The Newcomes

by William Makepeace Thackeray

stop. Go and tell Ethel to come down; bring her down with you. Do you

  understand?"

  The unconscious infants toddle upstairs to their sister; and Lady Kew

  blandly says, "Ethel's engagement to my grandson, Lord Kew, has long been

  settled in our family, though these things are best not talked about

  until they are quite determined, you know, my dear Mr. Newcome. When we

  saw you and your father in London, we heard that you too-that you too

  were engaged to a young lady in your own rank of life, a Miss--what was

  her name?--Miss MacPherson, Miss Mackenzie. Your aunt, Mrs. Hobson

  Newcome, who I must say is a most blundering silly person, had set about

  this story. It appears there is no truth in it. Do not look surprised

  that I know about your affairs. I am an old witch, and know numbers of

  things."

  And, indeed, how Lady Kew came to know this fact, whether her maid

  corresponded with Lady Anne's maid, what her ladyship's means of

  information were, avowed or occult, this biographer has never been able

  to ascertain. Very likely Ethel, who in these last three weeks had been

  made aware of that interesting circumstance, had announced it to Lady Kew

  in the course of a cross-examination, and there may have been a battle

  between the granddaughter and the grandmother, of which the family

  chronicler of the Newcomes has had no precise knowledge. That there were

  many such I know--skirmishes, sieges, and general engagements. When we

  hear the guns, and see the wounded, we know there has been a fight. Who

  knows had there been a battle-royal, and was Miss Newcome having her

  wounds dressed upstairs?

  "You will like to say good-bye to your cousin, I know," Lady Kew

  continued, with imperturbable placidity. "Ethel, my dear, here is Mr.

  Clive Newcome, who has come to bid us all good-bye." The little girls

  came trotting down at this moment, each holding a skirt of their elder

  sister. She looked rather pale, but her expression was haughty--almost

  fierce.

  Clive rose up as she entered, from the sofa by the old Countess's side,

  which place she had pointed him to take during the amputation. He rose up

  and put his hair back off his face, and said very calmly, "Yes, I'm come

  to say good-bye. My holidays are over, and Ridley and I are off for Rome;

  good-bye, and God bless you, Ethel."

  She gave him her hand and said, "Good-bye, Clive," but her hand did not

  return his pressure, and dropped to her side, when he let it go.

  Hearing the words good-bye, little Alice burst into a howl, and little

  Maude, who was an impetuous little thing, stamped her little red shoes

  and said, "It san't be good-bye. Tlive san't go." Alice, roaring, clung

  hold of Clive's trousers. He took them up gaily, each on an arm, as he

  had done a hundred times, and tossed the children on to his shoulders,

  where they used to like to pull his yellow mustachios. He kissed the

  little hands and faces, and a moment after was gone.

  "Qu'as-tu?" says M. de Florac, meeting him going over the bridge to his

  own hotel. "Qu'as-tu, mon petit Claive? Est-ce qu'on vient de t'arracher

  une dent?"

  "C'est ca," says Clive, and walked into the Hotel de France. "Hulloh! J.

  J.! Ridley!" he sang out. "Order the trap out and let's be off." "I

  thought we were not to march till to-morrow," says J. J., divining

  perhaps that some catastrophe had occurred. Indeed, Mr. Clive was going a

  day sooner than he had intended. He woke at Fribourg the next morning. It

  was the grand old cathedral he looked at, not Baden of the pine-clad

  hills, of the pretty walks and the lime-tree avenues. Not Baden, the

  prettiest booth of all Vanity Fair. The crowds and the music, the

  gambling-tables and the cadaverous croupiers and chinking gold, were far

  out of sight and hearing. There was one window in the Hotel de Hollande

  that he thought of, how a fair arm used to open it in the early morning,

  how the muslin curtain in the morning air swayed to and fro. He would

  have given how much to see it once more! Walking about at Fribourg in the

  night, away from his companions, he had thought of ordering horses,

  galloping back to Baden, and once again under that window, calling Ethel,

  Ethel. But he came back to his room and the quiet J. J., and to poor Jack

  Belsize, who had had his tooth taken out too.

  We had almost forgotten Jack, who took a back seat in Clive's carriage,

  as befits a secondary personage in this history, and Clive in truth had

  almost forgotten him too. But Jack having his own cares and business, and

  having rammed his own carpet-bag, brought it down without a word, and

  Clive found him environed in smoke when he came down to take his place in

  the little britzska. I wonder whether the window at the Hotel de Hollande

  saw him go? There are some curtains behind which no historian, however

  prying, is allowed to peep.

  "Tiens, le petit part," says Florac of the cigar, who was always

  sauntering. "Yes, we go," says Clive. "There is a fourth place, Viscount;

  will you come too?"

  339

  "I would love it well," replies Florac, "but I am here in faction. My

  cousin and seigneur M. le Duc d'Ivry is coming all the way from Bagneres

  de Bigorre. He says he counts on me:--affaires mon cher, affaires

  d'etat."

  "How pleased the duchess will be! Easy with that bag!" shouts Clive. "How

  pleased the princess will be!" In truth he hardly knew what he was

  saying.

  "Vous croyez; vous croyez," says M. de Florac. "As you have a fourth

  place, I know who had best take it."

  "And who is that?" asked the young traveller.

  Lord Kew and Barnes, Esq., of Newcome, came out of the Hotel de Hollande

  at this moment. Barnes slunk back, seeing Jack Belsize's hairy face. Kew

  ran over the bridge. "Good-bye, Clive. Good-bye, Jack." "Good-bye, Kew."

  It was a great handshake. Away goes the postillion blowing his horn, and

  young Hannibal has left Capua behind him.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  Madame la Duchesse

  In one of Clive Newcome's letters from Baden, the young man described to

  me, with considerable humour and numerous illustrations as his wont was,

  a great lady to whom he was presented at that watering-place by his

  friend Lord Kew. Lord Kew had travelled in the East with Monsieur le Duc

  and Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry--the prince being an old friend of his

  lordship's family. He is the "Q" of Madame d'Ivry's book of travels,

  Footprints of the Gazelles, by a daughter of the Crusaders, in which she

  prays so fervently for Lord Kew's conversion. He is the "Q" who rescued

  the princess from the Arabs, and performed many a feat which lives in her

  glowing pages. He persists in saying that he never rescued Madame la

  Princesse from any Arabs at all, except from one beggar who was bawling

  out for bucksheesh, and whom Kew drove away with a stick. They made

  pilgrimages to all the holy places, and a piteous sight it was, said Lord

  Kew, to see the old prince in the Jerusalem processions at Easter pacing

  with bare feet and a candle. Here Lord Kew separated from the prince's

  party. His name does not occur in th
e last part of the Footprints; which,

  in truth, are filled full of strange rhapsodies, adventures which nobody

  was but the princess, and mystic disquisitions. She hesitates at nothing,

  like other poets of her nation: not profoundly learned, she invents where

  she has not acquired: mingles together religion and the opera; and

  performs Parisian pas-de-ballet before the gates of monasteries and the

  cells of anchorites. She describes, as if she had herself witnessed the

  catastrophe, the passage of the Red Sea: and, as if there were no doubt

  of the transaction, an unhappy love-affair between Pharaoh's eldest son

  and Moses's daughter. At Cairo, apropos of Joseph's granaries, she enters

  into a furious tirade against Putiphar, whom she paints as an old savage,

  suspicious and a tyrant. They generally have a copy of the Footprints of

  the Gazelles at the Circulating Library at Baden, as Madame d'Ivry

  constantly visits that watering-place. M. le Duc was not pleased with the

  book, which was published entirely without his concurrence, and which he

  described as one of the ten thousand follies of Madame la Duchesse.

  This nobleman was five-and-forty years older than his duchess. France is

  the country where that sweet Christian institution of mariages de

  convenance (which so many folks of the family about which this story

  treats are engaged in arranging) is most in vogue. There the newspapers

  daily announce that M. de Foy has a bureau de confiance, where families

  may arrange marriages for their sons and daughters in perfect comfort and

  security. It is but a question of money on one side and the other.

  Mademoiselle has so many francs of dot; Monsieur has such and such rentes

  or lands in possession or reversion, an etude d'avoue, a shop with a

  certain clientele bringing him such and such an income, which may be

  doubled by the judicious addition of so much capital, and the pretty

  little matrimonial arrangement is concluded (the agent touching his

  percentage), or broken off, and nobody unhappy, and the world none the

  wiser. The consequences of the system I do not pretend personally to

  know; but if the light literature of a country is a reflex of its

  manners, and French novels are a picture of French life, a pretty society

  must that be into the midst of which the London reader may walk in twelve

  hours from this time of perusal, and from which only twenty miles of sea

  separate us.

  When the old Duke d'Ivry, of the ancient ancient nobility of France, an

  emigrant with Artois, a warrior with Conde, an exile during the reign of

  the Corsican usurper, a grand prince, a great nobleman afterwards, though

  shorn of nineteen-twentieths of his wealth by the Revolution,--when the

  Duke d'Ivry lost his two sons, and his son's son likewise died, as if

  fate had determined to end the direct line of that noble house, which had

  furnished queens to Europe, and renowned chiefs to the Crusaders--being

  of an intrepid spirit, the Duke was ill disposed to yield to his

  redoubtable energy, in spite of the cruel blows which the latter had

  inflicted upon him, and when he was more than sixty years of age, three

  months before the July Revolution broke out, a young lady of a sufficient

  nobility, a virgin of sixteen, was brought out of the convent of the

  Sacre Coeur at Paris, and married with immense splendour and ceremony to

  this princely widower. The most august names signed the book of the civil

  marriage. Madame la Dauphine and Madame la Duchesse de Berri complimented

  the young bride with royal favours. Her portrait by Dubufe was in the

  Exhibition next year, a charming young duchess indeed, with black eyes,

  and black ringlets, pearls on her neck, and diamonds in her hair, as

  beautiful as a princess of a fairy tale. M. d'Ivry, whose early life may

  have been rather oragious, was yet a gentleman perfectly well conserved.

  Resolute against fate his enemy (one would fancy fate was of an

  aristocratic turn, and took especial delight in combats with princely

  houses; the Atridae, the Borbonidae, the Ivrys,--the Browns and Joneses

  being of no account), the prince seemed to be determined not only to

  secure a progeny, but to defy age. At sixty he was still young, or seemed

  to be so. His hair was as black as the princess's own, his teeth as

  white. If you saw him on the Boulevard de Gand, sunning among the

  youthful exquisites there, or riding au Bois, with a grace worthy of old

  Franconi himself, you would take him for one of the young men, of whom

  indeed up to his marriage he retained a number of the graceful follies

  and amusements, though his manners had a dignity acquired in old days of

  Versailles and the Trianon, which the moderns cannot hope to imitate. He

  was as assiduous behind the scenes of the opera as any journalist, or any

  young dandy of twenty years. He "ranged himself," as the French phrase

  is, shortly before his marriage, just like any other young bachelor: took

  leave of Phryne and Aspasie in the coulisses, and proposed to devote

  himself henceforth to his charming young wife.

  The affreux catastrophe of July arrived. The ancient Bourbons were once

  more on the road to exile (save one wily old remnant of the race, who

  rode grinning over the barricades, and distributing poignees de main to

  the stout fists that had pummelled his family out of France). M. le Duc

  d'Ivry, who lost his place at court, his appointments which helped his

  income very much, and his peerage would no more acknowledge the usurper

  of Neuilly, than him of Elba. The ex-peer retired to his terres. He

  barricaded his house in Paris against all supporters of the citizen king;

  his nearest kinsman, M. de Florac, among the rest, who for his part

  cheerfully took his oath of fidelity, and his seat in Louis Philippe's

  house of peers, having indeed been accustomed to swear to all dynasties

  for some years past.

  In due time Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry gave birth to a child, a daughter,

  whom her noble father received with but small pleasure. What the Duke

  desired, was an heir to his name, a Prince of Moncontour, to fill the

  place of the sons and grandsons gone before him, to join their ancestors

  in the tomb. No more children, however, blessed the old Duke's union.

  Madame d'Ivry went the round of all the watering-places: pilgrimages were

  tried: vows and gifts to all saints supposed to be favourable to the

  d'Ivry family, or to families in general:--but the saints turned a deaf

  ear; they were inexorable since the true religion and the elder Bourbons

  were banished from France.

  Living by themselves in their ancient castles, or their dreary mansion of

  the Faubourg St. Germain, I suppose the Duke and Duchess grew tried of

  one another, as persons who enter into a mariage de convenance sometimes,

  nay, as those who light a flaming love-match, and run away with one

  another, will be found to do. A lady of one-and-twenty, and a gentleman

  of sixty-six, alone in a great castle, have not unfrequently a third

  guest at their table, who comes without a card, and whom they cannot shut

  out, though they keep their doors closed ever so. His name is Ennui, and

  m
any a long hour and weary night must such folks pass in the

  unbidden society of this Old Man of the Sea; this daily guest at the

  board; this watchful attendant at the fireside; this assiduous companion

  who will walk out with you; this sleepless restless bedfellow.

  At first, M. d'Ivry, that well-conserved nobleman who never would allow

  that he was not young, exhibited no sign of doubt regarding his own youth

  except an extreme jealousy and avoidance of all other young fellows. Very

  likely Madame la Duchesse may have thought men in general dyed their

  hair, wore stays, and had the rheumatism. Coming out of the convent of

  the Sacre Coeur, how was the innocent young lady to know better? You see,

  in these mariages de convenance, though a coronet may be convenient to a

  beautiful young creature, and a beautiful young creature may be

  convenient to an old gentleman, there are articles which the

  marriage-monger cannot make to convene at all: tempers over which M. de

  Foy and his like have no control; and tastes which cannot be put into the

  marriage settlements. So this couple were unhappy, and the Duke and

  Duchess quarrelled with one another like the most vulgar pair who ever

  fought across a table.

  In this unhappy state of home affairs, madame took to literature,

  monsieur to politics. She discovered that she was a great unappreciated

  soul, and when a woman finds that treasure in her bosom of course she

  sets her own price on the article. Did you ever see the first poems of

  Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry, Les Cris de l'Ame? She used to read them to

  her very intimate friends, in white, with her hair a good deal down her

  back. They had some success. Dubufe having painted her as a Duchess,

  Scheffer depicted her as a Muse. That was in the third year of her

  marriage, when she rebelled against the Duke her husband, insisted on

  opening her saloons to art and literature, and, a fervent devotee still,

  proposed to unite genius and religion. Poets had interviews with her.

  Musicians came and twanged guitars to her.

  Her husband, entering her room, would fall over the sabre and spurs of

  Count Almaviva from the boulevard, or Don Basilio with his great sombrero

  and shoe-buckles. The old gentleman was breathless and bewildered in

  following her through all her vagaries. He was of old France, she of new.

  What did he know of the Ecole Romantique, and these jeunes gens with

  their Marie Tudors and Tours de Nesle, and sanguineous histories of

  queens who sewed their lovers into sacks, emperors who had interviews

  with robber captains in Charlemagne's tomb, Buridans and Hernanis, and

  stuff? Monsieur le Vicomte de Chateaubriand was a man of genius as a

  writer, certainly immortal; and M. de Lamartine was a young man extremely

  bien pensant, but, ma foi, give him Crebillon fils, or a bonne farce of

  M. Vade to make laugh; for the great sentiments, for the beautiful style,

  give him M. de Lormian (although Bonapartist) or the Abbe de Lille. And

  for the new school! bah! these little Dumass, and Hugos, and Mussets,

  what is all that? "M. de Lormian shall be immortal, monsieur," he would

  say, "when all these freluquets are forgotten." After his marriage he

  frequented the coulisses of the opera no more; but he was a pretty

  constant attendant at the Theatre Francais, where you might hear him

  snoring over the chefs-d'oeuvres of French tragedy.

  For some little time after 1830, the Duchesse was as great a Carlist as

  her husband could wish; and they conspired together very comfortably at

  first. Of an adventurous turn, eager for excitement of all kinds, nothing

  would have better pleased the Duchesse than to follow MADAME in her

  adventurous courses in La Vendee, disguised as a boy above all. She was

  persuaded to stay at home, however, and aid the good cause at Paris;

  while Monsieur le Duc went off to Brittany to offer his old sword to the

  mother of his king. But MADAME was discovered up the chimney at Rennes,