Remark, too, another development of this same popular feeling of dislike against men in power. What a number of plays and legends have we (the writer has submitted to the public, in the preceding pages, a couple of specimens; one of French, and the other of Polish origin), in which that great and powerful aristocrat, the Devil, is made to be miserably tricked, humiliated, and disappointed! A play of this class, which, in the midst of all its absurdities and claptraps, had much of good in it, was called Le Maudit des Mers. Le Maudit is a Dutch captain, who, in the midst of a storm, while his crew were on their knees at prayers, blasphemed and drank punch; but what was his astonishment at beholding an archangel with a sword, all covered with flaming resin, who told him that, as he, in this hour of danger, was too daring, or too wicked, to utter a prayer, he never should cease roaming the seas until he could find some being who would pray to Heaven for him!
Once, only, in a hundred years, was the skipper allowed to land for this purpose; and this piece runs through four centuries, in as many acts, describing the agonies and unavailing attempts of the miserable Dutchman. Willing to go any lengths, in order to obtain this prayer, he, in the second act, betrays a Virgin of the Sun to a follower of Pizarro; and, in the third, assassinates the heroic William of Nassau; but ever before the dropping of the curtain, the angel and sword make their appearance:—‘Treachery,’ says the spirit, ‘cannot lessen thy punishment;—crime will not obtain thy release! A la mer! à la mer!’ and the poor devil returns to the ocean, to be lonely, and tempest-tossed, and sea-sick, for a hundred years more.
But his woes are destined to end with the fourth act. Having landed in America, where the peasants on the sea-shore, all dressed in Italian costumes, are celebrating, in a quadrille, the victories of Washington, he is there lucky enough to find a young girl to pray for him. Then the curse is removed, the punishment is over, and a celestial vessel, with angels on the decks, and ‘sweet little cherubs’ fluttering about the shrouds and the poop, appears to receive him.
This piece was acted at Franconi’s, where, for once, an angel-ship was introduced in place of the usual horsemanship.
One must not forget to mention here, how the English nation is satirised by our neighbours, who have some droll traditions regarding us. In one of the little Christmas pieces produced at the Palais Royal (satires upon the follies of the past twelve months, on which all the small theatres exhaust their wit), the celebrated flight of Messrs. Green and Monck Mason was parodied, and created a good deal of laughter at the expense of John Bull. Two English noblemen, Milor Cricri and Milor Hanneton, appear as descending from a balloon, and one of them communicates to the public the philosophical observations which were made in the course of his aërial tour.
‘On leaving Vauxhall,’ says his lordship, ‘we drank a bottle of Madeira, as a health to the friends from whom we parted, and crunched a few biscuits to support nature during the hours before lunch. In two hours we arrived at Canterbury, enveloped in clouds; lunch, bottled porter; at Dover, carried several miles in a tide of air, bitter cold, cherry brandy; crossed over the Channel safely, and thought, with pity, of the poor people who were sickening in the steamboats below; more bottled porter; over Calais; dinner, roast-beef of Old England; near Dunkirk,—night falling, lunar rainbow, brandy-and-water; night confoundedly thick; supper, nightcap of rum-punch, and so to bed. The sun broke beautifully through the morning mist, as we boiled the kettle, and took our breakfast over Cologne. In a few more hours we concluded this memorable voyage, and landed safely at Weilburg, in good time for dinner.’
The joke here is smart enough; but our honest neighbours make many better, when they are quite unconscious of the fun. Let us leave plays, for a moment, for poetry, and take an instance of French criticism, concerning England, from the works of a famous French exquisite and man of letters. The hero of the poem addresses his mistress:—
‘Londres, tu le sais trop, en fait de capitale,
Est ce que fit le ciel de plus froid et plus pâle,
C’est la ville du gaz, des marins, du brouillard;
On s’y couche à minuit, et l’on s’y lève tard;
Ses raouts tant vantés ne sont qu’une boxade,
Sur ses grands quais jamais échelle ou sérénade,
Mais de volumineux bourgeois pris de porter
Qui passent sans lever le front à Westminster;
Et n’était sa forêt de mâts perçant la brume,
Sa tour dont à minuit le vieil œil s’allume,
Et tes deux yeux, Zerline, illuminés bien plus,
Je dirais que, ma foi, des romans que j’ai lus,
Il n’en est pas un seul, plus lourd, plus léthargique
Que cette nation qu’on nomme Britannique!’
The writer of the above lines (which let any man who can translate) is Monsieur Roger de Beauvoir, a gentleman who actually lived many months in England, as an attaché to the embassy of M. de Polignac. He places the heroine of his tale in a petit réduit près le Strand, ‘with a green and fresh jalousie, and a large blind, let down all day; you fancied you were entering a bath of Asia, as soon as you had passed the perfumed threshold of this charming retreat!’ He next places her—
‘Dans un Square écarté, morne et couverte de givre,
Où se cache un Hôtel, aux vieux lions de cuivre;’