My destitution had impeded my work. As I delivered no more manuscript, the printing was suspended. Deprived of Hingant's company, I did not keep on my room at Baylis' at a guinea per month; I paid the quarter that was due and went away. Below the needy Emigrants who had served as my first protectors in London were others who were even more necessitous. There are degrees among the poor as among the rich; one can go from the man who in winter keeps himself warm with his dog down to him who shivers in his torn rags. My friends found me a room more suited to my diminishing fortune: one is not always at the height of prosperity! They installed me in the neighbourhood of Marylebone Street, in a garret whose dormer window overlooked a cemetery: every night the watchman's rattle told me of the proximity of body-snatchers. I had the consolation to hear that Hingant was out of danger.
Friends came to see me in my work-room. To judge from our independence and our poverty, we might have been taken for painters on the ruins of Rome; we were artists in wretchedness on the ruins of France. My face served as a model, my bed as a seat for my pupils. The bed consisted of a mattress and a blanket. I had no sheets; when it was cold my coat and a chair, added to my blanket, kept me warm. I was too weak to make my bed; it remained turned down as God had left it.
My cousin de La Boüétardais, turned out of a low Irish lodging for not paying his rent, although he had put his violin in pawn, came to ask me for a shelter against the constable: a vicar from Lower Brittany lent him a trestle-bed. La Boüétardais, like Hingant, had been a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany; he did not possess a handkerchief to tie round his head; but he had deserted with bag and baggage, that is to say, he had brought away his square cap and his red robe, and he slept under the purple by my side. Jocular, a good musician with a fine voice, on nights when we could not sleep he would sit up quite naked on his trestles, put on his square cap, and sing ballads, accompanying himself on a guitar with only three strings. One night when the poor fellow was in this way humming Scendi propizia from Metastasio's[181] Hymn to Venus, he was struck by a draught; he twisted his mouth, and he died of it, but not at once, for I rubbed his cheek heartily. We held counsel in our elevated room, argued on politics, and discussed the gossip of the Emigration. In the evening, we went to our aunts and cousins to dance, after the dresses had been trimmed with ribbons and the hats made up.
They who read this portion of my Memoirs are not aware that I have interrupted them twice: once to offer a great dinner to the Duke of York, brother of the King of England; and once to give a rout on the anniversary of the entry of the King of France into Paris, on the 8th of July. That rout cost me forty thousand francs. Peers and peeresses of the British Empire, ambassadors, distinguished foreigners filled my gorgeously-decorated rooms. My tables gleamed with the glitter of London crystal and the gold of Sèvres porcelain. The most delicate dainties, wines and flowers abounded. Portland Place was blocked with splendid carriages. Collinet and the band from Almack's enraptured the fashionable melancholy of the dandies and the dreamy elegance of the pensively-dancing ladies. The Opposition and the Ministerial majority had struck a truce: Mrs. Canning[182] talked to Lord Londonderry, Lady Jersey to the Duke of Wellington. Monsieur, who this year sent me his compliments on the sumptuousness of my entertainments in 1822, did not know in 1793 that, not far from him, lived a future minister who, while awaiting the advent of his greatness, fasted over a cemetery for his sin of loyalty. I congratulate myself to-day on having experienced shipwreck, gone through war, and shared the sufferings of the humblest classes of society, as I applaud myself for meeting with injustice and calumny in times of prosperity. I have profited by these lessons: life, without the ills that make it serious, is a child's bauble.
*
I was the man with the forty crowns; but since fortunes had not yet been levelled, nor the price of commodities reduced, there was nothing to serve as a counterpoise to my rapidly diminishing purse. I could not reckon on further help from my family, exposed in Brittany to the double scourge of the Chouans[183] and the Terror. I saw nothing before me but the workhouse or the Thames.
A contrast.
Some of the Emigrants' servants, whom their masters could no longer feed, had turned into eating-house keepers in order to feed their masters. God knows the merry meals that were made at these ordinaries! God knows, too, what politics were talked there! All the victories of the Republic were turned into defeats, and, if by chance one entertained a doubt as to an immediate restoration, he was declared a Jacobin. Two old bishops, who looked like live corpses, were walking one morning in St James's Park:
"Monseigneur," said one, "do you think we shall be in France by June?"
"Why, monseigneur," replied the other, after ripe reflection, "I see nothing against it."