MADAME LÉONIE D'AUNET.
Among the crowd of lady travellers to whom this nineteenth century has given birth, the able and accomplished Frenchwoman, so widely known by her pseudonym of Madame Léonie d'Aunet, merits a passing allusion. Remove from her the mask she is pleased to assume before the public, and she stands revealed as Madame Biard, the wife of the great humoristic painter, whose "Sequel of a Masquerade," "Family Concert," "Combat with Polar Bears," and other pictures, are not less highly esteemed by English than by French connoisseurs. Born about 1820, she is twenty years younger than her husband, whom, in 1845, she accompanied in his excursion to Spitzbergen; an excursion which opened with, by way of prologue, a rapid tour through Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and Norway. Of the tour and the excursion she has published a brilliant narrative, which it is impossible to read without pleasure, so polished is the style, and so sharply defined are the descriptions. Her literary skill gives her an advantage over the great majority of female travellers, whose diaries and journals, from want of it, are often bald, colourless, and diffuse. On the other hand, she is deficient in sympathy; she judges rather with the intellect than with the heart, which is at least as necessary to the formation of a fair and intelligent opinion. Her mind, however, is so keen and so incisive, so prompt to seize the most curious facts, so apt in discovering characteristic details, that even when she speaks of places and peoples with whom we are all familiar, she compels us to listen, and irresistibly holds our attention. It has been said that in some respects her manner is that of the elder Dumas, but while she is more honest and less given to exaggeration she does not rise to the same literary standard. The famous author of "Anthony" is still first master in the art, more difficult than the world in general believes it to be, of recording the experiences of travel; he is a master in it, because he does not make the attempt, which must always be unsuccessful, of minutely recording every particular that comes under a traveller's notice, and because he is gifted beyond ordinary measure with the art and verve of the raconteur. Persons and situations he knows how to group in the most effective manner; incidents assume their most dramatic form; scenes are worked up so as to produce a definite impression on the reader's mind.
Madame d'Aunet, as a popular novelist, knows when writing that she can count upon her thousands of readers. But this is a fact which we wish she could have forgotten or ignored. For, keeping it always before her, she is led to weigh with critical timidity every word, every phrase, and to elaborate each sentence until, in the old Greek phrase, we "smell the oil." Those passages of glowing description which at first marched on so freely and fully, come to an abrupt pause. The language, formerly so vigorous and incisive, becomes vague, colourless, hesitating; or, very frequently, gets upon stilts and assumes an air of pretentious affectation. The writer has evidently forgotten, in her over-scrupulous regard for the artistic and picturesque, that nothing is so attractive as simplicity. And Madame d'Aunet is always most charming when she is most natural—that is, when she is herself; when she writes spontaneously, and fully possessed by her subject, without casting anxious glances at the reader to see if he admires this polished period or catches that apt allusion. Therefore, we are compelled to indicate as a defect—which, if not very great, might as well have been avoided—a certain affectation and coquetry of style, displaying the solicitude of the artist rather than the frank simplicity of the story-teller. Something of this fault the English reader notes in Mr. Kinglake's "Eöthen."
In speaking of Belgium and Holland, Madame d'Aunet lets drop some felicitous expressions, some pregnant and rememberable phrases, which give the reader an exact idea of the manners of the inhabitants and of the land they dwell in. The touch is delicate, but always firm and true.
As to the Hollanders, she says:—
"These people have not the love of cleanliness, but its cultus."
Referring to the two Dutch towns which are the most rigorously watched over, she says:—
"Saardam is a page, and Broek a vignette, from the history of Holland.