Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2299 page)

One or two English travelling by Lausanne had meanwhile greeted him as they were passing home, and a few days given him by Elliotson had been an enjoyment without a drawback. It was now the later autumn, very high winds were coursing through the valley, and his last letter but one described the change which these approaches of winter were making in the scene. “We have had some tremendous hurricanes at Lausanne. It is an extraordinary place now for wind, being peculiarly situated among mountains — between the Jura, and the Simplon, St. Gothard, St. Bernard, and Mont Blanc ranges; and at night you would swear (lying in bed) you were at sea. You cannot imagine wind blowing so, over earth. It is very fine to hear. The weather generally, however, has been excellent. There is snow on the tops of nearly all the hills, but none has fallen in the valley. On a bright day, it is quite hot between eleven and half past two. The nights and mornings are cold. For the last two or three days, it has been thick weather; and I can see no more of Mont Blanc from where I am writing now than if I were in Devonshire terrace, though last week it bounded all the Lausanne walks. I would give a great deal that you could take a walk with me about Lausanne on a clear cold day. It is impossible to imagine anything more noble and beautiful than the scene; and the autumn colours in the foliage are more brilliant and vivid now than any description could convey to you. I took Elliotson, when he was with us, up to a ravine I had found out in the hills eight hundred or a thousand feet deep! Its steep sides dyed bright yellow, and deep red, by the changing leaves; a sounding torrent rolling down below; the lake of Geneva lying at its foot; one enormous mass and chaos of trees at its upper end; and mountain piled on mountain in the distance, up into the sky! He really was struck silent by its majesty and splendour.”

He had begun his third number of
Dombey
on the 26th of October, on the 4th of the following month he was half through it, on the 7th he was in the “agonies” of its last chapter, and on the 9th, one day before that proposed for its completion, all was done. This was marvellously rapid work, after what else he had undergone; but within a week, Monday the 16th being the day for departure, they were to strike their tents, and troubled and sad were the few days thus left him for preparation and farewell. He included in his leave-taking his deaf, dumb, and blind friends; and, to use his own homely phrase, was yet more terribly “down in the mouth” at taking leave of his hearing, speaking, and seeing friends. “I shall see you soon, please God, and that sets all to rights. But I don’t believe there are many dots on the map of the world where we shall have left such affectionate remembrances behind us, as in Lausanne. It was quite miserable this last night, when we left them at Haldimand’s.”

He shall himself describe how they travelled post to Paris, occupying five days. “We got through the journey charmingly, though not quite so quickly as we hoped. The children as good as usual, and even Skittles jolly to the last. (That name has long superseded Sampson Brass, by the bye. I call him so, from something skittle-playing and public-housey in his countenance.) We have been up at five every morning, and on the road before seven. We were three carriages: a sort of wagon, with a cabriolet attached, for the luggage; a ramshackle villainous old swing upon wheels (hired at Geneva), for the children; and for ourselves, that travelling chariot which I was so kind as to bring here for sale. It was very cold indeed crossing the Jura — nothing but fog and frost; but when we were out of Switzerland and across the French frontier, it became warmer, and continued so. We stopped at between six and seven each evening; had two rather queer inns, wild French country inns; but the rest good. They were three hours and a half examining the luggage at the frontier custom-house — atop of a mountain, in a hard and biting frost; where Anne and Roche had sharp work I assure you, and the latter insisted on volunteering the most astonishing and unnecessary lies about my books, for the mere pleasure of deceiving the officials. When we were out of the mountain country, we came at a good pace, but were a day late in getting to our hotel here.”

They were in Paris when that was written; at the hotel Brighton; which they had reached in the evening of Friday the 20th of November.

CHAPTER XV.

THREE MONTHS IN PARIS.

1846-1847.

Lord Brougham — French Sunday — A House taken — His French Abode — A Former Tenant — Sister Fanny’s Illness — The King of the Barricades — The Morgue — Parisian Population — Americans and French — Unsettlement of Plans — A True Friend — Hard Frost — Alarming Neighbour — A Fellow-littérateur — London Visit — Return to Paris — Begging-letter-writers — A Boulogne Reception — French-English — Citizen Dickens — Sight-seeing — Evening with Victor Hugo — At the Bibliothèque Royale — Adventure with a Coachman — Illness of Eldest Son — Visit of his Father — The “Man that put together Dombey.”

No man enjoyed brief residence in a hotel more than Dickens, but “several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and other tons of children” are not desirable accompaniments to this kind of life; and his first day in Paris did not close before he had offered for an “eligible mansion.” That same Saturday night he took a “colossal” walk about the city, of which the brilliancy and brightness almost frightened him; and among other things that attracted his notice was “rather a good book announced in a bookseller’s window as
Les Mystères de Londres par Sir Trollopp
. Do you know him?” A countryman better known had given him earlier greeting. “The first man who took hold of me in the street, immediately outside this door, was Bruffum in his check trousers, and without the proper number of buttons on his shirt, who was going away this morning, he told me, but coming back in two months, when we would go and dine — at some place known to him and fame.”

Next day he took another long walk about the streets, and lost himself fifty times. This was Sunday, and he hardly knew what to say of it, as he saw it there and then. The bitter observance of that day he always sharply resisted, believing a little rational enjoyment to be not opposed to either rest or religion; but here was another matter. “The dirty churches, and the clattering carts and waggons, and the open shops (I don’t think I passed fifty shut up, in all my strollings in and out), and the work-a-day dresses and drudgeries, are not comfortable. Open theatres and so forth I am well used to, of course, by this time; but so much toil and sweat on what one would like to see, apart from religious observances, a sensible holiday, is painful.”

The date of his letter was the 22nd of November, and it had three postscripts.
The first, “Monday afternoon,” told me a house was taken; that, unless the agreement should break off on any unforeseen fight between Roche and the agent (“a French Mrs. Gamp”), I was to address him at No. 48, Rue de Courcelles, Faubourg St. Honouré; and that he would merely then advert to the premises as in his belief the “most ridiculous, extraordinary, unparalleled, and preposterous” in the whole world; being something between a baby-house, a “shades,” a haunted castle, and a mad kind of clock. “They belong to a Marquis Castellan, and you will be ready to die of laughing when you go over them.” The second P.S. declared that his lips should be sealed till I beheld for myself. “By Heaven it is not to be imagined by the mind of man!” The third P.S. closed the letter. “One room is a tent. Another room is a grove. Another room is a scene at the Victoria. The upstairs rooms are like fanlights over street-doors. The nurseries — but no, no, no, no more! . . .”

His following letter nevertheless sent more, even in the form of an additional protestation that never till I saw it should the place be described. “I will merely observe that it is fifty yards long, and eighteen feet high, and that the bedrooms are exactly like opera-boxes. It has its little courtyard and garden, and porter’s house, and cordon to open the door, and so forth; and is a Paris mansion in little. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room. Being a gentleman’s house, and not one furnished to let, it has some very curious things in it; some of the oddest things you ever beheld in your life; and an infinity of easy chairs and sofas. . . . Bad weather. It is snowing hard. There is not a door or window here — but that’s nothing! there’s not a door or window in all Paris — that shuts; not a chink in all the billions of trillions of chinks in the city that can he stopped to keep the wind out. And the cold! — but you shall judge for yourself; and also of this preposterous dining-room. The invention, sir, of Henry Bulwer, who when he had executed it (he used to live here), got frightened at what he had done, as well he might, and went away. . . . The Brave called me aside on Saturday night, and showed me an improvement he had effected in the decorative way. ‘Which,’ he said, ‘will very much s’prize Mis’r Fors’er when he come.’ You are to be deluded into the belief that there is a perspective of chambers twenty miles in length, opening from the drawing-room. . . .”

My visit was not yet due, however, and what occupied or interested him in the interval may first be told. He had not been two days in Paris when a letter from his father made him very anxious for the health of his eldest sister. “I was going to the play (a melodrama in eight acts, five hours long), but hadn’t the heart to leave home after my father’s letter,” he is writing on the 30th of November, “and sent Georgy and Kate by themselves. There seems to be no doubt whatever that Fanny is in a consumption.” She had broken down in an attempt to sing at a party in Manchester; and subsequent examination by Sir Charles Bell’s son, who was present and took much interest in her, too sadly revealed the cause. “He advised that neither she nor Burnett should be told the truth, and my father has not disclosed it. In worldly circumstances they are very comfortable, and they are very much respected. They seem to be happy together, and Burnett has a great deal of teaching. You remember my fears about her when she was in London the time of Alfred’s marriage, and that I said she looked to me as if she were in a decline? Kate took her to Elliotson, who said that her lungs were certainly not affected then. And she cried for joy. Don’t you think it would be better for her to be brought up, if possible, to see Elliotson again? I am deeply, deeply grieved about it.” This course was taken, and for a time there seemed room for hope; but the result will be seen. In the same letter I heard of poor Charles Sheridan, well known to us both, dying of the same terrible disease; and his chief, Lord Normanby, whose many acts of sympathy and kindness had inspired strong regard in Dickens, he had already found “as informal and good-natured as ever, but not so gay as usual, and having an anxious, haggard way with him, as if his responsibilities were more than he had bargained for.” Nor, to account for this, had Dickens far to seek, when a little leisure enabled him to see something of what was passing in Paris in that last year of Louis Philippe’s reign. What first impressed him most unfavourably was a glimpse in the Champs Elysées, of the King himself coming in from the country. “There were two carriages. His was surrounded by horseguards. It went at a great pace, and he sat very far back in a corner of it, I promise you. It was strange to an Englishman to see the Prefet of Police riding on horseback some hundreds of yards in advance of the cortége, turning his head incessantly from side to side, like a figure in a Dutch clock, and scrutinizing everybody and everything, as if he suspected all the twigs in all the trees in the long avenue.”

But these and other political indications were only, as they generally prove to be, the outward signs of maladies more deeply-seated. He saw almost everywhere signs of canker eating into the heart of the people themselves. “It is a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive; and there can be no better summary of it, after all, than Hogarth’s unmentionable phrase.” He sent me no letter that did not contribute something of observation or character. He went at first rather frequently to the Morgue, until shocked by something so repulsive that he had not courage for a long time to go back; and on that same occasion he had noticed the keeper smoking a short pipe at his little window, “and giving a bit of fresh turf to a linnet in a cage.” Of the condition generally of the streets he reported badly; the quays on the other side of the Seine were not safe after dark; and here was his own night experience of one of the best quarters of the city. “I took Georgy out, the night before last, to show her the Palais Royal lighted up; and on the Boulevard, a street as bright as the brightest part of the Strand or Regent-street, we saw a man fall upon another, close before us, and try to tear the cloak off his back. It was in a little dark corner near the Porte St. Denis, which stands out in the middle of the street. After a short struggle, the thief fled (there were thousands of people walking about), and was captured just on the other side of the road.”

An incident of that kind might mean little or much: but what he proceeded to remark of the ordinary Parisian workpeople and smaller shopkeepers, had a more grave complexion; and may be thought perhaps still to yield some illustration, not without value, to the story of the quarter of a century that has passed since, and even to some of the appalling events of its latest year or two. “It is extraordinary what nonsense English people talk, write, and believe, about foreign countries. The Swiss (so much decried) will do anything for you, if you are frank and civil; they are attentive and punctual in all their dealings; and may be relied upon as steadily as the English. The Parisian workpeople and smaller shopkeepers are more like (and unlike) Americans than I could have supposed possible. To the American indifference and carelessness, they add a procrastination and want of the least heed about keeping a promise or being exact, which is certainly not surpassed in Naples. They have the American semi-sentimental independence too, and none of the American vigour or purpose. If they ever get free trade in France (as I suppose they will, one day), these parts of the population must, for years and years, be ruined. They couldn’t get the means of existence, in competition with the English workmen. Their inferior manual dexterity, their lazy habits, perfect unreliability, and habitual insubordination, would ruin them in any such contest, instantly. They are fit for nothing but soldiering — and so far, I believe, the successors in the policy of your friend Napoleon have reason on their side.
Eh bien, mon ami, quand vous venez à Paris, nous nous mettrons à quatre épingles, et nous verrons toutes les merveilles de la cité, et vous en jugerez.
God bless me, I beg your pardon! It comes so natural.”