Complete Works of Frances Burney

by Frances Burney

  My eyes were suffused with tears, from mingled emotions I glided nimbly through the crowd to a corner at the other end of the room, where Lady Crewe joined me almost instantly, and with felicitations the most amiably cordial and lively.

  We then repaired to a side-board on which we contrived to seat ourselves, and Lady Crewe named to me the numerous personages of rank who passed on before us for presentation. But every time any one espied her and approached,, she named me also; an honour to which I was very averse. This I intimated, but to no purpose; she went on her own way. The curious stares this produced, in my embarrassed state of spirits, from recent grief, were really painful to sustain; but when the seriousness of my representation forced her to see that I was truly in earnest in my desire to remain unnoticed, she was so much vexed, and even provoked, that she very gravely begged that, if such were the case, I would move a little farther from her; saying, “If one must be so ill-natured to people as not to name you, I had rather not seem to know who you are myself.”

  AN IMPORTANT LETTER DELAYED.

  When, at length, her ladyship’s chariot was announced, we drove to Great Cumberland-place, Lady Crewe being so kind as to convey me to Mrs. Angerstein. As Lady Crewe was too much in haste to alight, the sweet Amelia Angerstein came to the carriage to speak to her, and to make known that a letter had arrived from M. de la Chtre relative to my presentation, which, by a mistake of address, had not come in time for my reception.(244)

  This note dispelled all of astonishment that had enveloped with something like incredulity my own feelings and perceptions in my unexpected presentation and reception. The king himself had personally desired to bestow upon me this mark of royal favour. What difficulty, what embarrassment, what confusion should I have escaped, had not that provoking mistake which kept back my letter occurred

  M. D’ARBLAY ARRIVES IN ENGLAND.

  Madame d”Arblay to Mrs. locke.) April 30, 1814. My own dearest friend must be the first, as she will be among the warmest, to participate in my happiness — M. d’Arblay is arrived. He came yesterday, quite unexpectedly as to the day, but not very much quicker than my secret hopes. He is extremely fatigued with all that has passed, yet well; and all himself, i.e., all that is calculated to fill my heart with gratitude for my lot in life. How would my beloved father have rejoiced in his sight, and in these glorious new events!(245)

  A BRILLIANT ASSEMBLAGE.

  (Madame d’Arblay to M. d’Arblay) June 18, 1814. Ah, mon ami! you are really, then, well? — really in Paris? — really without hurt or injury? What I have suffered from a suspense that has no name from its misery shall now be buried in restored peace, and hope, and happiness. With the most fervent thanks to providence that my terrors are removed, and that I have been tortured by only false apprehensions, I will try to banish from my mind all but the joy, and gratitude to heaven, that your safety and health inspire. Yet still, it is difficult to me to feel assured that all is well! I have so long been the victim to fear and anguish, that my spirits cannot at once get back their equilibrium. . . .

  Hier j’ai quitt ma retraite, trs volontiers, pour(246) indulge myself with the sight of the Emperor of Russia. How was I charmed with his pleasing, gentle, and so perfectly unassuming air, manner, and demeanour! I was extremely gratified, also, by seeing the King of Prussia, who interests us all here, by a look that still indicates his tender regret for the partner of his hopes, toils, and sufferings, but not of his victories and enjoyments. It was at the queen’s palace I saw them by especial and most gracious permission. The Prussian princes, six in number, and the young prince of Mecklenburg, and the Duchess of Oldenbourg, were of the party. All our royal Page 290 dukes assisted, and the Princesses Augusta and Mary. The Princess Charlotte looked quite beautiful. She is wonderfully improved. It was impossible not to be struck with her personal attractions, her youth, and splendour. The Duchess of York looked amongst the happiest; the King of Prussia is her brother.

  M. D’ARBLAY ENTERS Louis XVIII.’S BODY-GUARD.

  (Madame d’Arblay to Mrs. locke.) London, July, 1814. After a most painful suspense I have been at length relieved by a letter from Paris. It is dated the 18th of June, and has been a fortnight on the road. It is, he says, his fourth letter, and he had not then received one of the uneasy tribe of my own.

  The consul-generalship is, alas, entirely relinquished, and that by M. d’Arblay himself, who has been invited into the garde du corps by the Duc de Luxembourg, for his own company an invitation he deemed it wrong to resist at such a moment; and he has since been named one of the officers of the garde du corps by the king, Louis XVIII., to whom he had taken the customary oath that very day — the 18th.

  The season, however, of danger over, and the throne and order steadily re-established, he will still, I trust and believe, retire to civil domestic life. May it be speedily! After twenty years’ lying by, I cannot wish to see him re-enter a military career at sixty years of age, though still young in all his faculties and feelings, and in his capacity of being as useful to others as to himself. There is a time, however, when the poor machine, though still perfect in a calm, is unequal to a storm. Private life, then, should be sought while it yet may be enjoyed; and M. d’Arblay has resources for retirement the most delightful, both for himself and his friends. He is dreadfully worn and fatigued by the last year; and he began his active services at thirteen years of age. He is now past sixty. Every propriety, therefore, will abet my wishes, when the king no longer requires around him his tried and faithful adherents. And, indeed, I am by no means myself insensible to what is so highly gratifying to his feelings as this mark of distinction bien plus honorable, cependant,(247) as he adds, than lucrative. . . . . (Madame d’Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) August 9, 1814. The friends of M. d’A. in Paris are now preparing to claim for him his rank in the army, as he held it under Louis XVI., of marchal de Camp; and as the Duc de Luxembourg will present, in person, the demand au roi, there is much reason to expect it will be granted.

  M. de Thuisy, who brought your letter from Adrienne, has given a flourishing account of M. d’A. in his new uniform, though the uniform itself, he says, is very ugly. But so sought is the company of the garde du corps du roi that the very privates, M. de T. says, are gentlemen. M. d’A. himself has only the place of sous-lieutenant; but it is of consequence sufficient, in that company, to be signed by the king, who had rejected two officers that had been named to him just before he gave his signature for M. d’A.

  August 24, 1814.

  M. d’Arblay has obtained his rank, and the kind king has dated it

  from the aera when the original brevet was signed by poor Louis

  XVI. in 1792.

  [Here follows, in the original edition, a long letter in French from M. d’Arblay to his wife, dated “ Paris, August 3 0, 1814. “ He records the enthusiasm manifested by the people of Paris on the arrival of the king and the Duchess of Angoulme, and the flattering reception given by the king to the Duke of Wellington. “After having testified his satisfaction at the sentiments which the duke had just expressed to him on the part of the prince regent, and told him that he infinitely desired to see the peace which had been so happily concluded, established on solid foundations, his majesty added, ‘For that I shall have need of the powerful co-operation of his royal highness. The choice which he has made of you, sir, gives me hope of it. He honours me. . . . I am proud to see that the first ambassador sent to me by England is the justly celebrated Duke of Wellington.”’ M. d’Arblay counts with certainty upon his wife’s joining him in November, and ventures upon the unlucky assertion that “ the least doubt of the stability of the paternal government, which has been so miraculously restored to us, is no longer admissible.”-ED.]

  (214) Lyons rebelled against the Republic in the summer of 1793: against Jacobinism, in the first instance, and guillotined its jacobin leader, Chalier; later it declared for the king. After a long siege and a heroic defence, Lyons surrendered to the Republicans, October 9, 1793, and Fouch was o
ne of the commissioners sent down by the Convention to execute vengeance on the unfortunate town. A terrible vengeance was taken. “The Republic must march to liberty over corpses,” said Fouch; and thousands of the inhabitants were shot or guillotined. -ED.

  (215) The reputed assassin of the Duc d’Enghien. [“Assassin” is surely an unnecessarily strong term. The seizure of the Duke d’Enghien on neutral soil was illegal and indefensible: but he was certainly guilty of conspiring against the government of his country. He was arrested, by Napoleon’s orders, in the electorate of Baden, in March, 1804; carried across the frontier, conveyed to Vincennes, tried by court-martial, condemned, and shot forthwith.-ED.]

  (216) The disastrous campaign in Russia. Napoleon left Paris on the 9th Of May, 1812.-ED.

  (217) “So that we divine her meaning.”

  (218) “Who are you?

  “My name is d’Arblay.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is your husband?”

  “At Paris.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He works in the Home Office.”

  “Why are you leaving him?”

  (219) “You are English?”

  (220) “Follow me!”

  (221) “You do not think proper to follow me, then?”

  (222) “I have nothing to do here, sir, I believe.”

  (223) “We shall see!”“

  (224) “Young Man!”

  (225) Her sister Charlotte, formerly Mrs. Francis.-ED.

  (226) The 20th of August.-ED.

  (227) Mrs Crewe’s husband, John Crewe of Crewe Hall, cheshire, had been created a peer by the title of Baron Crewe of Crewe, in 1806.-ED.

  (228) An attempt to enter her apartment by a crazy woman.

  (229) “ Hunted out of France.” The work in question was Madame de Stael’s book on Germany (De l’Allemagne), which had been printed at Paris, and of which the entire edition had been seized by the police before its publication, on the plea that it contained passages offensive to the government. The authoress, moreover, was ordered to quit France, and joined her father at Coppet in Switzerland-ED.

  (230) No doubt, for his uncle’s school. Dr Charles Burney had left Hammersmith and established his school at Greenwich in 1793.-ED.

  (231) William Wilberforce, the celebrated philanthropist, was born at Htill in 1759. He devoted his life to the cause of the negro slaves; and to his exertions in Parliament were chiefly due the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and the total abolition of slavery in the English colonies in 1833. He died in the latter year, thanking God that he “had seen the day in which England was willing to give twenty millions sterling for the abolition of slavery.”-ED.

  (232) Narbonne was appointed by Napoleon, during the campaign of 1813, governor of the fortress of Torgau, on the Elbe. He defended the place with great resolution, even after the emperor had been obliged to retreat beyond the Rhine, but unhappily took the fever, and died there, November 17, 1813.-ED.

  (233) This proved to be a false report. General Victor de Latour Maubourg suffered the amputation of a leg at Leipzic, where he fought bravely in the service of the Emperor Napoleon. But he did not die of his wound, and we find him, in 1815, engaged in raising volunteers for the service of Louis XVIII.-ED.

  (234) Here is evidently a mistake as to the month: the date, no doubt, should be April 19. Dr. Burney died on the 12th of April, 1814.-ED.

  (235) Dr. Charles Burney.-ED.

  (236) Marie Thrse Charlotte, Duchess of Angoulme, was the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. She was born in 1778, and, after the execution of her father and mother she was detained in captivity in Paris until December, 1795, when she was delivered up to the Austrians in exchange for certain French prisoners of war. in 1799 she married her cousin, the Duke of Angoulme, son of Louis XVI’s brother, the Count d’Artois, (afterwards Charles X. of France). On the return of Napoleon from Elba, the Duchess of Angoulme so distinguished herself by her exertions and the spirit which she displayed in the king’s cause, that Napoleon said of her “ she was the only man in her family.”-ED.

  (237) Henry Grattan, the Irish statesman, orator, and patriot. Already one of the most distinguished members of the Irish Parliament, he vigorously opposed the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. He sat in the Imperial Parliament as member for Dublin from 1806 until his death in 1820, in his seventy-fourth year. As an orator, Mr. Lecky writes of him, “He was almost unrivalled in crushing invective, in delineations of character, and in brief, keen arguments; carrying on a train of sustained reason he was not so happy.”-ED.

  (238) Louis XVIII., formerly known as the Count of Provence, was the brother of the unfortunate Louis XVI. “Louis XVII” was the title given by the royalists to the young son of Louis XVI., who died, a prisoner, in June, 1795, some two years after the execution of his father.-ED.

  (239) “There is Madame d’Arblay; she must be presented.”

  (240) What a moment for her noble country, and what a subject for pride and exultation! Were we not very sure of Fanny’s sincerity, it were scarcely possible to read with patience such passages as this and others similarly extravagant. Her common sense seems to take flight in the presence of royalty.-ED.

  (242) “And M. d’Arblay, Sire, good and brave, is one of your majesty’s most devoted and faithful servants.”

  (243) “I believe it.”

  (244) This letter, addressed to Mrs. Angerstein, was to the effect that the Duchess of Angoulme would be very pleased to receive Madame d’Arblay, at 72 South Audley-street, between three and half-past three; and that the king (Louis XVIII.) also desired to see her, and would receive between four and five.-ED.

  (245) M. d’Arblay returned to France in the following June. -ED.

  (246) Yesterday I left my retreat, very willingly, to-”

  (247) “Far more honorable, nevertheless—”

  SECTION 24. (1815)

  MADAME D’ARBLAY AGAIN IN FRANCE: BONAPARTE’S ESCAPE FROM ELBA.

  (The two following sections contain Fanny’s account of her adventures during the “ Hundred Days “ which elapsed between the return of Napoleon from Elba and his final downfall and abdication. This narrative may be recommended to the reader as an interesting supplement to the history of that period. The great events of the time, the triumphal progress of the emperor, the battles which decided his destiny and the fate of Europe, we hear of only at a distance, by rumour or chance intelligence; but our author brings vividly before us, and with the authenticity of personal observation, the disturbed state of the country, the suspense, the alarms, the distress occasioned by the war. To refresh our readers’ memories, we give an epitome, as brief as possible, of the events to which Madame d’Arblay’s narrative forms, as it were, a background.

  When Napoleon abdicated the imperial throne, in April, 1814, the allied powers consented by treaty to confer upon him the sovereignty of the island of Elba, with a revenue of two million francs. To Elba he was accordingly banished, but the revenue was never paid. This disgraceful infringement of the treaty of Fontainebleau, joined to the accounts which he received of the state of public feeling in France, determined him to make the attempt to regain his lost empire. March 1, 1815, he landed at Cannes, with a few hundred men. He was everywhere received with the utmost enthusiasm. The troops sent to oppose him joined his standard with shouts of “Vive l’empereur!” March 20, he entered Paris in triumph, Louis XVIII having taken his departure the preceding evening, “amidst the tears and lamentations of several courtiers.”(248)

  The congress of the allied powers at Vienna proclaimed the emperor an outlaw, not choosing to remember that the treaty which they accused him of breaking, had been first violated by themselves. To his offers of negotiation they replied not. The Page 293

  English army under the Duke of Wellington, the Prussian under Prince Blcher occupied Belgium; the Austrians and Russians were advancing in immense force towards the Rhine. Anxious to st
rike a blow before the arrival of the latter Napoleon left Paris for Belgium, June 12. His army amounted to about one hundred and twenty thousand men. On the 15th the fighting commenced, h and the advanced guard of the Prussians was driven back. On the 16th, Blcher was attacked at Ligny, and defeated with terrible loss; but Marshal Ney was unsuccessful in an attack upon the combined English and Belgian army at Quatre Bras. Sunday, June 18, was the day of the decisive battle of Waterloo. After the destruction of his army, Napoleon hastened to Paris, but all hope was at an end. He abdicated the throne for the second time, proceeded to Rochefort, and voluntarily surrendered himself to Captain Maitland, of the English seventy-four, Bellerophon. He was conveyed to England, but was not permitted to land, and passed the few remaining years of his life a prisoner in the island of St. Helena.-ED.]

  AN INTERVIEW WITH THE DUCHESS OF ANGOULEME.

  I come now to my audience with Madame, Duchesse d’Angoulme.(249) As I had missed, through a vexatious mistake, the honour she had herself intended me, of presentation in England, my own condescending royal mistress, Queen Charlotte, recommended my claiming its performance on my return to Paris. M. d’Arblay then consulted with the Vicomte d’Agoult, his intimate early friend, how to repair in France my English deprivation. M. d’Agoult was cuyer to her royal highness, and high in her confidence and favour. He advised me simply to faire ma cour as the wife of a superior officer in the garde du corps du roi, at a public drawing-room; but the great exertion and publicity, joined to the expense Of such a presentation, made me averse, in all ways, to this proposal; and when M. d’Arblay protested I had not anything in view but to pay my respectful devoirs to her royal highness, M. d’Agoult undertook to make known my wish. It soon proved that this alone was necessary for its success, for madame la duchesse Page 294 instantly recollected what had passed in England, and said she would name, with pleasure, the first moment in her power - expressing an impatience on her own part that an interview should not be delayed which had been desired by her majesty Queen Charlotte of England. . . .