by Roland Perry
On the positive side she noted the beautiful Botanic Gardens south of the Yarra, where she took carriage rides with Marie and Solange. She visited the university, founded only a year earlier, to see if there might be a course for her. But her English was still poor, and besides, she had responsibilities as the consul’s wife, Solange to look after and a household to run. Yet still she hankered to learn and write, and saw this as her calling now, rather than the theatre. Her stage career was slipping away like a nostalgic dream.
Social life existed, too, not with the flair of Paris, but with the excitement of new openings in 1854. The count and countess were invited to the completion of the Melbourne Terminus; the first steam-train ride from the terminus to Sandridge; the Melbourne Exhibition; the State Library opening; the celebration of the first telegraph service to Williamstown across the Bay; and the completion of the first town hall. It was all very uplifting for the locals, and even the sophisticated Chabrillans could not help but be swept along with the rapid development of a village into a city backed by extraordinary wealth.
Still there was a sense of isolation. Céleste had dealt with this before at Berry. She could not help dreaming of Paris and the high life, but with new challenges and projects arising constantly, she put it to the back of her mind. A return to France was not contemplated and could not be for some time, or at least not until Lionel had made his hoped-for speculative fortune. Besides, she was preoccupied with buying land in the village of St Kilda about three kilometres from the centre of Melbourne. This would be the place where she would erect the gabled house she had bought in Bordeaux.
The sound of a cannon firing, which heralded the arrival of a boat in the colony and the possibility of letters from home, would trigger a reminder of France and cause Céleste to be ‘overcome with excitement’.
‘It is the only emotion I feel in this country,’ she wrote. ‘A letter addressed to you, even if it is from a creditor, gives immense pleasure.’ She always hoped for mail, even if it wasn’t due.
‘At midday,’ she said, ‘you see the postman in his red uniform approaching in the distance, you run to meet him.’
If he had no letters, she felt downcast. He would not return for a month.
After four months—on 18 August—she was elated to hear the cannon boom announce the arrival of The Great Britain, carrying her furniture and her prefabricated house. It had taken 120 days to travel from Le Havre, and her prayers that it arrive undamaged were answered.
Six weeks later it was erected on Céleste’s land in St Kilda, a few hundred yards from the edge of the Bay.
‘Here I am, a landowner in Australia,’ she wrote with joy. ‘A weatherboard gable with a forest view. I no longer fear anything but fire and water.’
CHAPTER 36
Memoirs of Another Life
The consul’s office received a twenty-kilogram bundle of French papers and letters, which carried only disturbing or irritating news and information. Céleste was depressed by some of the reviews and comments about her book.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ she told Lionel.
‘I knew about the Mémoires,’ Lionel said. ‘My friends, including Prince Napoleon, forewarned me. I can’t say I’m happy, but what’s done is done. We move on.’ He paused, and nodding to the papers, asked, ‘And what do these reviews say?’
‘Listen to this,’ Céleste said, ‘“Her self-deprecation and expressions of God-fearing guilt give balance to her memoirs. The authenticity is between the lines. It is an honest rendition of a not always honest life.’”
‘That’s fine. People will buy it.’
‘And this,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘“She shows intellectual skills in her humour and observational capacities. Mogador is clearly intelligent and sharp in analysis of people. Pity that her writing does not match these qualities.”’
‘That is a silly review,’ Lionel said. ‘You show all those qualities in your writing but it’s not up to standard. That’s contradictory.’
‘Some are personal. They dredge up the past.’
‘But it’s top of the bestseller list in France . . .’
‘Does that worry you?’
‘Not from this distance,’ he said, trying to sound cheerful.
‘You haven’t read the book, have you?’
‘No, and I won’t.’ He paused and added, ‘Oh, I might, sometime in the future. I am curious, of course.’
‘The sales mean one good thing,’ she said. ‘We’ll have income to supplement your salary here.’
Lionel comforted her further by appealing to her vengeful streak. ‘When I’m rich I shall settle my score with all those individuals’, referring to those who had attacked her in print. He embraced her. ‘Just think of me, the one who loves you. My love will last longer than the petty spite of the gossips.’
‘Lionel is suffering,’ she observed in her diary, ‘but only on my behalf. He is the one who restores my strength by being especially considerate and loving.’
It secretly thrilled her to receive such supportive and flattering comments.
Céleste’s mother, living at Céleste’s property at Poinçonnet, wrote a plaintive, miserable letter, for which her daughter had only thinly veiled contempt. There was no mention of the detested Vincent, but her negativity made Céleste shudder. It reinforced her decision to distance herself from Anne-Victoire, who was a universe away from her daughter in temperament and experience. Céleste decided she could not care less whether Anne-Victoire was with Vincent or not.
More encouraging was a letter from Ernest Baroche, a friend and previous paramour of Céleste, who was the son of an important conservative Minister of State under Napoleon III. Baroche, who had the reputation of a playboy, was working in a government ministry at the time. His views and those of other friends such as Alexandre Dumas Sr and Jr, who were opposed to the incumbent emperor, meant that Céleste could gauge a wide spectrum of views on everything, from the general political climate in France to the attitude to her personal image.
Baroche wrote to introduce a good friend, who was coming to Melbourne. Baroche had read in the Paris papers a false report that the Croesus had sunk with all on board lost at sea.
‘All those who know you and love you,’ he wrote, ‘you know that I am among them, were greatly grieved. We very often speak of you as an author. You have your supporters and enemies. Don’t distress about anything. In my opinion, to be talked about gives us proof that we have a relative value . . .’
It indicated to her that she was being gossiped about in Parisian circles, but this was nothing new.1
Céleste occupied herself by furnishing her new home while Marie did the shopping and amused everyone with her straightforward manner.
‘She comes back from the market,’ Céleste recalled, ‘and goes into Lionel’s office, and whether there are people there or not, she adds up the cost of every item from water to cauliflower, and groans at the expense.’
Marie also complained about the number of carriages and horses that crammed Melbourne streets and the crowded omnibuses, which cost one shilling (three francs) a ride. They were clear signs of the ongoing, gold-generated boom, as were the numbers of carpenters, builders, locksmiths and painters that jostled for space on the ride. The demand for tradesmen was out-stripping supply and they were charging two pounds (fifty francs) a day, which was as much and more than professionals such as some doctors or lawyers were earning. Lionel went on with his ‘surgery’, dealing with cases large and small. A French mechanical engineer, Jacques Mureut, had been on board the 220-tonne Tayleur that left Liverpool on 19 January 1854. It was shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland. Two hundred and fifty of the 705 people on board survived. Mureut’s wife and child were lost. He was picked up by a passing boat that took him to Melbourne. Now he wished to be repatriated to France to be with his mother and sister.
Lionel gave him some of his own money and took Céleste to see the captain of the French ship, Hirondelle, who piped them aboard with
full ceremonial honours. Lionel, showing some finesse, flattered and cajoled the captain into taking on Mureut as an engineer for the trip back to France.
On the way back to port in a small boat they saw a British ship, the Onyx, with its flag at half-mast. It had sailed from Hong Kong on 3 May 1854 with 214 Chinese passengers, all bound for the goldfields. Later it was discovered that many on board had suffered a food-poisoning calamity, or a bad case of scurvy. Their diet of rice, water and inedible fish had not been supplemented by citrus fruits, which would ward off the scurvy. Twenty-four died on board. The other 190 were quarantined in an area north of the Princes Bridge and the Yarra, in what was already becoming a Chinatown. More than forty more died there within twelve days of landing on 22 August.
After such a sobering, tiring day, Lionel had some light relief the next morning from a ‘jolly, fat English laundress’ who had been deserted by her French husband. She complained about ‘these rogues of Frenchmen’, and ‘what liars they are’. The woman also claimed that he would kick her. Lionel discovered that she was pregnant.
He took down the Frenchman’s particulars.
‘I shall return your husband to you,’ Lionel said, with a serious expression. ‘It will be punishment for insulting my compatriots!’
CHAPTER 37
A Hanging and Miner Rebellion
Céleste reflected on the success of her memoirs and was encouraged to continue writing in her diary about the boat trip and life in Australia.1 But fermenting in her fertile, ambitious and creative mind late in 1854 were the ideas for a novel. Her fervent dislike for the Australian environment and some of the people there was a driving force. And she didn’t have to look or read far to find riveting material. Emerging now in her thoughts was Alexandre Dumas’s advice to try fiction; to note everything around her and to sketch mini-biographies on any real characters she came across. Dumas had made her realise that the people who revolted her most, the individuals she had no intention of wasting her intellectual energy on, were the ones she should definitely write about. It was the despised types, even more than the ones she admired, that would draw out the real writer in her.
With this in mind she organised Lionel to take her on an official French Consulate tour of Ballarat, the goldmining district seventy miles north-west of Melbourne. But instead of hiring a carriage the adventurous Chabrillans, wishing to save on costs, decided to go on horseback over two days, stopping first near a Chinese tent village. At first the inhabitants were hostile to them.
‘They were exasperated after being treated like animals by the British,’ Céleste wrote. Through an interpreter, the couple made it clear that they were French and had sympathy with them. A Chinese senior then presented Céleste with ‘some very pretty handcrafts’.
The next day they trotted on to Ballarat, population 20,000, which frightened Céleste on first sighting.
‘It was like a huge cemetery,’ she noted, ‘where each person digs their own grave.’
The miner representatives gave them a respectful reception, assuming, correctly, that anyone representing the French would not necessarily be supportive of the British-run Victorian Government’s policies. There was simmering dislike for the colonial administrators, now headed by Governor Charles Hotham. He had arrived a few months earlier in June, to the alarming news that his coffers were almost bare from the cost of policing and running the goldfields. Miners had to pay a pound a month, or twelve pounds a year, for a licence. This was a heavy imposition for most of them, and many avoided paying the licence fee. Hotham ordered the police to redouble their efforts to collect the fees, and this was when tensions—colonial masters versus miners—began to increase.
The Chabrillans picked up on this sensitivity. Lionel, representing several hundred Frenchmen in the area, listened to their grievances; Céleste, not understanding much of the discussions, learned by watching the miners’ agitated faces and body language.
After the initial political chat, Céleste was asked if she would care to go down a mine shaft. She had no wish to go, but in front of her husband and so many eager watchers, she relented and switched to ‘show time’ in an instant. Céleste looked her ravishing best in long dress, bonnet and with a colourful parasol. She smiled her regal smile, waved to two photographers present and stepped with fashion-model elegance into the mine trolley to the applause of a hundred onlookers. She was given a lantern and lowered carefully into the pit.
‘I am plunged about eighty feet,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘and arrive at the bottom feeling very apprehensive.’
A miner showed her around the cramped underground passage. He gave her a pick and invited her to dig. Céleste scratched around, and with the miner’s help ‘discovered’ a few small grains of gold, which had been secretly placed at her feet.
Lionel embraced her on her return to the surface, where she was cheered again.2
Dumas’s comment about revulsion being a spur for characters and incident in fiction and non-fiction was tested when, much against her instincts, Céleste decided to attend the trial of an alleged serial killer in the Melbourne Supreme Court. The man accused was John Hughes. There was a wealth of evidence that said he had slain at least fifteen people, and perhaps double that number. Hughes was already branded as Australia’s worst mass murderer. The courtroom was crowded. A mob of hundreds more waited for the verdict outside. Chances were that in the small colony, there were many who knew someone who had been killed by this alleged monster.
Céleste better understood Dumas’s advice. She found the insouciant Hughes an ‘interesting’ character, mainly because of his behaviour at the trial, which began on 19 September. On day three the jury broke to deliberate for an hour. When the trial resumed Hughes said to the judge, ‘You’re in too much of a hurry to find me guilty.’
The judge glared but said nothing. This only encouraged the accused to add, ‘It’s six o’clock. You’re thinking of the dinner that’s waiting for you.’ Some in the audience giggled nervously at the outburst. ‘Come on, hurry up, or the pudding will get cold.’
It seemed as if Hughes may have been correct. A minute later the judge read the sentence to him, ‘The accused has been found guilty and is condemned to death by hanging, in three days.’
Hughes, now sounding on the verge of hysteria, gesticulated at the judge and repeated the sentence. ‘I wish you bon appétit! Drink my health with a glass of sherry before I die!’
Over the next two day gallows scaffolding was erected in the forecourt of the courthouse. On 22 September a big crowd gathered on high ground in Victoria Parade to witness the event. Céleste had been intrigued by the trial. Now she wished to follow it through to a conclusion by viewing the actual execution. A doctor friend offered her a place at a window in his house, which looked over Victoria Parade. It was a scene reminiscent of the glory days of the guillotine in Paris only a few decades earlier, but without women knitting. There was a similar bloodlust and desire to see a humiliating state-determined end to a human being.
‘I accepted despite my repugnance for this kind of spectacle,’ Céleste said, but she was thinking of Dumas’s advice to experience such incidents so she could write about them later with the authority of a first-hand witness. ‘I want to familiarise myself with all life’s atrocities,’ she added. ‘It will make me philosophical.’ Seeing such a grotesque demise, she felt, would focus her mind on the more important issues in life and help her ‘rise above the petty afflictions that beset me constantly’.
This was at odds with others, who wanted revenge for the many people slaughtered by Hughes, and still others who were there for the thrill.
The condemned man arrived, shackled and flanked by four burly policemen.
‘The crowd is suddenly full of movement like an ants’ nest that has just been run over by a carriage wheel,’ Céleste observed in her diary. Hughes looked scornfully at the inquisitive throng, ‘all riveted and open-mouthed’. He put on a bold front as he was escorted up the steps to the platform. Once
there, he bent his head forward towards the executioner, ‘smiling as if he were only going to try on a cravat’.
Hughes’s careless, almost carefree attitude incensed many onlookers. They wanted him to suffer indignity, fear and pain, but he was denying them that pleasure. Hughes, hands tied behind his back, was not allowed the right to say some last words, usually a chance to repent. But knowing he would never do this, the executioner steadied him in position over a trap door, stepped to one side and pulled a metre-long lever. The trap door fell open, sending Hughes into space and eternity. There were gasps as his body twisted and his neck muscles fought a losing battle against strangulation.
‘His eyes become bloodshot,’ Céleste noted with a writer’s eye for detail and drama, ‘the veins on his forehead and temple swell fit to burst. His mouth gapes open, showing his swollen, distended tongue, as big as an ox’s. Soon all that can be seen is a featureless purple, round mass.’
Lionel was alert to the unrest at Ballarat. He had direct involvement with French miners there and it was a talking point every night at dinner. Deep unrest was sparked on 7 October 1854 when Scottish miner James Scobie was murdered at the Eureka Hotel, Ballarat. The proprietor, James Bentley, was charged with murder but acquitted on 17 October. Several thousand miners gathered at the hotel to protest, and this forced Bentley and his wife to flee the area. The miners rioted and burned down the hotel, despite the efforts to stop them by a small contingent of soldiers. Two miners were arrested and charged for lighting the fire. This provoked 4000 miners to hold a meeting, and they resolved to establish a Diggers’ Rights Society. Seven more miners were arrested over the hotel fire, which led to a second meeting of miners at Bakery Hill. A third meeting on 11 November saw about 10,000 miners attend and the Ballarat Reform League was created with John Humffray as chairman. He had been in the Chartist Movement in England, which fought for political reforms such as the vote for all males. He and other former Chartists were turning miner unrest over licence fees into a more fundamental force for change. This was all in defiance of the goldfields commissioner, Robert Rede, the British son of a naval officer. Rede had lost control of the situation and swore revenge against the miners.