Here we saw the last of a Mr Hare, a young Englishman who had tormented Jane from the hour of our landing in Holland. They had met in some passage in the Badthouse at Rotterdam, and he had neglected no opportunity of throwing himself, ever after, in her way, He even addressed her, not rudely, not at all, but humbly, laid nosegays at her feet, sent her flowers by Ward the maid, stood in doorways and sighed, looked up at windows in languishing despair, followed her not only from street to street but from place to place. We found him at the Hague the morning after our arrival, at Amsterdam as soon as ourselves, at Liège immediately after us. We only escaped him at Spa from some misapprehension about our journey there, for he used to waylay Ward and try to bribe her with large sums of money to deliver notes and give him intelligence of our plans. He tried the courier too, and I am pretty sure made more of him than of little indignant Ward, who, after many minor repulses, at last made him a long speech in the style of Mrs Nickleby to the man with the vegetable marrow,14 and with equal effect, for this poor Mr Hare was insane, had escaped from his friends, and was not recovered by them till he had reached Maestricht. Many years afterwards, when Jane was Mrs Pennington, she met him, also married, quite rational, and perfectly oblivious of his wanderings in the Netherlands.
Whereabouts could we have seen Cleves, We certainly passed through this most beautiful little Duchy. A little paradise it seemed to be, with its rich fields, its wooded hills and old Castles upon heights. All this German scenery was very pretty, and so was the part of Flanders we next proceeded to. We had to return to Liège, and then we travelled up the Maese, an enchanting journey; past Huy, such a perfect picture of beauty, to Namur, a large fortified town. Here, though I was never noted for a painter’s eye, I recollect nothing so well as a large picture of the Crucifixion by Vandyke, unrolled for us to examine. With pride the priest told us it had never been to France. When Buonaparte carried off all the Spoils of all countries to embellish the Louvre, this gem was saved by being taken down from its place over the high altar of the Cathedral, removed out of its frame, rolled up, and hid in a chimney. They were just going to replace it, there being no longer any fear of French invasions. The works of Vandyke always touch me, as do the few paintings I have seen of the Italian Masters. This consists but of two figures, the Christ on the Cross, his Mother beneath it. It has never gone out of my head. For many months after seeing it, it came back to me in my dreams, or when I was sitting quietly at work alone. I can’t tell what it was that attracted me. I have no knowledge of colouring, or grouping, or even of correct outline, so that all the beauties of the painting could never be described by one so ignorant. I felt them though, and I rather think that would have satisfied the Artist himself nearly as well as the panegyrick of a connoisseur! They do talk such stuff with their technical round about phrases.15
The next point was Gemappes, the little rather bleak village on the hill near Quatre Bras. We dined in a room the walls of which still bore the marks of Cannon balls. The girl who waited on us had been in the house during the battle, saw the Highland regiments trot up in their peculiar fashion through the town, the people crowding out of their doors to offer them a snatch of refreshments as they quickly passed. She sang to us, in a loud, shrill voice, a few bars of some tune bearing a resemblance to the White Cockade, so that it must have been the 92nd, the gallant Gordons, that every one liked so much! those charming men with petticoats, who, when billeted on the inhabitants, helped to make the soup and rock the cradle for the half frightened mistress of the family. On the table where we had sat to eat, so many wounded Officers had lain under the Surgeon’s knife. In the room overhead so many had died; the garden had been destroyed, the fields had been desolated, losses of all kinds had been suffered during those dreadful days, yet for this no one blamed Napoleon. We found his great name treasured in almost every heart, every where except in Holland proper, where neither he nor any of his dynasty were popular. Here in Flanders they made no secret of preferring any Sovereign to their present Dutch one. The Flemings are half Spanish, half French; there is no similitude whatever between them and the nation they have been ill advisedly joined to; had been, I should say, for the forced union did not last long.16
On reaching Brussels we put up at the Hotel de Bellevue in the Place Royale, just for a couple of days while we looked about us, for the whole aspect of this particularly pretty town was so agreeable to my Mother, now quite tired of travelling, that it was determined to take a house here for a month, and send for our friend Amelia Ferrier. We spent two mornings, my father and I, walking about the high and new town, looking for lodgings, and all over the low and old town, admiring both, so beautiful they are in different ways. The Place Royale in the high town is the fashionable residence of the Court, some of the nobles, most of the strangers; the houses are like palaces, three fine rows enclosing a large oblong park, very agreeably laid out in shady walks. A steep street, the Montagne de la cour, leads from this to the low town, where all the publick buildings are to be found; and there are the ramparts, a broad causeway with neat houses on one side, and fine trees in a row upon the other. A good many handsome equipages rolled about during the middle of the day; there was plenty of traffick going forward, plenty of handsome well filled shops, foot passengers in constant variety, all well dressed, and the women mostly wearing very coquettishly the becoming Spanish Mantilla instead of shawl and bonnet, so disposed as by no means to conceal the features. The whole scene was gay, it was quite a place to fall in love with. Cheap, too, as we found Flanders generally; nearly half as cheap again as Holland, and about a third cheaper than the short experience we had of Germany.
The people spoke French in Brussels so well that we got on most easily with them, and very soon settled all our business. We fixed on apartments in a fine house in the Place Royale belonging to a Cotton manufacturer whose principal residence was close to his Mill in the country. He only used the ground floor of his town house during occasional visits to the City and let all the upper part. We had on the first floor a dining and a drawing room and my Mother’s bedroom, all communicating; on the second floor four good bedrooms, and there were rooms in a back wing for the servants. We required no additional plagues, the Courier dusting, and the porter’s daughter helping Ward upstairs; for our dinner came from a traiteur in a tray on a boy’s head, cheaper than we could have cooked it at home, and very much better. We ordered it for six, and there was always more left than the servants wanted. Breakfast and tea the Courier managed, our obliging landlord allowing us to boil our kettle on his stove. The entrance to our ‘palace home’ was through a porte cochère into a yard surrounded by low buildings used for warehouses. A staircase, broad and handsome, led up to our apartments; they were neatly finished, the drawing room indeed handsomely, and with its cheerful look out on the Parc, it was a very pleasant sitting room, particularly after we had put a harp and a pianoforte into it. Unpacking was a short business, for we travelled light, so soon felt at home in our new situation.
1. It was this avenue of elms that gave its name to the Boompjes, the quarter mile long quay in the heart of the city.
2. The former Austrian Netherlands had been joined to the Kingdom of Holland by the victorious allies four years earlier at Vienna; E.G. seemed well aware of this union’s deficiencies.
3. Although of different parties, they knew each other well. Canning was Prime Minister for a few months before his death in 1827.
4. His eldest son died next year aged 19; Edmund Burke’s son, Christopher, had died in childhood; a Merlin chair was an invalid wheel chair named after its inventor.
5. He ruled Holland for his brother, 1805−10.
6. The beautiful house of E.G.’s Co. Wicklow neighbour, the Earl of Milltown.
7. For Scott’s securing an heiress for his eldest son, see n, pp. 73−4.
8. Hortense, daughter of Napoleon’s first wife by a former marriage, Josephine de Beauharnais, married his brother Louis.
9. Earthenware cooking pot.
10. Actually, the radical Henry Labouchere (1798−1869) was not elected until 1826.
11. Robert Owen (1771−1858) used his wealth as an industrialist to found two communities, New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in the U.S.A., based on the idealistic principles of his New View of Society; for the D.N.B. he was ‘an intolerable bore who was the salt of the earth’.
12. Divina Commedia: ‘Inferno’1, ii.
13. Double-breasted French gentleman’s coat.
14. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, Chapter XXIII.
15. Baedeker’s first English edition (1869) suggests this picture is a copy.
16. It ended with the outbreak of the Belgian revolution in 1830.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1819−1820
THE day we moved from the hotel, just before despatching our last truck full of luggage, my father, who had gone out alone on some errand, returned accompanied by a country man, a gentleman he had known in his youth, Mr Pryse Gordon, a good looking, busy mannered person, with whom the world had not gone altogether well whoever had been to blame for it. He had been, he said, for some time settled in Brussels, and from a perfect knowledge of the place might be of some use to us, where so many were on the alert to take every advantage of strangers.1 He very much regretted our precipitation in taking a house so entirely on chance, and unguardedly throwing ourselves quite into our Landlord’s hands by employing all his tradespeople, the Belgians being rogues from top to bottom. He would take care in future to preserve us from this race of harpies by going with us himself to all shops as a protection, these crooked traders knowing him well, and knowing, too, that he would not suffer his friends to be imposed upon. Mrs Gordon, who was ill, or she would immediately have done herself the honour of waiting on my Mother, would introduce us to respectable milliners and dress makers; they would also shew us a little of Brussels society—do their best to make our sojourn agreeable. If we had never read Gil Bias,2 we might have been more grateful to him. There was something that jarred against our sympathies in some way in his many professions; that is, we young people fancied we could do just as well without him. My father and mother were quite delighted at meeting so zealous a friend. We therefore kept our own Counsel but as far as I could manage if I prevented Mr Gordon’s interference, the rather that in one or two trifling instances I found I had made better bargains for myself than he would have made for me. The black Courier detested him, I fancy their vocations clashed; neither did Monsieur Francois like me, as he required a watchful eye over his proceedings; he cheated us in spite of being looked after, but he would have made a much larger private purse had Mademoiselle not learned the value of the different moneys, and picked up useful words both in Dutch and German. One thing Mr Gordon certainly did well for us, he gave us the names of the best masters. Whether, poor people, he made them pay for the recommendation there is no saying. We lost not a franc, for their terms being known we paid them the customary fees, no more.
Education at Brussels was remarkably good at this time. Many English families were living there on account of the excellence and cheapness of the Masters. We took advantage of three, Henri Bertini for the pianoforte, a lesson from whom was worth at least half a dozen from an inferiour professor. His wife for the Harp, rather a so so teacher; and inimitable Monsieur Sacré for dancing. He was the Master of the Ceremonies at the palace, most particularly attentive to the Deportment, yet taking the greatest trouble with the most curiously minute incidents of every day life, as relating to the manners. He gave his pupils an ease of movement that very few inherited from nature. He must have been descended from Monsieur Jourdain’s celebrated Teacher, for the importance of his art filled his whole understanding.3 He used to give us long lectures upon simple elegance, act awkwardness before us, and then triumphantly ask which style would have greatest effect on the sympathies of our neighbour in every circumstance of life. Amelia Ferrier listened to him so gravely, so with an air of fully appreciating his reasoning, that between them we could hardly keep the entertainment they gave us within the bounds of good breeding.
Mr Ferrier had not been able to accompany his daughter. He sent her with a friend, Mr Steuart, the Editor of the Courier, a most clever, amusing little man sadly in want of a few lessons from Monsieur Sacre, for he was so thoroughly vulgar as to be some times annoying, but very witty; so up to the times, too, acquainted with every thing and every body, and so shrewd in his remarks he quite enlivened us. He delighted in musick, so that every evening while he staid we had quite a Concert. Both Amelia and I were anxious to have had some singing lessons; a celebrity was therefore engaged, but my father, who superintended the first interview, took good care to preserve us from a second. My father was unable to endure the new system of the ‘sons de tete’, such an ease to the singer … all the notes must be formed in the chest, and those that could not be thus reached, had to be let alone. The chest notes certainly are fuller, more satisfactory to a musical ear than the head notes, unless these last are excellently well produced, which they were not always in the beginning from want of practice probably. In our present day, by careful study, there is really no knowing where the two voices join, or part, and our taste being now formed to this falsetto, its sweetness and its truth, for being easily reached, these upper notes are never flat, quite reconcile us to what was condemned as a serious fault in the days of our fathers. Even the Italians now teach in this mode.
Our early mornings being thus occupied in agreeable studies, we devoted the middle of every day to walks about the town, or drives in the environs; the evenings we occasionally spent in such society as was accessible to us, not the best by any means, Brussels being then the refuge for all the scum and dregs of Britain. It would have required a good introduction to get at all among the Belgian noblesse, the specimens within their view making them very difficult of access by our countrymen. The Prince of (I forget the name) alone, who laid himself out to entertain the English, invited my father and William twice or thrice to dine. The company they met they described as no way remarkable; but they both of them spoke french so badly they were quite unequal to judge of any one’s conversational powers in that language. The banquet was like one in London, with two or three slight differences.
We ladies had to put up with Mr and Mrs James Conynghame and George—the married brother had been long done up and was living with his really nice wife on a small allowance granted to him by his creditors, to whom the father Sir James, made over his income. George was run out and was recruiting queer disagreeable odd pleasant ugly old Beau of mine—Mr and Mrs Wynne Aubrey, or in full as he was a younger son, Mr and Mrs Henry Harcourt Wynne Aubrey, precisely under the same delapidated circumstances. She, such a pretty woman, beautiful indeed, a great deal handsomer than Mrs Munro her sister. Two or three more there were of this same creditable description, and one very nice family who had certainly come to Brussels to economise while educating their many children; but then they had the sure prospect of a few years of prudent saving setting their affairs all right again. Mr Houlton had been building a very fine house. We may all know the cost of that amusement. Mrs Houlton, a fair specimen of a thoroughly English woman, handsome and pleasant, looked well after all under her control. The eldest son was in the Army, not with them; the second, a dear little George, was worth making a pet of. The two elder girls were beauties in different styles; the second, a Brunette, played the guitar in Spanish fashion, not picking at the strings, but sweeping them with the thumb, and she sang Spanish and Portuguese airs to this accompaniment so bewitchingly we were not at all surprised to hear afterwards that she had married well before she was 17. There was no danger of her marrying ill with that wide awake mother; and so the pretty Fanny never married at all. There were several clever younger sisters, but none of them possessed the remarkable good looks of the elder ones. We got extremely intimate with these Houltons, spent many walking or driving mornings, and happy musical evenings, together. They were from the West of England, from some
where near Bowood, Lord Lansdowne’s, I visited there, I forget the County.
All this time Mrs Gordon never came to call. He was with us daily, and had managed to carry us to his hairdresser and his shoemaker and his dressmaker, etc. I really believe they were all the best in their line, and they may not have charged us with the douceur given to our obliging friend—or they may; there was no knowing, At this period of our acquaintance suspicion of the cause of all the trouble taken for us had not entered into the heads of the most influential among us. A stray word of Mr Steuart of the Courier first enlightened us. Speaking of him once after his regular daily visit, when he had been as usual all kindness and very cheerful and agreeable, ‘Ah,’ said Mr Steuart, ‘poor devil! I wonder how the deuce the fellow gets on; never did a man throw opportunities away as did that poor Pryse Gordon, clever, very gentlemanly man, quite cleared out long before he had to run for it, how on earth does he manage to live here? On his countrymen? eh? a per centage on all waxes perhaps supplied by his tradesmen. He had not a penny left, nor has he any way of earning one. Who was the wife? had she money?’ That bit of news it seemed as if we were not likely to know. Mr Gordon made the civilest apologies for her non appearance, but she never came; her cold remained so very oppressive that she, being a delicate person, could not venture out so late in the year, September or October, while any cough continued. At length, the day after Mr Steuart departed to resume his editorial duties in London, Mrs Gordon’s cough had sufficiently moderated and Mr Gordon brolight her to see us, literally brought her, for she was evidently unwilling to come. She was very awkward, very reserved in manner, extremely silent, and instead of the slight delicate looking woman we expected, she was a great rawboned giantess with a scorbutick face. She must have had a fortune; that we were persuaded of. We found from George Conyngham that it was a jointure, and that she had been married for her beauty in very early youth.
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