make their early arrival a convenience; not so much from the Devonshire lawyer, whose methodical regularity left nothing to desire, as with regard to the sale of Sir Godfrey’s commission, and some arrangements left unfinished in town, of that tedious nature which characterises stockbroking. Meanwhile their establishment was certainly simple compared with that lately given up in Golden Square, where society, at no time deficient to the Willoughbies, had, since the Colonel’s last return home, been doubling itself every year, and had begun, since his brother’s death, absolutely to send visiting-cards by footmen, to call in carriages, to bespeak the earliest possible share of their company at dinner: contrasted with the extent which must have been necessary for Stoke, it was diminutive. Yet it was by no means one of a restricted kind, although the income from Lady Willoughby’s own small fortune would alone have sufficed to keep it up, leaving some surplus; so that, living as yet without new acquaintances, and, so far as their countrymen were concerned, in perfect obscurity, they had not a wish which it did not suffice for; as long, at least, as the vast, strange city held its first influences over them. To these, probably, it was owing that Colonel Willoughby appeared for some time to have had no other object in coming to Paris; if distinctly aware of any, beyond the facilities there for choosing a place of residence in the provinces, for awaiting his son Francis, and finishing the more important part of his correspondence, with the convenience of respectable banking-houses—besides the possibility of avoiding English acquaintances, which at Dieppe or Boulogne would not have been so easy—then he would without doubt have mentioned it to his wife. A reserved man, and in the strictest sense a proud one, he was amongst the last to have secrets; they would have sat on his brow, and troubled his manner; nor had he at any time had such a thing apart from her. During the whole course of their wedded life, whether together or separated, by word or letter, their mutual confidence had increased: for her part, she was of that easy, placid, seemingly almost torpid nature, which, save in a receipt of housekeeping, or a triumph of domestic management, appears merely to produce in it nothing worth the hiding, nor to receive, either, anything of that serious kind; while the course of time, that had begun to turn the fair features of Mrs Willoughby rather large, giving her form a somewhat more than matronly fulness, had so increased this peculiarity in her disposition as to make strangers think her insipid. Older friends thought very far otherwise, and it was, in some way, chiefly old friends Mrs Willoughby had had at all; but neither they, the oldest of them, nor even her children, perhaps, could so much as imagine the truth of heart, the perfect trust, the intimate, unhesitating appreciation, which, since they were first gained by him, her husband had been ever knowing better. Indolently placid as she might seem even to ordinary troubles, tumults, and embarrassments, as if the world’s care entered no imagination of hers—quietly busied, with attention fixed on household matters, knitting or sewing in her endless, noiseless manner—yet if his eye had shown anxiety, if he had ceased to read, if he paced the room, or had been very silent, a kind of divination there was, that, without any watching or any questioning, would have roused her up—the work suspended on her lap, her cheek losing the old dimple-mark which maturity had deepened there, and her glance widened with concern; till, if he had still not spoken, Lady Willoughby would have risen up gradually, looking round as if startled from a sort of mild dream, and have moved towards him, beginning of her own accord—which was a rare thing—to speak. Not necessarily, indeed, though they had been alone in the room, to invite confidence by any inquiry; but rather in the way of performing some slight office that might have been neglected, or with endeavours at such interesting news and small-talk as, to speak truth, she scarcely shone in, unsupported—nor any the better for the confused sense she evidently had at these times of having been by some means in fault, and having failed to be a very lively companion. She was of a plain country squire’s family, in fact; and in her day, if sent at all to boarding-schools, they had not lingered long over music, still less at flower-painting or the sciences; while with successive sisters waiting at home for their turn, as she had had, it was but to finish off baking and mending, with dancing and embroidery, then to come back, and bake and mend again. So when the dancing ended with marriage, the embroidery at the first birth, it might have been thought the officer had gained no very valuable society, sometimes in barrack-lodgings, sometimes abroad, sometimes for distant communication by letter; she might, at least, have been expected to form no great ornament in London circles, or among country people at Stoke Manor-house. Still there had been nothing in all their previous intercourse so precious to him as his wife’s letters, when almost for the first time, in her own natural way, she had to attempt expressing fond thoughts, soothing motives, and yet confessions of impatience—mixed up with accounts of children’s complaints, their faults, and their schooling—country gossip, and fashionable arrivals, with some stray suggestions and admissions, never before confided to him, of a pious kind: and when long afterwards came the events at Stoke, instead of any undue flutter or sense of importance being caused in her, she had fallen in as naturally to title or prospects, as she had sat before that at the head of their dinner-table in Golden Square. It was no doll’s disposition, as had been at the time hinted round some ill-natured card-tables in that region; if one thing more than another troubled Sir Godfrey in their present plans, it was that he believed devoutly in his wife’s aptitude for a high station, where expectations would be formed and occasions raised; his feeling was—and the partiality was excusable—that her chief value lay obscured in ordinary circumstances. Whereas at the new abode in Paris, with ample scope and convenience, all the earlier habits of domestic superintendence seemed returning, the making, baking, mending—almost even to washing; in reference to which alone Lady Willoughby seemed really active, and the more so that everything might go on as in England, had the mere economy of the thing not been a vital point. Her pleased air would alone have hindered him from reasoning it with her, had Sir Godfrey so much as dreamt, in the latter respect, how their case really stood: and when, indeed, there did lie any care on his mind, which he might be unwilling she should share, yet so gently did the conversation win it from him, and so quietly did something like the old manner woo him to bear no burden alone, that, ere he knew, it was no longer his, but they were talking of it plainly. What tranquil reassurance then, and grave, prompt advertence to the point—and pure sympathy, and that repose of soul from which a woman’s instinct can express so much by a tone, a look, silence itself! Sir Godfrey had sometimes been ashamed to find how much more he could be disturbed by trifles, or how cautiously he had been underrating his wife’s affection. So that she knew as well as he did, and almost as soon, how affairs stood at Stoke, with the tenor of his brother’s intended will, and any the slightest incident which could concern them. He had even casually mentioned, as among the more trivial, Sir John’s wishes for the benefit of the person entitled Suzanne Deroux, for Lady Willoughby had long known, of course, what of Sir John’s early history his brother knew. The matter had well-nigh escaped his memory, he said; till on happening to want a banker in Paris, it struck him that the house formerly employed by his brother, in the payment of the annuity referred to, might suit himself. To these gentlemen, accordingly, he had sent a memorandum of the address left by Sir John, with a request that they would have the money paid to her. It was a small sum, but might be important to the people, whoever they were, living in one of the poorest and most wretchedly-crowded quarters of Paris. Still, as Sir Godfrey smiled on that occasion cheerfully, and resumed his English newspaper, he did not, he could not tell all the painful and pertinacious impressions, of circumstances unknown or acts untraced, which any allusion to his late brother’s former stay in Paris still called up.
Everything did not exactly go on in the household as in England, indeed, but all was as nearly so as a quiet assiduity could make it. The house, a somewhat dull and dilapidated mansion, very barely furnished, and taken by the month from an adjoining notary, stood far to the western or court-end of the city, though rather involved in the dinginess of a sort of minor fauxbourg, where, in those days, between the sudden curve of the river and the lesser alleys of the Champs Elysées, a motley population still clustered about the tan-pits or dye-houses, and towards the bridge and quays: it occupied one corner of a short, deserted-looking street, the other end of which was reduced to a narrow lane by the high enclosure of a convent; in front was a small paved court, very shady and damp, by the help of two or three stunted poplars it contained, yet not by any means private, being overlooked by dusty or broken staircase windows, one over the other, from at hand; while it, nevertheless, could boast of a wall surmounted by a railing, with a heavily-pillared gate of open ironwork, a little lodge on one side within, where the porter lived—at one end of the house a diminutive stable and coach-shed, at the other an entrance to a high-walled garden, laid out in intricate confusion, without sign of flowers, and overgrown with a luxury of weeds. Some rising bourgeois had probably at first designed it, with a moderate eye to fashion; although its prime recommendation from the notary was, that successive families of the English nobility had chosen it for their temporary residence; nor did the old concierge fail to point out, with some emphasis, when showing the garden, that it was in the English style. The place was, at all events, at a convenient distance from the central parts of Paris, and within an easy drive to the Protestant Episcopal chapel. At a sharp angle with the street ran a main thoroughfare from the city barrier, one way confused in the dense suburb, the other way breaking towards a leafy promenade of the public park; sending all day a busy throng of passengers into that brighter current, where it glimpsed broad past the gap of light, with the glitter of equipages, the shifting glow of dresses, and the constant hum and babble of its gaiety; while nearer by was an opening in the contiguous street, through which the first-floor windows of their house looked at the motion along the quay, and saw the stately piles of building on the opposite bank, in brighter perspective, curve away from the eastern avenue of the Champ de Mars, with the bending of the river. They had still a carriage, too, though it was merely hired by the month, like the house, from the nearest livery-stables—a light, English-shaped barouche, with its pair of soot-black, long-legged Flemish horses, long-tailed and square-nosed, barrel-bodied and hollow-backed, and formally-stepping, which the owner called English also, for everything English seemed the rage: they were objects of no slight scorn, in that light, to Sir Godfrey’s groom, a stiff old trooper, who, with his duties towards his master’s horse, Black Rupert (the only possession they had brought from Stoke, save the title), had soon to unite that of coachman. Since besides Jackson himself, there was not merely an English housemaid, but there was young Mr Charles’s tutor, a grave, rather middle-aged bachelor of arts from Cambridge, and in clerical orders, who was to make up for the lost advantages of Eton, while he looked forward to the first opening in the curacy at Stoke: there was Miss Willoughby’s governess, a lady apparently also of middle age, whose perfect breeding and great accomplishments had made her acceptance of the position a favour, when the sudden necessity arose for the young lady’s leaving school; she had been in the highest families, and her conversational powers were of a superior order, so that there was a continual silent gratitude towards her on the part of Lady Willoughby. To the latter, indeed, whose whole heart lay in her family, these unavoidable changes had been a source of pure satisfaction, so far as she was concerned; compared with the privilege of having their children about them, educated under their own eye, expecting Frank so soon, too, nothing else was a deprivation; she merely missed England and English habits when some one else did, and had seen Stoke but once; only through the occasional abstracted looks of Sir Godfrey did she regret its postponement. As for the old French concierge at the gate, indeed, with his wife, family, and friends, she could have gladly spared them; but the concierge was indispensable—he lived there—he went with the house, in fact; and at the very hint of his being superfluous, the old cracked-voiced porter had drawn himself up indignantly in his chair, while his bare-armed, black-browed wife had turned her leatherlike face up from her tub, looking daggers. True, the English family had, in the mean time, no visitors, but the concierge had;—he was well known to his respectable neighbours; and, besides, it was possible that the misanthropy of the Chevalier Vilby and of Madame might be to some extent diminished; they would probably yet enter into society—all the previous tenants of the mansion had done so; Paris was, in reality, so attractive a capital. Such had been the response to the diplomacy of Jackson, who, having once been a French prisoner, far abroad, knew the language after a fashion of his own; and he received it in grim silence. The truth was, the gossipping receptions at the little lodge were somewhat troublesome, and seemed to concern themselves greatly with the affairs of the household within, had there been nothing else than the general interest taken in it by the adjacent windows, or the popularity of the whole family, collectively or individually, which had sometimes accompanied their exit or entrance with applause from crowds of street children—a prestige which had as evidently deserted them afterwards, to be replaced by tenfold scrutiny of a less partial kind, not unmingled with sundry trivial annoyances. Nor, although it resulted, with Lady Willoughby’s usual easy disposition, in her employing the services of the porter’s daughter within the house, did the one parent open the gate with less sullen dignity, and the other seem less jealously watchful against some abstraction of the furniture, or nocturnal evasion of the rent.
Nevertheless, Paris itself was not more restless or more lively than the spirits of the young people in their first enjoyment of its scenes. The earliest summer had begun to lighten up what was already bright with heat that came before the leaves, quickly as these were bursting into verdure along every avenue; and when the dust is hovering in the sun, when the level light streams along causeway and pavement, crossed by cooler vistas, when the morning water-carts go slowly hissing past, the shopmen sprinkling their door-steps, putting out their canopies, setting their windows right—with the moist smell of market-carts still in the air, the stray fragrance of fruit-stalls near—steeples shining high beyond the steel-blue roofs, the dazzling skylight panes,—chambermaids looking far out from upper windows, long perspectives of architecture blending, and a vast hollow azure over all, ere the smoke is gathered, and before the street-cries are confused, or the growing rush of sounds has become oppressive in the heat—then who remembers not the fairy feeling of a city to youth! It is when they still look to life from under protection, with no experience, nothing like the need of directing for themselves; but most of all from a simple household, used to temperate pleasures, and to the sort of kindness that rests more in purpose than upon indulgence; the city need only be Paris, with sights as foreign as the language, to crown that morning cup of enchantment to its brim. For the two younger members of the family it wore all its charm: Rose Willoughby had seen little more of the world in her boarding-school, at sixteen, than if it had been a nunnery; while Charles, who was younger, had been fancying his knowledge of life at Westminster school and Eton rather uncommon;—so that every morning set them astir early, watching at the windows, impatient to get breakfast-time past, to have those studies severally over, in which, so far as the lad’s tutor was concerned, Mr Thorpe bore the chief difficulties of the task. Each day, in fact, found the party rolling farther from the shady environs, through into the hot heart of the city, towards scenes or structures that were multiplied by each previous discovery: for if the long stately façades of the Tuileries, from its formal gardens swarming with people and statues, ran already half-linked to the gorgeous old Louvre, steeped pale in the southern flood of light above the river, till all its deep-set, embossed windows seemed diamonds in the rich Corinthian filagree that framed them, though the workmen were still busy at its unfinished roof, like emmets from the crowd along the quays; so these also pointed to the Palais Royal court, with its new arcades and glittering shops—or, again, far through the labyrinth of exhaustless streets, where moted and dusty shadows plunged into the gloom of deep lanes, to the grim grey towers of the Bastille rising embattled out of the squalid fauxbourg, which blackened in manufactory smoke beyond—miles back, too, it led across some bridge, to the Gobelins, to the close and dingy quarter of the university, with its old legends of learning, or magic in dark ages; its careless students swaggering past, or smoking from their high-perched casements; its grisettes, that sat at work opposite with an air of coquettish grace amidst their poverty, their hair neither frizzed nor powdered, with a bright cotton handkerchief twined half about it, watering their little mignonette-boxes, or chirping to their bird-cages that hung outside to a gleam of sunshine;—or to where the golden dome of the great hospital hung in the air, faintly bright; to the bronze form of Henry of Navarre riding regardless above the throng of the market-place, and where the two huge cathedral-towers of Notre Dame stood over their mountain of roof, above the gaunt old houses of the island Cité; with the sharp-peaked prison-turrets and grated loopholes of the Conciergerie lifted from the river’s edge, whose muddy eddies swam each way by, among the barges. The Colonel had been in Paris many years before, ere he had had any interest in it save that of a young man, in lively company; when all sons of gentlemen made the grand tour, and the old glories of Versailles were still reflected even at the court of Louis Quinze, in the elegant dissipation of his latter days: he had come since then, indeed, into sterner contact with Frenchmen abroad; but it served him now, in making shift to act as guide among the principal wonders of the capital—when he rode near the carriage, sometimes accompanied by Mr Thorpe, the tutor, on a quiet white mare from the hackney stables. And Lady Willoughby mildly eyed the Bastille, or gently noticed the sumptuousness of the Louvre, at her husband’s remark; suffering herself to be handed out to some sentinel-guarded vestibule, and led along some chill historical corridor, although it might cost a shudder at what was told of it; if some positive domestic duty did not rather keep her all day at home. While Mrs Mason, the governess, following with the party, would sedulously express assent, at due intervals, by word or sign, to the statements of the baronet; not seldom addressing to the young lady beside her some comment of her own, or improving inference, such as Mrs Trimmer had recently brought into educational vogue. It might have been that Rose on these occasions sometimes caught her brother’s eye, so that her absorbed face and lighted look would grow all at once intensely demure, or she had to turn away to hide a smile at his air of exaggerated attention; while Mr Thorpe was usually so deep in abstraction, or had wandered so far, as to be in danger of their leaving him altogether behind. It was all one storm of spectacle and excitement, in fact, to the two; antique memories mingling in it with the record of fearful deeds, and quaint traces of rude manners with the grandeur of the church, the magnificence of the days of great kings—it only added zest to the living rush of the streets, the foreign faces and unaccustomed accents, the endless variety of movement that shone, flickered, or darkened every way about them. Then, slowly extricated from fetid lanes and old overhanging houses, patched, and stained, and ruinous, where the low-stretched cord of the street lantern showed that carriages seldom passed, they would wheel out suddenly from the rough causeway and its filthy middle-gutter, into the broad light and sunny air of the verdurous boulevards, where the ramparts of old Paris ran. So as the sounds of wheels grew soft, and they rolled leisurely along, the girl and her brother would look to each other, with something of the same feeling; her eyes would sparkle, while Charles’s were everywhere: when on either side of the curving vista, either way lost to sight, and heaped with the motion of equipages and riders, the showering elm-leaves and blossoming lime-twigs rose green ’gainst the tall, bright, ornate houses, tinted variously, and dappled fitfully by the shade—where the scattered passengers lounged, the loitering groups mingled, and all was open-air existence—while the gay shop-windows and café signs shone beneath the boughs, the open upper-casements seemed to drink coolness beneath their striped canopies through green-barred jalousies, the double shutter-frames were thrown out either way against the wall, and no care, no business appeared to hang on Paris far as eye could reach, as it thickened there through the swimming light of afternoon. To Rose and Charles it left no dissatisfactions about Stoke, nor regret for the smoke of London; and instead of wishing the place of their residence settled soon, although neither had confided it to the other, they would fain, no doubt, have had their father decide on staying where they were, so as to fulfil the suggestion of the worthy concierge, by making acquaintances and going into society. The truth was, that they were unconsciously somewhat conspicuous; whether it was that the full, fair, lady-like features of Lady Willoughby, with her hair aristocratically enough drawn up, heaped high, and powdered, had yet an air of half-sleepy ease and comfort that offered the strongest contrast to French looks, or that the hood-like bonnet of black crape which surmounted them, drawn in folds together and hung with its short curtain-like veil of black lace, however according to matronly usage then in London, had already been left behind in Paris by a barer and more classical taste; or the girlish grace and bloom of Rose in her mourning-dress and hat; the half clerical air of Mr Thorpe, with his mingled awkwardness and endeavours at attention to the ladies; or the military air, tall figure, and splendid English hunter of the baronet: all which, perhaps, taken together, might even in passing have suggested food for the proverbial Parisian curiosity. Especially if, as at times might have been done, they had noticed the grave silence of the elderly English gentleman on horseback, when his companion addressed him in vain, or when with a start he looked up to answer, sometimes running his eye keenly about the passing people, over the seated and trifling groups, up to the windows of the houses, or along the shop-signs, like one all at once awake to them. Indeed, out of the charmingly private allée des veuves in the Elysian fields, where alone the equipages of the rich widows of the whole capital were in propriety seen to drive, and the doubtful widowers and needy bachelors to seek opportunities of consoling them, with a similar gravity of dress and demeanour—it was questionable whether the people of Paris were accustomed to observe so puzzlingly attractive a sight. It had altogether, no doubt, a sincere insular air in their eyes.
It happened that on the day they had visited Notre Dame cathedral, Colonel Willoughby took advantage of their return through the Rue St Honoré to call at his banker’s in that leading street. He had transacted his principal business there, and only found some difficulty in detaching himself from the subsequent animated conversation of the courteous financier, whose spirits seemed to be excellent on account of some continued increase in the price of corn; a motive but dimly understood by Sir Godfrey, while at each step or two of his egress from the antechamber he was still detained by some fresh ground of satisfaction. As regarded places of abode to be had, in any part of France whatever, the perplexity did not certainly result from want of choice; since his last inquiry, the notices and advertisements had increased, particularly in the rural provinces; to be let or sold, they seemed surprisingly plentiful; nor were their advantages in every point omitted, after the usual style of such description, which sometimes dilated on the very nature of the landscape, or dwelt with gusto on the particular character of architecture. “It is doubtless owing, Monsieur le Baron,” suggested the banker, complacently, “to the immense resort, at the present, of the nobility to Paris. The attraction is excessive! It will indeed be impossible to reside but in the vicinity—and M. le Baron sympathises, I imagine, with the party of our ——, probably to a certain extent in the ——?”
“I really know very little of political matters, Monsieur,” said the baronet, smiling, “even at home,—and as for those in this country, I can scarcely say that I have attended to them much.”
“It is exactly the position which I have myself assumed, M. le Baron,” responded the banker, with a subdued air of confidential understanding. “In finance it is indispensable. But affairs are solid here;” and he gaily struck his hand on his pocket. “Things will move—they will go—now that M. Neckar is at the head! M. le Baron is doubtless aware that the meetings of the States-General have commenced, and are open to attendance, like the English parliament itself? Bah we are aware that in affairs nowadays, the minister is everything; to speak properly—the king, nothing! The discussions grow interesting—it was a happy stroke—to render the nation—yes, conceive, Monsieur,—responsible for its own expenses! And, after all, the world is governed by this money here!” Sir Godfrey sighed involuntarily, while the banker, slightly rubbing his hands together, bowing and smiling, still conducted him with empressement towards the court in which his horse was held. “It would be easy to secure a distinguished place of audience for M. le Baron in the minister’s gallery at Versailles,” persisted Monsieur Blaise, with interest, “and for the family of M. le Baron, whom we have not yet, indeed, had the honour to see?” M. Blaise had, in fact, made sundry half-subdued advances, at various times, towards a mutual introduction of the families; which seemed latterly to become more obvious. “Thank you, Monsieur,” was the rather dry answer—“no. The fact is, we intend immediately leaving town, as soon as my eldest son arrives. And, of course, this matter as to a place of residence must be settled. I should prefer some remote, quiet, country place.”