Читать книгу: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 339, January, 1844», страница 14
The note at once threw every thing else into the background. What were invasions and armies—what were kings and kingdoms—to the slightest wish of the being who had written this billet? All this I admit to be the fever of the mind—a waking dream—an illusion to which mesmerism or magic is but a frivolity. Like all fevers, it is destined to pass away, or to kill the patient; yet for the time, what on earth is so strange, or so powerful—so dangerous to the reason—so delicious to the soul!
But, after the long reverie into which I sank, with the writing of Clotilde in my hand, I recollected that fortune had for once given me the power of meeting the wishes of this noble and beautiful creature. The resemblance of the picture that had so much perplexed and attracted me, was now explained. I was in the Chateau de Montauban, and I now blessed the chance which had sent me to its honoured walls.
To hasten to the chamber where I was again to look upon the exquisite resemblance of features which, till then, I had thought without a similar in the world, was a matter of instinct; and, winding my way through the intricacies of galleries and corridors, loaded with the baggage of the emigrant army, and strewed with many a gallant noble who had exchanged the down bed of his ancestral mansion for the bare floor, or the open bivouac, I at length reached the apartment to which the captive general had been consigned. To my utter astonishment, instead of the silence which I expected under the circumstances, I heard the jingling of glasses and roars of laughter. Was this the abode of solitude and misfortune? I entered, and found M. Lafayette, indeed, conducting himself with the composure of a personage of his rank; but the other performers exhibiting a totally different temperament. A group of Polish officers, who had formerly borne commissions in the royal service, and now followed the Emigrant troops, had recognized Lafayette, and insisted on paying due honours to the "noble comrade" with whom they had served beyond the Atlantic. Hamlet's menace to his friend, that he would "teach him to drink deep ere he depart," had been adopted in the amplest sense by those jovial sons of the north, and "healths bottle-deep" were sent round the board with rapid circulation.
My entrance but slightly deranged the symposium, and I was soon furnished with all the freemasonry of the feast, by being called on to do honour to the toast of "His Majesty the King of Great Britain." My duty was now done, my initiation was complete, and while my eyes were fixed on the portrait which, still in its unharmed beauty, looked beaming on the wild revel below, I heard, in the broken queries, and interjectional panegyrics of these hyperborean heroes, more of the history of Lafayette than I had ever expected to reach my ears.
His life had been the strangest contrast to the calm countenance which I saw so tranquilly listen to its own tale. It was Quixotic, and two hundred years ago could scarcely have escaped the pen of some French Cervantes. He had begun life as an officer in the French household troops in absolute boyhood. At sixteen he had married! at eighteen he had formed his political principles, and begun his military career by crossing the Atlantic, and offering his sword to the Republic. To meet the thousand wonderings at his conduct, he exchanged the ancient motto of the Lafayettes for a new one of his own. The words, "Why not?" were his answer to all, and they were sufficient. On reaching America, he asked but two favours, to be suffered to serve, and to serve without pay.
In America he was more republican than the Republicans. He toiled, traveled, and bled, with an indefatigable zeal for the independence of the colonists; his zeal was a passion, his love of liberty a romance, his hostility to the dominion of England an universal scorn of established power. But if fantastic, he was bold; and if too hot for the frigidity of America, he was but preparing to touch France with kindred fire. He refused rank in the French army coupled with the condition of leaving the service of the Republic; and it was only on the French alliance in 1788 that he returned to Paris, to be received with feigned displeasure by the King, and even put under arrest by the minister, but to be welcomed by the praises of the true sovereign, the Queen, feted by the court, the sovereign of that sovereign, and huzzaed by the mob of Paris, already the sovereign of them all; from his military prison he emerged, colonel of the King's regiment of dragoons.
While this narrative was going on, mingled with bumpers, and bursts of Slavonic good-fellowship, I could not help asking myself whether Lavater was not quack and physiognomy a folly? Could this be the dashing Revolutionist? No plodder over the desk ever wore a more broadcloth countenance; an occasional smile was the only indication of his interest in what was passing around him. He evidently avoided taking a share in the discussion of his Transatlantic career, probably from delicacy to his English auditor. But when the conversation turned upon France, the man came forth, and he vindicated his conduct with a spirit and fulness that told me what he might have been when the blood of youth was added to the glow of the imagination. He was now evidently exhausted by toil, and dispirited by disappointment. No man could be more thoroughly ruined; baffled in theory, undone in practice—an exile from his country, a fugitive from his troops—overwhelmed by the hopelessness of giving a constitution to France, and with nothing but the dungeon before him, and the crash of the guillotine behind.
"What was to be done?" said Lafayette. "France was bankrupt—the treasury was empty—the profligate reign of Louis XV. had at once wasted the wealth, dried up the revenues, and corrupted the energies of France. Ministers wrung their hands, the king sent for his confessor, the queen wept—but the nation groaned. There was but one expedient, to call on the people. In 1787 the Assembly of the Notables was summoned. It was the first time since the reign of Henry IV. France had been a direct and formal despotism for almost two hundred years. She had seen England spread from an island into an empire; she had seen America spread from a colony into an empire. What had been the worker of the miracle?—Liberty. While all the despotisms remained within the boundaries fixed centuries ago, like vast dungeons, never extending, and never opening to the light and air, except through the dilapidations of time, I saw England and America expanding like fertile fields, open to every breath of heaven and every beam of day, expanding from year to year by the cheerful labour of man, and every year covered with new productiveness for the use of universal mankind. I own that there may have been rashness in urging the great experiment—there may have been a dangerous disregard of the actual circumstances of the people, the time, and the world—the daring hand of the philosopher may have drawn down the lightning too suddenly to be safe; the patriot may have flashed the blaze of his torch too strongly on eyes so long trained to the twilight of the dungeon. The leader of this enterprise himself, like the first discoverer of fire, may have brought wrath upon his own head, and be condemned to have his vitals gnawed in loneliness and chains; but nothing shall convince Lafayette that a great work has not been begun for the living race, for all nations, and for all posterity."
I could not suppress the question—"But when will the experiment be complete? When will the tree, planted thus in storms, take hold of the soil? When will the tremendous tillage which begins by clearing with the conflagration, and ploughing with the earthquake, bring forth the harvest of peace to the people?"
"These must be the legacy to our children," was the reply, in a grave and almost contrite tone. "The works of man are rapid only when they are meant for decay. The American savage builds his wigwam in a week, to last for a year. The Parthenon took half an age and the treasures of a people, to last for ever."
We parted for the night—and for thirty years. My impression of this remarkable man was, that he had more heart than head; that a single idea had engrossed his faculties, to the exclusion of all others; that he was following a phantom, with the belief that it was a substantial form, and that, like the idolaters of old, who offered their children to their frowning deity, he imagined that the costlier the sacrifice, the surer it was of propitiation. Few men have been more misunderstood in his own day or in ours. Lifted to the skies for an hour by popular adulation, he has been sunk into obscurity ever since by historic contempt. Both were mistaken. He was the man made for the time—precisely the middle term between the reign of the nobility and the reign of the populace. Certainly not the man to "ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm;" but as certainly altogether superior to the indolent luxury of the class among whom he was born. Glory and liberty, the two highest impulses of our common nature, sent him at two and twenty from the most splendid court of Europe, to the swamps and snows, the desperate service and dubious battles of America. Eight years of voyages, negotiations, travels, and exposure to the chances of the field, proved his energy, and at the age of thirty he had drawn upon himself the eyes of the world. Here he ought to have rested, or have died. But the Revolution swept him off his feet. It was an untried region—a conflict of elements unknown to the calculation of man; he was whirled along by a force which whirled the monarchy, the church, and the nation with him, and sank only when France plunged after him.
I have no honour for a similar career, and no homage for a similar memory; but it is from those mingled characters that history derives her deepest lesson, her warnings for the weak, her cautions for the ambitious, and her wisdom for the wise.
On the retiring of the party for the night, my first act was to summon the old Swiss and his wife who had been left in charge of the mansion, and collect from them all their feeble memories could tell Clotilde. But Madame la Maréchale was a much more important personage in their old eyes, than the "charmante enfant" whom they had dandled on their knees, and who was likely to remain a "charmante enfant" to them during their lives. The chateau had been the retreat of the Maréchale after the death of her husband; and it was in its stately solitudes, and in the woods and wilds which surrounded it for many a league, that Clotilde had acquired those accomplished tastes, and that characteristic dignity and force of mind, which distinguished her from the frivolity of her country-women, however elegant and attractive, who had been trained in the salons of the court. The green glades and fresh air of the forest had given beauty to her cheek and grace to her form; and scarcely conceiving how the rouged and jewelled Maréchale could have endured such an absence from the circles of the young queen, and the "beaux restes" of the wits and beauties of the court of Louis the 15th, I thanked in soul the fortunate necessity which had driven her from the atmosphere of the Du Barris to the shades thus sacred to innocence and knowledge.
But the grand business of the thing was still to be done. The picture was taken down at last, to the great sorrow of the old servants, who seemed to regard it as a patron saint, and who declared that its presence, and its presence alone, could have saved the mansion, in the first instance, from being burned by the "patriots," who generally began their reforms of the nobility by laying their chateaux in ashes, and in the next, from being plundered by the multitudes of whiskered savages speaking unknown tongues, and came to leave France without "ni pain ni vin" for her legitimate sons. But the will of Madame la Maréchale was to them as the laws of the Medes and Persians, irresistible and unchangeable; and with heavy hearts they dismounted the portrait, and assisted in enfolding and encasing it, with much the same feeling that might have been shown in paying the last honours to a rightful branch of the beloved line.
But, in the wall which the picture had covered, I found a small recess, closed by an iron door, and evidently unknown to the Swiss and his old wife. I might have hesitated about extending my enquiry further, but Time, the great discoverer of all things, saved my conscience: with a slight pressure against the lock it gave way; the door flew open, and dropped off the hinges, a mass of rust and decay. Within was a casket of a larger size than that generally used for jewels; but my curiosity durst not go beyond the superscription, which was a consignment of the casket, in the name of the Maréchale, to her banker in London. Whatever might be the contents, it was clear that, like the picture, it had been left behind in the hurry of flight, and that to transmit it to England was fairly within my commission. Before our busy work was done, day was glancing in through the coloured panes of the fine old chamber. I hurried off the Swiss, with my precious possessions, to the next town, in one of the baggage carts, with a trooper in front to prevent his search by hands still more hazardous than those of a custom-house officer; and then, mounting my horse, and bidding a brief farewell to the brave and noble fellows who were already mustering for the march, and envying me with all their souls, I set off at full speed to rejoin the army.
With all my speed, the action had begun for some hours before I came in sight of the field. With what pangs of heart I heard the roar of the cannon, for league on league, while I was threading my bewildered way, and spurring my tired horse through the miry paths of a country alternately marsh and forest; with what pantings I looked from every successive height, to see even to what quarter the smoke of the firing might direct me; with what eager vexation I questioned every hurrying peasant, who either shook his moody head and refused to answer, or who answered with the fright of one who expected to have his head swept off his shoulders by some of my fierce-looking troop, I shall not now venture to tell; but it was as genuine a torture as could be felt by man. At length, exhausted by mortal fatigue, and ready to lie down and die, I made a last effort, would listen no more to the remonstrances of the troop, whose horses were sinking under them. I ordered them to halt where they were, pushed on alone, and, winding my way through a forest covering the side of a low but abrupt hill, or rather succession of hills, I suddenly burst out into the light, and saw the whole battle beneath, around, and before me. It was magnificent.
LETTER FROM LEMUEL GULLIVER.
TO THE EDITOR
Sir—At the request of my four-footed friends, I forward to you a free translation of the proceedings of a meeting of Houynhyms, recently held for the protection of their interests in corn. As the language appears more temperate, and the propositions quite as rational, as those which are ordinarily brought forward in the other Corn-law meetings which still continue to agitate the county, I have no difficulty in complying with their wishes; and if you can afford space for the insertion of the report in your valuable Magazine, you will greatly oblige the Houynhym race, and confer a favour upon, sir, your obedient servant,
LEMUEL GULLIVER.Stable-Yard, Nov. 10th, 1843.
ADVERTISEMENT
A meeting of delegates from the different classes of consumers of oats was held on Friday last, at the Nag's Head in the Borough, pursuant to public advertisement in the Hors-Lham Gazette. The object of the meeting was to take into consideration the present consumption of the article, and to devise means for its increase. The celebrated horse Comrade, of Drury-Lane Theatre, presided on the occasion.
The business of the meeting was opened by a young Racer of great promise, who said it was his anxious desire to protect the interests of the horse community, and to promote any measure which might contribute to the increase of the consumption of oats, and improve the condition of his fellow-quadrupeds. He was not versed in political economy, nor, indeed, economy of any kind. He had heard much of demand and supply, and the difficulty of regulating them properly; but, for his own part, he found the latter always equalled the former, though he understood such was not the case with his less fortunate brethren. He warmly advocated the practice of sowing wild oats, and considered that much of the decrease of consumption complained of arose from the undue encouragement given to the growth of other grain; and that the horse interest would be best promoted by imposing a maximum as to the growth of wheat and barley, according to the acreage of each particular farm.
A HACKNEY-COACH HORSE declared himself in favour of the sliding-scale, which he understood from Sir Peter Lawrie to mean the wooden pavement. He admitted it was not well adapted for rainy seasons, but it was impossible to doubt that things went much more smoothly wherever it was established; and that he, and the working classes whom he represented, found in it a considerable relief from the heavy duties daily imposed upon them. He wished that some measure could be devised for superseding the use of nosebags, which he designated as an intolerable nuisance, especially during the summer months; but he principally relied for an improvement in condition on the prohibition of the mixture of chaff with oats; which latter article, he contended, was unfit for the use of able-bodied horses, who earned their daily food, and ought to be limited to those cattle who spent an idle existence in straw-yards.
A BRIGHT CHESTNUT HORSE, of great power, and well-known in the parks, warmly replied to the last neigher. He denounced the sliding-scale as a slippery measure, unworthy of a horse of spirit, and adding greatly to the burdens with which horses like himself were saddled. He daily saw steeds of the noblest blood and most undaunted action humbled to the dust by its operation; and if Sir Peter Lawrie was to be believed, it was more dreaded by the household troops than Napoleon's army on the field of Waterloo. He yielded to no horse in an anxious desire to promote the true interests of the horse community; but he could not give his support to measures so unsafe, merely because they enabled a small and inferior section of their community to move more smoothly. He reprobated, in strong terms, the unfeeling allusion of the last neigher to the unfortunate inmates of union straw-yards, whom, for his own part, he looked upon as nowise inferior to the hackney-coach horse himself, of whose right to be present at a meeting of consumers of oats he entertained serious doubts. (Loud neighs of "Order! Order!")
A SCOTCH HORSE feared that, strictly speaking, he was included in the same category with the hackney-coach horse, and had no right to be heard, having no personal interest in the question; but he trusted he might be permitted to speak as the delegate of the horses of Scotland, who were ignorant of the Houynhym language, and not entitled to attend. Permission being granted, to the surprise of the assembly he descanted with much asperity upon the gross oppression to which horses in Scotland were subject, as their rough coats and ragged appearance plainly manifested; and stated, in conclusion, that no hope or expectation of bettering the condition of the Scotch horse could be entertained until their lawful food was restored to them, and Scotchmen were compelled, by act of Parliament, to abstain from the use of oatmeal, and live like the rest of the civilized world.
Several worn-out horses belonging to members of the Whig administration then endeavoured to address the meeting, with an evident intention of converting the proceedings into a party question; but they were informed by the president, in the midst of loud snorting and neighing, that they had not the slightest right to be present, as they were all undoubtedly turned out for life. This decision appeared to give universal satisfaction.
AN IRISH HORSE was of opinion that the great cause of the present difficulties arose from deficiency in the quality and not the quantity of the article, and strongly recommended the growth of Irish oats in England. To the surprise of the English delegates, he warmly eulogized the superiority of the Irish oat; but it afterwards appeared, upon the production of a sample, that he had mistaken the potatoe oat for the Irish oat.
AN OLD ENGLISH HUNTER next addressed the meeting, and was listened to with deep attention. He impressed upon the young delegates the good old adage of "Look before you leap," and cautioned them against the delusive hope that their condition would be improved by change of measures. In the course of his long life he had experienced measures of every description, and had invariably found that his supplies depended, not on the measure itself; but on the hand that filled it. He had ever given his willing support to his employers, and served them faithfully; and if they were as well acquainted as quadrupeds with the secrets of the stable, they would learn the fallacy of their favourite maxim of "Measures, not men," and trust the administration of their affairs to upright and steady grooms, rather than those fanciful half-educated gentlemen who were perpetually changing the rules of the stables, and altering the form of the measures, whereby they embarrassed the regular feeding and training of the inmates, without producing any practical good.
A STAGE-COACH HORSE imputed their want of condition to the misconduct of their leaders, who, he said, could never be kept in the right path, or made to do one-half of the work which properly belonged to them. By a strange fatality, they were generally purblind, and always shyed most fearfully when an Opposition coach approached them. Indeed, it was well known that the horses selected for these duties were, generally speaking, vicious and unsound, and not taken from the most able and powerful, but from the most showy classes. He then proceeded to descant upon the general wrongs of horses. He congratulated the community upon the abolition of bearing reins, those grievous burdens upon the necks of all free-going horses; and he trusted the time would soon arrive when the blinkers would also be taken off, every corn-binn thrown open, and every horse his own leader.
Several other delegates addressed the meeting, and various plans were discussed; but it invariably turned out, upon investigation, that the change would only benefit the class of animals by whom it was proposed. A post-horse was of opinion, that the true remedy lay in decreasing the amount of speed, and shortening the spaces between milestones. A Welsh pony was for the abolition of tolls, which, he said, exhausted the money intended for repairs; whilst some plough-horses from Lincolnshire proposed the encouragement of pasture land, the abolition of tillage, and the disuse of oats altogether. The harmony of the meeting was, at one period, interrupted, by the unfortunate use of the word "blackguard" by a delegate from the collieries, which caused a magnificent charger from the Royal Horse Guards, Blue, to rear up, and, with great indignation, demand if the allusion was personal; but who was satisfied with the explanation of the president, that it was applicable only in a warlike sense. A long, lean, bay horse, with a sour head, demanded a similar explanation of the word "job," and was told it was used in a working sense. Several resolutions, drawn by two dray-horses, embodying the supposed grievances of the community, were finally agreed upon, and a petition, under the hoof of the president, founded upon them, having been prepared, and ordered to be presented to the House of Commons by the members for Horsham, the meeting separated, and the delegates returned to their respective stables.
