"You carry your heart in a sling."
I carried my heart anyhow.
Mrs. O'Larry left for Dublin; then, moving once more from the neighbourhood of the colony of the poor Emigration of the east, I arrived, from lodging to lodging, in the quarter of the rich Emigration of the west, among the bishops, the Court families, and the West Indian planters. Peltier had come back to me: he had got married as a joke; he was the same boaster as always, lavishly obliging, and frequenting his neighbours' pockets rather than their society. I made several new acquaintances, particularly in the society in which I had family connections: Christian de Lamoignon[201], who had been seriously wounded in the leg in the engagement at Quiberon, and who is now my colleague in the House of Lords, became my friend. He presented me to Mrs. Lindsay, who was attached to Auguste de Lamoignon[202], his brother: the Président Guillaume[203] was not installed in this fashion at Basville, in the midst of Boileau[204], Madame de Sévigné, and Bourdaloue[205].
Mrs. Lindsay, a lady of Irish descent, with a material mind and a somewhat snappish humour, an elegant figure and attractive features, was gifted with nobility of soul and elevation of character: the Emigrants of quality spent their evenings by the fireside of the last of the Ninons[206]. The old monarchy was going under, with all its abuses and all its graces. It will be dug up one day, like those skeletons of queens, decked with necklaces, bracelets and ear-rings, which they exhume in Etruria. At Mrs. Lindsay's I met M. Malouet[207] and Madame du Belloy, a woman worthy of affection, the Comte de Montlosier and the Chevalier de Panat[208]. The last had a well-earned reputation for wit, dirtiness, and gluttony; he belonged to that audience of men of taste who used formerly to sit with folded arms in the presence of French society: idlers whose mission was to look on at everything and criticize everything; they exercised the functions which the newspapers fulfill to-day, without the same bitterness, but also without attaining their great popular influence.
The Comte de Montlosier.
Montlosier continued to ride cock-horse on his famous phrase of the "wooden cross," a phrase somewhat smoothed down by me, when I revived it, but true at bottom. On leaving France he went to Coblentz: he was badly received by the Princes, had a quarrel, fought a duel at night on the bank of the Rhine, and was run through. Being unable to move and quite unable to see, he asked the seconds if the point of the sword was sticking out behind:
"Only three inches," said they, feeling him.
"Then it's nothing," replied Montlosier. "Sir, withdraw your weapon."
Thus badly received for his royalism, Montlosier went to England, and took refuge in literature, the great almshouse of the Emigrants, in which I had a pallet next to his. He obtained the editorship of the Courrier français.[209] In addition to his newspaper, he wrote physico-politico-philosophical works: in one of these works he proved that blue is the colour of life, because our veins turn blue after death, life coming to the surface of the body in order to evaporate and return to the blue sky; as I am very fond of blue, I was quite charmed.
Feudally liberal, aristocratic and democratic, with a motley mind, made up of shreds and patches, Montlosier is delivered, with difficulty, of incongruous ideas; but, once he has succeeded in extricating them from their after-birth, they are sometimes fine, above all energetic: an anti-clerical as a noble, a Christian through sophistry and as a lover of the olden times, he would, in the days of paganism, have been an eager partisan of freedom in theory and of slavery in practice, and would have had the slave thrown to the lampreys in the name of the liberty of the human race. Wrong-headed, cavilling, stiff-necked, and hirsute, the ex-deputy of the nobles of Riom nevertheless indulges in condescendences to the powers that be; he knows how to look after his interests, but he does not suffer others to perceive this, and he shelters his weaknesses as a man beneath his honour as a gentleman. I do not wish to speak ill of my "smoky Auvernat," with his novels of the Mont-d'Or and his polemics of the Plaine; I like his heteroclitous person. His long and obscure setting forth and twisting of ideas, with parentheses, clearings of the throat, and tremulous "oh, ohs," bore me (I abominate the tenebrous, the involved, the vaporous, the laborious); but, on the other hand, I am amused by this naturalist of volcanoes, this abortive Pascal, this mountain orator who holds forth in the tribune as his little fellow-countrymen sing in the chimney-tops[210]; I love this gazetteer of peat-bogs and castle-keeps, this Liberal explaining the Charter through a Gothic window, this shepherd-lord half married to his milkmaid, himself sowing his barley in the snow, in his little pebbly field; I shall always thank him for dedicating to me, in his chalet in the Puy-de-Dôme, an old black rock taken from a cemetery of the Gauls discovered by himself.