Читать книгу: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843», страница 10
But here a new difficulty arose. The duchess was known to La Maréchal, for to whom in misfortune was not that most generous and kind-hearted duchess known? But I was still a stranger. However, with my old Frenchwoman, ceremony was not then the prevailing point. I had been her "preserver," as she was pleased to term me. I had been "introduced," which was quite sufficient for knowledge; above all other merits, "I spoke French like a Parisian;" in short, it was wholly impossible for her to ascend the crowded staircase, with her numberless dislocations, by the help of any other arm on earth. The slightest hope of seeing Clotilde would have made me confront all the etiquette of Spain; and I bore the contrast of my undress costume with the feathered and silken multitude which filled the stairs, in the spirit of a philosopher, until, by "many a step and slow," we reached the private wing of the mansion.
There, in an apartment fitted up with all the luxury of a boudoir, yet looking melancholy from the dim lights and the silent attendants, lay Clotilde on a sofa. But how changed from the being whom I had just seen at the theatre! She had been in imminent danger, and was literally dragged from under the horses' feet. A slight wound in her temple was still bleeding, and her livid lips and half-closed eyes gave me the image of death. As for Madame, she was in distraction; the volubility of her sorrows made the well-trained domestics shrink, as from a display at which they ought not to be present; and at length the only recipients of her woes were myself and the physician, who, with ominous visage, and drops in hand, was administering his aid to the passive patient. As Madame's despair rendered her wholly useless, the doctor called on me to assist him in raising her from the floor, on which she had flung herself like a heroine in a tragedy.
While I was engaged in this most reluctant performance, the accents of a sweet voice, and the rustling of silk, made me raise my eyes, and a vision floated across the apartment; it was the duchess herself, glittering in gold and jewels, turbaned and embroidered, as a Semiramis or a queen of Sheba; she was brilliant enough for either. She had just left the fancy ball behind, and was come "to make her personal enquiries for the health of her young friend."
My office was rather startling, even to the habitual presence of mind of the leader of fashion. I might have figured in her eyes, as the husband, or the lover, or the doctor's apprentice; she almost uttered a scream. But the sound, slight as it was, recalled the Maréchal to her senses. The explanation was given with promptitude, and received with politeness. My family, in all its branches, came into her Grace's quick recollection; and I was thus indebted to my adventure, not only for an introduction to one of the most elegant women of her time—to the goddess of fashion in her temple, the Circe of high life, at the "witching hour," but of being most "graciously" received; and even hearing a panegyric on my chivalry, from the Maréchal, smilingly echoed by lips which seemed made only for smiles.
A summons from the ball-room soon withdrew the captivating mistress of the mansion, who retired with the step and glance of the very queen of courtesy; and I was about to take my leave, when a ceremonial of still higher interest awaited me. Clotilde, feebly rising from her sofa, and sustaining herself on the neck of her kneeling mother, murmured her thanks to me "for the preservation of her dear parent." The sound of her voice, feeble as it was, fell on my ear like music. I advanced towards her. The Maréchal stood with her handkerchief to her eyes, and venting her sensibilities in sobs. The fairer object before me shed no tears, but, with her eyes half-closed, and looking the marble model of paleness and beauty, she held out her hand. She was, perhaps, unconscious of offering more than a simple testimony of her gratitude for the services which her mother had described with such needless eloquence. But in that delicious, yet unaccountable feeling—that superstition of the heart, which makes every thing eventful—even that simple pressure of her hand created a long and living future in my mind.
Yet let me do myself justice; whether wise or weak in the presence of the only being who had ever mastered my mind, I was determined not "to point a moral and adorn a tale." I had other duties and other purposes before me than to degenerate into a slave of sighs. I was to be no Romeo, bathing my soul in the luxuries of Italian palace-chambers, moonlight speeches, and the song of nightingales. I felt that I was an Englishman, and had the rugged steep of fortune to climb, and climb alone. The time, too, in which I was to begin my struggle for distinction, aroused me to shake off the spirit of dreams which threatened to steal over my nature. The spot in which I lived was the metropolis of mankind. I was in the centre of the machinery which moved the living world. The wheels of the globe were rushing, rolling, and resounding in my ears. Every interest, necessity, stimulant, and passion of mankind, came in an incessant current to London, as to the universal heart, and flowed back, refreshed and invigorated, to the extremities of civilization. I saw the hourly operations of that mighty furnace in which the fortunes of all nations were mingled, and poured forth remolded. And London itself was never more alive. Every journal which I took up was filled with the signs of this extraordinary energy; the projects and meetings, the harangues and political experiments, of bold men, some rising from the mire into notoriety, if not into fame; some plunging from the highest rank of public life into the mire, in the hope of rising, if with darkened, yet a freshened wing. The debates in parliament, never more vivid than at this crisis, with the two great parties in full force, and throwing out flashes in every movement, like the collision of two vast thunder clouds, were a perpetual summons to action in every breast which felt itself above the dust it trod. But the French journals were the true excitements to political ardour. They were more than lamps, guiding mankind along the dusky paths of public regeneration—they were torches, dazzling the multitude who attempted to profit by their light; and, while they threw a glare round the head of the march, blinding all who followed. To one born, like myself, in the most aristocratic system of society on earth, yet excluded from its advantages by the mere chance of birth, it was new, and undoubtedly not displeasing, to see the pride of nobility tamed by the new rush of talent and ambition which had started up from obscurity in France; village attorneys and physicians, clerks in offices, journalists, men from the plough and the pen, supplying the places of the noblesse of Clovis and Capet, possessing themselves of the highest power while their predecessors were flying through Europe; conducting negotiations, commanding armies, ruling assemblies, holding the helm of government in the storm which had scattered the great names of France upon the waters. I anticipated all the triumph of the "younger sons."
Even the brief interval of my Brighton visit had curiously changed the aspect of the metropolis. The emigration was in full force, and every spot was crowded with foreign visages. Sallow cheeks and starting eyes, scowling brows and fierce mustaches, were the order of the day; the monks and the military had run off together. The English language was almost overwhelmed by the perpetual jargon of all the loud-tongued provincialities of France. But the most singular portion was the ecclesiastical. The streets and parks were filled with the unlucky sheep of the Gallican church, scattered before the teeth and howl of the republican wolf; and England saw, for the first time, the secrets of the monastery poured out before the light of day. The appearance of some among this sable multitude, though venerable and dignified, could not prevent the infinite grotesque of the others from having its effect on the spectator. The monks and priesthood of France amounted to little less than a hundred and fifty thousand. All were now thrown up from the darkness of centuries before a wondering world. I had Milton's vision of Limbo before my eyes.
"Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars,
A violent cross wind from either coast
Blew them transverse. Then might ye see
Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost,
And flutter'd into rags; their reliques, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,
The sport of winds."
The mire was fully stirred up in which the hierarchy had enjoyed its sleep and sunshine for a thousand years. The weeds and worms had been fairly scraped off, which for a thousand years had grown upon the keel of the national vessel, and of which the true wonder was, that the vessel had been able to make sail with them clinging to her so long. In fact, I was thus present at one of the most remarkable phenomena of the whole Revolution. The flight of a noblesse was nothing to this change. The glittering peerage of France, created by a court, and living in perpetual connexion with the court, as naturally followed its fate as a lapdog follows the fortunes of its mistress; but here was a digging up of the moles, an extermination of the bats, a general extrusion of the subversive principle, to a race of existence which, whether above or below ground, seemed almost to form a part of the soil. Monkery was broken up, like a ship dashed against the shores of the bay of Biscay. The ship was not only wrecked, but all its fragments continued to be tossed on the ceaseless surge. The Gallican church was flung loose over Europe, at a time when all Europe itself was in commotion. I own, to the discredit of my political foresight, that I thought its forms and follies extinguished for ever. The snake was more tenacious of life than I had dreamed. But if I erred, I did not err alone.
Mordecai, whom I found immersed deeper and deeper in continental politics, and who scarcely denied his being the accredited agent of the emigrant princes, gave his opinion of this strange portion of French society with much more promptitude than he probably would of the probable fall or rise of stocks.
"Of all the gamblers at the great gambling-table of France," said he, "the clergy have played their game the worst. By leaving their defence to the throne, they have only dragged down the throne. By relying on the good sense of the National Assembly, they have left themselves without a syllable to say. Like men pleading by counsel, they have been at the mercy of their counsel, and been ruined at once by their weakness and their treachery."
On my observing to him that the church of France was necessarily feebler than either the throne or the nobles, and that, therefore, its natural course was to depend on both—
"Rely upon it," said the keen Jew "that any one great institution of the state which suffers itself, in the day of danger, to depend on any other for existence, will be ruined. When all are pressed, each will be glad to get rid of the pressure, by sacrificing the most dependent. The church should have stood on its own defence. The Gallican hierarchy was, beyond all question, the most powerful in Europe. Rome and her cardinals were tinsel and toys to the solid strength of the great provincial clergy of France. They had numbers, wealth, and station. Those things could give influence among a population of Hottentots. Let other hierarchies take example. They threw them all away, at the first move of a bloody handkerchief on the top of a Parisian pike. They had vast power with the throne; but what had once been energy they turned into encumbrance, and if the throne is pulled down, it will be by their weight. They had a third of the land in actual possession, and they allowed themselves to be stripped of it by a midnight vote of a drunken assembly. If they were caricatured in Paris, they had three-fourths of the population as fast bound to them as bigotry and their daily bread could bind. Three months ago, they might have marched to Paris with their crucifixes in front, and three millions of stout peasantry in their rear, have captured the capital, and fricaseed the foolish legislature. And now, they have archbishops learning to live on a shilling a-day."
From the Horse guards I had yet obtained nothing, but promises of "being remembered on the first vacancy;" Clotilde was still a sufferer, and my time, like that of every man without an object, began to be a deplorable encumbrance. In short, my vision of high life and its happiness was fairly vanishing hour by hour. I occasionally met Lafontaine; but, congenial as our tempers might be, our natures had all the national difference, and I sometimes envied, and as often disdained, his buoyancy. Even he, too, had his fluctuations; and a letter from Mariamne, a little more or less petulant, raised and sank him like the spirits in a thermometer.
But one day he rushed into my apartment with a look of that despair which only foreigners can assume, and which actually gave me the idea that he was about to commit suicide. Flinging himself into a chair, and plunging his hand deep into his bosom, from which I almost expected to see him draw the fatal weapon, he extracted a paper, and held it forth to me. "Read!" he exclaimed, with the most pathetic tones of Talma in tragedy—"read my ruin!" I read, and found that it was a letter from his domineering little Jewess, commanding him to throw up his commission on the spot, and especially not to go to France, on penalty of her eternal displeasure. My looks asked an explanation. "There!" cried the hero of the romance, "there!—see the caprice, the cruelty, the intolerable tyranny of that most uncertain, intractable, and imperious of all human beings!" I had neither consolation nor contradiction to offer.
He then let me into his own secret, with an occasional episode of the secrets of others—the substance of the whole being, that a counter revolution was preparing in France; that, after conducting the correspondence in London for some time, he had been ordered to carry a despatch, of the highest importance, to the secret agency in Paris; and that the question was now between love and honour—Mariamne having, by some unlucky hint dropped from her father, received intimation of the design, and putting her veto on his bearing any part in it in the most peremptory manner. What was to be done? The unfortunate youth was fairly on the horns of the dilemma, and he obviously saw no ray of extrication but the usual Parisian expedient of the pistol.
While he alternately raved and wept, the thought struck me—"Why might I not go in his place?" I was growing weary of the world, however little I knew of it. I had no Mariamne either to prohibit or to weep for me. The only being for whom I wished to live was lost to me already. I offered myself as the carrier of the despatch without delay.
I never saw ecstasy so visible in a human being; his eloquence exhausted the whole vocabulary of national rapture. "I was his friend, his brother, his preserver. I was the best, the ablest, the noblest of men." But when I attempted to escape from this overflow of gratitude, by observing on the very simple nature of the service, his recollection returned, and he generously endeavoured, with equal zeal, to dissuade me from an enterprise of which the perils were certainly neither few nor trifling. He was now in despair at my obstinacy. The emigration of the French princes had not merely weakened their cause in France, but had sharpened the malice of their enemies. Their agents had been arrested in all quarters, and any man who ventured to carry on a correspondence with them, was now alike in danger of assassination and of the law. After debating the matter long, without producing conviction on either side, it was at length agreed to refer the question to Mordecai, whom Lafontaine now formally acknowledged to be master of the secret on both sides of the Channel.
* * * * *
A VISION OF THE WORLD
BY DELTA
A blossom on a laurel tree—a cloudlet on the sky
Borne by the breeze—a panorama shifting on the eye;
A zig-zag lightning-flash amid the elemental strife—
Yea! each and all are emblems of man's transitory life!
Brightness dawns on us at our birth—the dear small world of home,
A tiny paradise from which our wishes never roam,
Till boyhood's widening circle brings its myriad hopes and fears,
The guileless faith that never doubts—the friendship that endears.
Each house and tree—each form and face, upon the ready mind
Their impress leave; and, in old age, that impress fresh we find,
Even though long intermediate years, by joy and sorrow sway'd,
Should there no mirror find, and in oblivion have decay'd.
How fearful first the shock of death! to think that even one
Whose step we knew, whose voice we heard, should see no more the sun;
That though a thousand years were ours, that form should never more
Revisit, with its welcome smiles, earth's once-deserted shore!
Look round the dwellings of the street—and tell, where now are they
Whose tongues made glad each separate hearth, in childhood's early day;
Now strangers, or another generation, there abide,
And the churchyard owns their lowly graves, green-mouldering side by side!
Spring! Summer! Autumn! Winter! then how vividly each came!
The moonlight pure, the starlight soft, and the noontide sheath'd in flame;
The dewy morning with her birds, and evening's gorgeous dyes,
As if the mantles of the blest were floating through the skies.
I laid me down, but not in sleep—and Memory flew away
To mingle with the sounds and scenes the world had shown by day;
Now listening to the lark, she stray'd across the flowery hill,
Where trickles down from bowering groves the brook that turns the mill;
And now she roam'd the city lanes, where human tongues are loud,
And mix the lofty and the low amid the motley crowd,
Where subtle-eyed philosophy oft heaves a sigh, to scan
The aspiring grasp, and paltry insignificance of man!
'Mid floods of light in festal halls, with jewels rare bedight,
To music's soft and syren sounds, paced damosel with knight;
It seem'd as if the fiend of grief from earthly bounds was driven,
For there were smiles on every cheek that spake of nought but heaven;
But, from that gilded scene, I traced the revellers one by one,
With sad and sunken features each, unto their chambers lone;
And of that gay and smiling crowd whose bosoms leapt to joy,
How many might there be, I ween'd, whom care did not annoy?
Some folded up their wearied eyes to dark unhallow'd dreams—
The soldier to his scenes of blood, the merchant to his schemes:
Pride, jealousy, and slighted love, robb'd woman of her rest;
Revenge, deceit, and selfishness, sway'd man's unquiet breast.
Some, turning to the days of youth, sigh'd o'er the sinless time
Ere passion led the heart astray to folly, care, and crime;
And of that dizzy multitude, from found or fancied woes,
Was scarcely one whose slumbers fell like dew upon the rose!
Then turn'd I to the lowly hearth, where scarcely labour brought
The simplest and the coarsest meal that craving nature sought;
Above, outspread a slender roof, to shield them from the rain,
And their carpet was the verdure with which nature clothes the plain;
Yet there the grateful housewife sat, her infant on her knee,
Its small palms clasp'd within her own, as if likewise pray'd he;
For ere their fingers brake the bread, from toil incessant riven,
Son, sire, and matron bow'd their heads, and pour'd their thanks to Heaven.
What, then, I thought, is human life, if all that thus we see
Of pageantry and of parade devoid of pleasure be!
If only in the conscious heart true happiness abide,
How oft, alas! has wretchedness but grandeur's cloak to hide?
And when upon the outward cheek a transient smile appears,
We little reck how lately hath its bloom been damp'd by tears,
And how the voice, whose thrillings from a light heart seem'd to rise,
Throughout each sleepless watch of night gave utterance but to sighs.
This was the moral, calm and deep, which to my musing thought,
From all the varying views of man and life, reflection brought—
That most things are not what they seem, and that the outward shows
Of grade and rank are only masks that hide our joys and woes;
That with the soul, the soul alone, resides the awful power,
To light with sunshine or o'ergloom the solitary hour;
And that the human heart is but a riddle to be read,
When all the darkness round it now in other worlds hath fled.
Why, then, should sorrow cloud the brow, should misery crush the heart,
Since all life's varied changes "come like shadows, so depart?"
There is one sun, there is one shower, to evil and to just,
And health, and strength, and length of days, and to all the common dust:
But as the snake throws off its skin, the soul throws off its clay,
And soars, till purpled are its wings with everlasting day;
God, having winnow'd with his flail the chaff from out the wheat,
When those, who seem'd alike when here, approach'd his judgment-seat.
