Quis sapiens bono Confidat fragili.—Seneca.
Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est.—Horace.
When I first went to Paris, I took a French master, to perfect me in the Parisian pronunciation. This “Haberdasher of Pronouns” was a person of the name of Margot. He was a tall, solemn man, with a face of the most imperturbable gravity. He would have been inestimable as an undertaker. His hair was of a pale yellow; you would have thought it had caught a bilious complaint from his complexion; the latter was, indeed, of so sombre a saffron, that it looked as if ten livers had been forced into a jaundice, in order to supply its colour. His forehead was high, bald, and very narrow. His cheekbones were extremely prominent, and his cheeks so thin, that they seemed happier than Pyramus and Thisbe, and kissed each other inside without any separation or division. His face was as sharp and almost as long as an inverted pyramid, and was garnished on either side by a miserable half starved whisker, which seemed scarcely able to maintain itself, amid the general symptoms of atrophy and decay. This charming countenance was supported by a figure so long, so straight, so shadowy, that you might have taken it for the monument in a consumption.
But the chief characteristic of the man was the utter and wonderful gravity I have before spoken of. You could no more have coaxed a smile out of his countenance, than you could out of the poker, and yet Monsieur Margot was by no means a melancholy man. He loved his joke, and his wine, and his dinner, just as much as if he had been of a fatter frame; and it was a fine specimen of the practical antithesis, to hear a good story, or a jovial expression, leap friskily out of that long, curved mouth; it was at once a paradox and a bathos—it was the mouse coming out of its hole in Ely Cathedral.
I said that this gravity was M. Margot’s most especial characteristic. I forgot:—he had two others equally remarkable; the one was an ardent admiration for the chivalrous, the other an ardent admiration for himself. Both of these are traits common enough in a Frenchman, but in Mons. Margot their excesses rendered them uncommon. He was a most ultra specimen of le chevalier amoureux—a mixture of Don Quixote and the Duc de Lauzun. Whenever he spoke of the present tense, even en professeur, he always gave a sigh to the preterite, and an anecdote of Bayard; whenever he conjugated a verb, he paused to tell me that the favourite one of his female pupils was je t’aime.
In short, he had tales of his own good fortune, and of other people’s brave exploits, which, without much exaggeration, were almost as long, and had perhaps as little substance as himself; but the former was his favourite topic: to hear him, one would have imagined that his face, in borrowing the sharpness of the needle, had borrowed also its attraction;—and then the prettiness of Mons. Margot’s modesty!
“It is very extraordinary,” said he, “very extraordinary, for I have no time to give myself up to those affairs; it is not, Monsieur, as if I had your leisure to employ all the little preliminary arts of creating la belle passion. Non, Monsieur, I go to church, to the play, to the Tuilleries, for a brief relaxation—and me voila partout accable with my good fortune. I am not handsome, Monsieur, at least, not very; it is true, that I have expression, a certain air noble, (my first cousin, Monsieur, is the Chevalier de Margot) and above all, de l’a me in my physiognomy; the women love soul, Monsieur—something intellectual and spiritual always attracts them; yet my success certainly is singular.”
“Bah! Monsieur,” replied I: “with dignity, expression, and soul! how could the heart of any French woman resist you? No, you do yourself injustice. It was said of Caesar, that he was great without an effort; much more, then, may Monsieur Margot be happy without an exertion.”
“Ah, Monsieur!” rejoined the Frenchman, still looking
“As weak, as earnest, and as gravely out As sober Lanesbro’ dancing with the gout.”
“Ah, Monsieur, there is a depth and truth in your remarks, worthy of Montaigne. As it is impossible to account for the caprices of women, so it is impossible for ourselves to analyze the merit they discover in us; but, Monsieur, hear me—at the house where I lodge, there is an English lady en pension. Eh bien, Monsieur, you guess the rest: she has taken a caprice for me, and this very night she will admit me to her apartment. She is very handsome,—Ah qu’elle est belle, une jolie petite bouche, une denture eblouissante, un nez tout afait grec, in fine, quite a bouton de rose.”
I expressed my envy at Monsieur Margot’s good fortune, and when he had sufficiently dilated upon it, he withdrew. Shortly afterwards Vincent entered—“I have a dinner invitation for both of us to-day,” said he; “you will come?”
“Most certainly,” replied I; “but who is the person we are to honour?”
“A Madame Laurent,” replied Vincent; “one of those ladies only found at Paris, who live upon anything rather than their income. She keeps a tolerable table, haunted with Poles, Russians, Austrians, and idle Frenchmen, peregrinae gentis amaenum hospitium. As yet, she has not the happiness to be acquainted with any Englishmen, (though she boards one of our countrywomen) and (as she is desirous of making her fortune as soon as possible) she is very anxious of having that honour. She has heard vast reports of our wealth and wisdom, and flatters herself that we are so many ambulatory Indies: in good truth, a Frenchwoman thinks she is never in want of a fortune as long as there is a rich fool in the world.
“‘Stultitiam patiuntur, opes,’
is her hope; and
“‘Ut tu fortunam, sic nos te, Celse, feremus,’
is her motto.”
“Madame Laurent!” repeated I, “why, surely that is the name of Mons. Margot’s landlady.”
“I hope not,” cried Vincent, “for the sake of our dinner; he reflects no credit on her good cheer—
“‘Who eats fat dinners, should himself be fat.’”
“At all events,” said I, “we can try the good lady for once. I am very anxious to see a countrywoman of ours, probably the very one you speak of, whom Mons. Margot eulogizes in glowing colours, and who has, moreover, taken a violent fancy for my solemn preceptor. What think you of that, Vincent?”
“Nothing extraordinary,” replied Vincent; “the lady only exclaims with the moralist—
“‘Love, virtue, valour, yea, all human charms, Are shrunk and centred in that heap of bones. Oh! there are wondrous beauties in the grave!’”
I made some punning rejoinder, and we sallied out to earn an appetite in the Tuilleries for Madame Laurent’s dinner.
At the hour of half-past five we repaired to our engagement. Madame Laurent received us with the most evident satisfaction, and introduced us forthwith to our countrywoman. She was a pretty, fair, shrewd looking person, with an eye and lip which, unless it greatly belied her, showed her much more inclined, as an amante, to be merry and wise, than honest and true.
Presently Monsieur Margot made his appearance. Though very much surprised at seeing me, he did not appear the least jealous of my attentions to his inamorata. Indeed, the good gentleman was far too much pleased with himself to be susceptible of the suspicions common to less fortunate lovers. At dinner I sat next to the pretty Englishwoman, whose name was Green.
“Monsieur Margot,” said I, “has often spoken to me of you before I had the happiness of being personally convinced how true and unexaggerated were his sentiments.”
“Oh!” cried Mrs. Green, with an arch laugh, “you are acquainted with Monsieur Margot, then?”
“I have that honour,” said I. “I receive from him every morning lessons both in love and languages. He is perfect master of both.”
Mrs. Green burst out into one of those peals so peculiarly British.
“Ah, le pauvre Professeur!” cried she. “He is too absurd!”
“He tells me,” said I, gravely, “that he is quite accable with his bonnes fortunes—possibly he flatters himself that even you are not perfectly inaccessible to his addresses.”
“Tell me, Mr. Pelham,” said the fair Mrs. Green, “can you pass by this street about half past twelve to-night?”
“I will make a point of doing so,” replied I, not a little surprised by the remark.
“Do,” said she, “and now let us talk of old England.”
When we went away I told Vincent of my appointment. “What!” said he, “eclipse Monsieur Margot! Impossible!”
“You are right,” replied I, “nor is it my hope; there is some trick afloat of which we may as well be spectators.”
“De tout mon coeur!” answered Vincent; “let us go till then to the Duchesse de G——.”
I assented, and we drove to the Rue de—.
The Duchesse de G—was a fine relict of the ancien regime—tall and stately, with her own grey hair crepe, and surmounted by a high cap of the most dazzling blonde. She had been one of the earliest emigrants, and had stayed for many months with my mother, whom she professed to rank amongst her dearest friends. The duchesse possessed to perfection that singular melange of ostentation and ignorance which was so peculiar to the ante-revolutionists. She would talk of the last tragedy with the emphatic tone of a connoisseur, in the same breath that she would ask, with Marie Antoinette, why the poor people were so clamorous for bread when they might buy such nice cakes for two-pence a-piece? “To give you an idea of the Irish,” said she one day to an inquisitive marquess, “know that they prefer potatoes to mutton!”
Her soirees were among the most agreeable at Paris—she united all the rank and talent to be found in the ultra party, for she professed to be quite a female Maecenas; and whether it was a mathematician or a romance-writer, a naturalist or a poet, she held open house for all, and conversed with each with equal fluency and self-satisfaction.
A new play had just been acted, and the conversation, after a few preliminary hoverings, settled upon it.
“You see,” said the duchesse, “that we have actors, you authors; of what avail is it that you boast of a Shakspeare, since your Liseton, great as he is, cannot be compared with our Talma?”
“And yet,” said I, preserving my gravity with a pertinacity, which nearly made Vincent and the rest of our compatriots assembled lose their’s “Madame must allow, that there is a striking resemblance in their persons, and the sublimity of their acting?”
“Pour ca, j’en conviens,” replied this ‘critique de l’Ecole des Femmes.’ “Mais cependant Liseton n’a pas la Nature! l’ame! la grandeur de Talma!”
“And will you then allow us no actors of merit?” asked Vincent.
“Mais oui!—dans le genre comique, par exemple, votre buffo Kean met dix fois plus d’esprit et de drollerie dans ses roles que La Porte.”
“The impartial and profound judgment of Madame admits of no further discussion on this point,” said I. “What does she think of the present state of our dramatic literature?”
“Why,” replied Madame, “you have many great poets, but when they write for the stage they lose themselves entirely; your Valter Scote’s play of Robe Roi is very inferior to his novel of the same name.”
“It is a great pity,” said I, “that Byron did not turn his Childe Harold into a tragedy—it has so much energy—action—variety!”
“Very true,” said Madame, with a sigh; “but the tragedy is, after all, only suited to our nation—we alone carry it to perfection.”
“Yet,” said I, “Goldoni wrote a few fine tragedies.”
“Eh bien!” said Madame, “one rose does not constitute a garden!”
And satisfied with this remark, la femme savante turned to a celebrated traveller to discuss with him the chance of discovering the North Pole.
There were one or two clever Englishmen present; Vincent and I joined them.
“Have you met the Persian prince yet?” said Sir George Lynton to me; “he is a man of much talent, and great desire of knowledge. He intends to publish his observations on Paris, and I suppose we shall have an admirable supplement to Montesquieu’s Lettres Persannes!”
“I wish we had,” said Vincent: “there are few better satires on a civilized country than the observations of visitors less polished; while on the contrary the civilized traveller, in describing the manners of the American barbarian, instead of conveying ridicule upon the visited, points the sarcasm on the visitor; and Tacitus could not have thought of a finer or nobler satire on the Roman luxuries than that insinuated by his treatise on the German simplicity.”
“What,” said Monsieur D’E—(an intelligent ci-devant emigre), “what political writer is generally esteemed as your best?”
“It is difficult to say,” replied Vincent, “since with so many parties we have many idols; but I think I might venture to name Bolingbroke as among the most popular. Perhaps, indeed, it would be difficult to select a name more frequently quoted and discussed than his; and yet his political works are the least valuable part of his remains; and though they contain many lofty sentiments, and many beautiful yet scattered truths, they were written when legislation, most debated, was least understood, and ought to be admired rather as excellent for the day than estimable in themselves. The life of Bolingbroke would convey a juster moral than all his writings: and the author who gives us a full and impartial memoir of that extraordinary man, will have afforded both to the philosophical and political literature of England one of its greatest desideratums.”
“It seems to me,” said Monsieur D’E—, “that your national literature is peculiarly deficient in biography—am I right in my opinion?”
“Indubitably!” said Vincent; “we have not a single work that can be considered a model in biography, (excepting, perhaps, Middleton’s Life of Cicero.) This brings on a remark I have often made in distinguishing your philosophy from ours. It seems to me that you who excel so admirably in biography, memoirs, comedy, satirical observation on peculiar classes, and pointed aphorisms, are fonder of considering man in his relation to society and the active commerce of the world, than in the more abstracted and metaphysical operations of the mind. Our writers, on the contrary, love to indulge rather in abstruse speculations on their species—to regard man in an abstract and isolated point of view, and to see him think alone in his chamber, while you prefer beholding him act with the multitude in the world.”
“It must be allowed,” said Monsieur D’E——t, “that if this be true, our philosophy is the most useful, though yours may be the most profound.”
Vincent did not reply.
“Yet,” said Sir George Lynton, “there will be a disadvantage attending your writings of this description, which, by diminishing their general applicability, diminish their general utility. Works which treat upon man in his relation to society, can only be strictly applicable so long as that relation to society treated upon continues. For instance, the play which satirizes a particular class, however deep its reflections and accurate its knowledge upon the subject satirized, must necessarily be obsolete when the class itself has become so. The political pamphlet, admirable for one state, may be absurd in another; the novel which exactly delineates the present age may seem strange and unfamiliar to the next; and thus works which treat of men relatively, and not man in se, must often confine their popularity to the age and even the country in which they were written. While on the other hand, the work which treats of man himself, which seizes, discovers, analyzes the human mind, as it is, whether in the ancient or the modern, the savage or the European, must evidently be applicable, and consequently useful, to all times and all nations. He who discovers the circulation of the blood, or the origin of ideas, must be a philosopher to every people who have veins or ideas; but he who even most successfully delineates the manners of one country, or the actions of one individual, is only the philosopher of a single country, or a single age. If, Monsieur D’E—t, you will condescend to consider this, you will see perhaps that the philosophy which treats of man in his relations is not so useful, because neither so permanent nor so invariable, as that which treats of man in himself.” [Note: Yet Hume holds the contrary opinion to this, and considers a good comedy more durable than a system of philosophy. Hume is right, if by a system of philosophy is understood—a pile of guesses, false but plausible, set up by one age to be destroyed by the next. Ingenuity cannot rescue error from oblivion; but the moment Wisdom has discovered Truth, she has obtained immortality.]
I was now somewhat weary of this conversation, and though it was not yet twelve, I seized upon my appointment as an excuse to depart—accordingly I rose for that purpose. “I suppose,” said I to Vincent, “that you will not leave your discussion.”
“Pardon me,” said he, “amusement is quite as profitable to a man of sense as metaphysics. Allons.”
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg