“THE MARCHIONESS OF BRINVILLIERS,” BY ALBERT SMITH.
“December 20, 1844.
“My dear Sir,
“Here we are at the 20th of the month, and I have only four pages of Smith’s new story—no incident. Really, it is too much to expect that I can throw myself at a moment’s notice into the seventeenth century, with all its difficulties of costume, etc., etc. What am I to do? There is a great want of system somewhere. I received a note from Mr. Marsh last night, stating for the first time that there would be two illustrations to ‘The Marchioness of Brinvilliers,’ and also urging me to be very early with the plates, it being Christmas and all that! But, as I said before, I have not the matter to illustrate. What am I to do? Added to all this, I must be engaged one day in the early part of next week on the melancholy occasion of the funeral of a poor little sister of mine. Pray, my dear sir, do what you can to expedite matters, and
“Believe me,
“Yours faithfully,
“John Leech.
“—— Morgan, Esq.”
The above is one of the many letters that might be quoted to show the aggravating delays and difficulties under which so much of Leech’s work was produced. I take Mr. Morgan to have been one of the officials of Mr. Richard Bentley’s establishment, whose patience must have been sorely tried again and again by the pranks of that genus irritabile, the writer. Judging from the humorous character of Albert Smith’s “Ledbury” and other works, one is hardly prepared for the horrors that make us shudder over the pages of “The Marchioness of Brinvilliers”—horrors in which the writer seems to revel with a zest as keen as that he takes in the fun and frolic of Ledbury.
The “shilling shocker” of the present day is a mild production indeed, in comparison with the history of the poisoner and adulteress, Brinvilliers, in which “on horror’s head horrors accumulate.” The authors of the modern productions are, for the most part, inventors of the blood-and-murder scenes that adorn their books. Not so Mr. Albert Smith, whose pages describe but too truly the career of the most notorious of the many criminals that flourished in the most profligate period of French history. Louis XIV. set an example in debauchery to his subjects which the highest of them eagerly followed; but the most fearful factor of this terrible time was poison, by which the possessors of estates who “lagged superfluous on the scene” were made to give place to greedy heirs; husbands, inconveniently in the way, were put out of it by their wives, whose affections had been disposed of elsewhere; state officers, whose positions were desired by aspirants unwilling to wait for them, were struck by sudden and mysterious illness, speedily followed by death, for which the faculty of the time could in no way account.