to the delight of Tom Sarjent, who, though he only partially comprehended the words of the song, pronounced the singer to be a rare gentleman, full of most excellent differences. We took our Florac to the Derby; we presented him in Fitzroy Square, whither we still occasionally went, for Clive’s and our dear Colonel’s sake.
The Vicomte pronounced himself strongly in favour of the blanche misse little Rosey Mackenzie, of whom we have lost sight for some few chapters. Mrs. Mac he considered, my faith, to be a woman superb. He used to kiss the tips of his own fingers, in token of his admiration for the lovely widow; he pronounced her again more pretty than her daughter; and paid her a thousand compliments, which she received with exceeding good-humour. If the Vicomte gave us to understand presently that Rosey and her mother were both in love with him, but that for all the world he would not meddle with the happiness of his dear little Clive, nothing unfavourable to the character or constancy of the before-mentioned ladies must be inferred from M. de Florac’s speech; his firm conviction being, that no woman could pass many hours in his society without danger to her subsequent peace of mind.
For some little time we had no reason to suspect that our French friend was not particularly well furnished with the current coin of the realm. Without making any show of wealth, he would, at first, cheerfully engage in our little parties: his lodgings in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, though dingy, were such as many noble foreign exiles have inhabited. It was not until he refused to join some pleasure-trip which we of Lamb Court proposed, honestly confessing his poverty, that we were made aware of the Vicomte’s little temporary calamity; and, as we became more intimate with him, he acquainted us, with great openness, with the history of all his fortunes. He described energetically that splendid run of luck which had set in at Baden with Clive’s loan: his winnings, at that fortunate period, had carried him through the winter with considerable brilliancy, but bouillotte and Mademoiselle Atala, of the Variétés (une ogresse, mon cher! who devours thirty of our young men every year in her cavern, in the Rue de Bréda), had declared against him, and the poor Vicomte’s pockets were almost empty when he came to London.
He was amiably communicative regarding himself, and told us his virtues and his faults (if indeed a passion for play and for women could be considered as faults in a gay young fellow of two or three and forty), with a like engaging frankness. He would weep in describing his angel mother: he would fly off again into tirades respecting the wickedness, the wit, the extravagance, the charms of the young lady of the Variétés. He would then (in conversation) introduce us to Madame de Florac, née Higg, of Manchesterre. His prattle was incessant, and to my friend Mr. Warrington especially he was an object of endless delight and amusement and wonder. He would roll and smoke countless paper cigars, talking unrestrainedly when we were not busy, silent when we were engaged; he would only rarely partake of our meals, and altogether refused all offers of pecuniary aid. He disappeared at dinner-time into the mysterious purlieus of Leicester Square, and dark ordinaries only frequented by Frenchmen. As we walked with him in the Regent Street precincts, he would exchange marks of recognition with many dusky personages, smoking bravos; and whiskered refugees of his nation.
“That gentleman,” he would say, “who has done me the honour to salute me, is a coiffeur of the most celebrated; he forms the delices of our table-d’hôte. ‘Bon jour, mon cher monsieur!’ We are friends, though not of the same opinion. Monsieur is a republican of the most distinguished; conspirator of profession, and at this time engaged in constructing an infernal machine to the address of His Majesty, Louis Philippe, King of the French.” “Who is my friend with the scarlet beard and the white paletot? My good Warrington! you do not move in the world; you make yourself a hermit, my dear! Not know monsieur!—monsieur is secretary to Mademoiselle Caracoline, the lovely rider at the circus of Astley; I shall be charmed to introduce you to this amiable society some day at our table-d’hôte.”
Warrington vowed that the company of Florac’s friends would be infinitely more amusing than the noblest society ever chronicled in the Morning Post; but we were neither sufficiently familiar with the French language to make conversation in that tongue as pleasant to us as talking in our own; and so were content with Florac’s description of his compatriots, which the Vicomte delivered in that charming French-English of which he was a master.
However threadbare in his garments, poor in purse, and eccentric in morals our friend was, his manners were always perfectly gentlemanlike, and he draped himself in his poverty with the grace of a Spanish grandee. It must be confessed, that the grandee loved the estaminet where he could play billiards with the first comer; that he had a passion for the gambling-house; that he was a loose and disorderly nobleman: but, in whatever company he found himself, a certain kindness, simplicity, and politeness distinguished him always. He bowed to the damsel who sold him a penny cigar, as graciously as to a duchess; he crushed a manant’s impertinence or familiarity as haughtily as his noble ancestors ever did at the Louvre, at Marli, or Versailles. He declined to obtempérer to his landlady’s request to pay his rent, but he refused with a dignity which struck the woman with awe; and King Alfred, over the celebrated muffin (on which Gandish and other painters have exercised their genius), could not have looked more noble than Florac in a robe-de-chambre, once gorgeous, but shady now as became its owner’s clouded fortunes; toasting his bit of bacon at his lodgings, when the fare even of his table-d’hôte had grown too dear for him.
As we know from Gandish’s work, that better times were in store for the wandering monarch, and that the officers came acquainting him that his people demanded his presence à grands cris, when of course King Alfred laid down the toast and resumed the sceptre; so in the case of Florac, two humble gentlemen, inhabitants of Lamb Court, and members of the Upper temple, had the good luck to be the heralds as it were, nay indeed, the occasion, of the rising fortunes of the Prince de Moncontour. Florac had informed us of the death of his cousin the Duc d’Ivry, by whose demise the Vicomte’s father, the old Count de Florac, became the representative of the house of Ivry, and possessor, through his relative’s bequest, of an old château still more gloomy and spacious than the count’s own house in the Faubourg St. Germain—a château, of which the woods, domains, and appurtenances had been lopped off by the Revolution. “Monsieur le Comte,” Florac says, “has not wished to change his name at his age; he has shrugged his old shoulder, and said it was not the trouble to make to engrave a new card; and for me,” the philosophical Vicomte added, “of what good shall be a title of prince in the position where I find myself?” It is wonderful for us who inhabit a country where rank is worshipped with so admirable a reverence, to think that there are many gentlemen in France who actually have authentic titles and do not choose to bear them.
Mr. George Warrington was hugely amused with this notion of Florac’s ranks and dignities. The idea of the Prince purchasing penny cigars; of the Prince mildly expostulating with his landlady regarding the rent; of his punting for half-crowns at a neighbouring hall in Air Street, whither the poor gentleman desperately ran when he had money in his pocket, tickled George’s sense of humour. It was Warrington who gravely saluted the Vicomte, and compared him to King Alfred, on that afternoon when we happened to call upon him and found him engaged in cooking his modest dinner.
We were bent upon an excursion to Greenwich, and on having our friend’s company on that voyage, and we induced the Vicomte to forgo his bacon, and be our guest for once. George Warrington chose to indulge in a great deal of ironical pleasantry in the course of the afternoon’s excursion. As we went down the river, he pointed out to Florac the very window in the Tower where the captive Duke of Orleans used to sit when he was an inhabitant of that fortress. At Greenwich, which palace Florac informed us was built by Queen Elizabeth, George showed the very spot where Raleigh laid his cloak down to enable Her Majesty to step over a puddle. In a word, he mystified M. de Florac; such was Mr. Warrington’s reprehensible spirit.