Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales

Just now, as I told you, I’m in daily relation with three separate pairs.  The owner of one of them has private lessons; she pays extra.  My cousin doesn’t give me a sou of the money, but I consider nevertheless that I’m not a loser by the arrangement.  Also I’m well, very very well, with the proprietors of the two other pairs.  One of these is a little Anglaise of twenty—a figure de keepsake; the most adorable miss you ever, or at least I ever, beheld.  She’s hung all over with beads and bracelets and amulets, she’s embroidered all over like a sampler or a vestment; but her principal decoration consists of the softest and almost the hugest grey eyes in the world, which rest upon you with a profundity of confidence—a confidence I really feel some compunction in betraying.  She has a tint as white as this sheet of paper, except just in the middle of each cheek, where it passes into the purest and most transparent, most liquid, carmine.  Occasionally this rosy fluid overflows into the rest of her face—by which I mean that she blushes—as softly as the mark of your breath on the window-pane.

Like every Anglaise she’s rather pinched and prim in public; but it’s easy to see that when no one’s looking elle ne demande qu’à se laisser aller!  Whenever she wants it I’m always there, and I’ve given her to understand she can count upon me.  I’ve reason to believe she appreciates the assurance, though I’m bound in honesty to confess that with her the situation’s a little less advanced than with the others.  Que voulez-vous?  The English are heavy and the Anglaises move slowly, that’s all.  The movement, however, is perceptible, and once this fact’s established I can let the soup simmer, I can give her time to arrive, for I’m beautifully occupied with her competitors.  They don’t keep me waiting, please believe.

These young ladies are Americans, and it belongs to that national character to move fast.  “All right—go ahead!”  (I’m learning a great deal of English, or rather a great deal of American.)  They go ahead at a rate that sometimes makes it difficult for me to keep up.  One of them’s prettier than the other; but this latter—the one that takes the extra-private lessons—is really une fille étonnante.  Ah par exemple, elle brûle ses vaisseaux, celle-là!  She threw herself into my arms the very first day, and I almost owed her a grudge for having deprived me of that pleasure of gradation, of carrying the defences one by one, which is almost as great as that of entering the place.  For would you believe that at the end of exactly twelve minutes she gave me a rendezvous?  In the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre I admit; but that was respectable for a beginning, and since then we’ve had them by the dozen; I’ve ceased to keep the account.  Non, c’est une fille qui me dépasse.

The other, the slighter but “smarter” little person—she has a mother somewhere out of sight, shut up in a closet or a trunk—is a good deal prettier, and perhaps on that account elle y met plus de façons.  She doesn’t knock about Paris with me by the hour; she contents herself with long interviews in the petit salon, with the blinds half-drawn, beginning at about three o’clock, when every one is à la promenade.  She’s admirable, cette petite, a little too immaterial, with the bones rather over-accentuated, yet of a detail, on the whole, most satisfactory.  And you can say anything to her.  She takes the trouble to appear not to understand, but her conduct, half an hour afterwards, reassures you completely—oh completely!

However, it’s the big bouncer of the extra-private lessons who’s the most remarkable.  These private lessons, my good Prosper, are the most brilliant invention of the age, and a real stroke of genius on the part of Miss Miranda!  They also take place in the petit salon, but with the doors tightly closed and with explicit directions to every one in the house that we are not to be disturbed.  And we’re not, mon gros, we’re not!  Not a sound, not a shadow, interrupts our felicity.  My cousins are on the right track—such a house must make its fortune.  Miss Miranda’s too tall and too flat, with a certain want of coloration; she hasn’t the transparent rougeurs of the little Anglaise.  But she has wonderful far-gazing eyes, superb teeth, a nose modelled by a sculptor, and a way of holding up her head and looking every one in the face, which combines apparent innocence with complete assurance in a way I’ve never seen equalled.  She’s making the tour du monde, entirely alone, without even a soubrette to carry the ensign, for the purpose of seeing for herself, seeing à quoi s’en tenir sur les hommes et les choses—on les hommes particularly.  Dis donc, mon vieux, it must be a drôle de pays over there, where such a view of the right thing for the aspiring young bourgeoises is taken.  If we should turn the tables some day, thou and I, and go over and see it for ourselves?  Why isn’t it as well we should go and find them chez elles, as that they should come out here after us?  Dis donc, mon gros Prosper . . . !

VIII

FROM DR. RUDOLPH STAUB IN PARIS TO DR. JULIUS HIRSCH AT GÖTTINGEN

My dear Brother in Science,

I resume my hasty notes, of which I sent you the first instalment some weeks ago.  I mentioned that I intended to leave my hotel, not finding in it real matter.  It was kept by a Pomeranian and the waiters without exception were from the Fatherland.  I might as well have sat down with my note-book Unter den Linden, and I felt that, having come here for documentation, or to put my finger straight upon the social pulse, I should project myself as much as possible into the circumstances which are in part the consequence and in part the cause of its activities and intermittences.  I saw there could be no well-grounded knowledge without this preliminary operation of my getting a near view, as slightly as possible modified by elements proceeding from a different combination of forces, of the spontaneous home-life of the nation.

I accordingly engaged a room in the house of a lady of pure French extraction and education, who supplements the shortcomings of an income insufficient to the ever-growing demands of the Parisian system of sense-gratification by providing food and lodging for a limited number of distinguished strangers.  I should have preferred to have my room here only, and to take my meals in a brewery, of very good appearance, which I speedily discovered in the same street; but this arrangement, though very clearly set out by myself, was not acceptable to the mistress of the establishment—a woman with a mathematical head—and I have consoled myself for the extra expense by fixing my thoughts upon the great chance that conformity to the customs of the house gives me of studying the table-manners of my companions, and of observing the French nature at a peculiarly physiological moment, the moment when the satisfaction of the taste, which is the governing quality in its composition, produces a kind of exhalation, an intellectual transpiration, which, though light and perhaps invisible to a superficial spectator, is nevertheless appreciable by a properly adjusted instrument.  I’ve adjusted my instrument very satisfactorily—I mean the one I carry in my good square German head—and I’m not afraid of losing a single drop of this valuable fluid as it condenses itself upon the plate of my observation.  A prepared surface is what I need, and I’ve prepared my surface.

Unfortunately here also I find the individual native in the minority.  There are only four French persons in the house—the individuals concerned in its management, three of whom are women, and one a man.  Such a preponderance of the Weibliche is, however, in itself characteristic, as I needn’t remind you what an abnormally-developed part this sex has played in French history.  The remaining figure is ostensibly that of a biped, and apparently that of a man, but I hesitate to allow him the whole benefit of the higher classification.  He strikes me as less human than simian, and whenever I hear him talk I seem to myself to have paused in the street to listen to the shrill clatter of a hand-organ, to which the gambols of a hairy homunculus form an accompaniment.

I mentioned to you before that my expectation of rough usage in consequence of my unattenuated, even if not frivolously aggressive, Teutonism was to prove completely unfounded.  No one seems either unduly conscious or affectedly unperceiving of my so rich Berlin background; I’m treated on the contrary with the positive civility which is the portion of every traveller who pays the bill without scanning the items too narrowly.  This, I confess, has been something of a surprise to me, and I’ve not yet made up my mind as to the fundamental cause of the anomaly.  My determination to take up my abode in a French interior was largely dictated by the supposition that I should be substantially disagreeable to its inmates.  I wished to catch in the fact the different forms taken by the irritation I should naturally produce; for it is under the influence of irritation that the French character most completely expresses itself.  My presence, however, operates, as I say, less than could have been hoped as a stimulus, and in this respect I’m materially disappointed.  They treat me as they treat every one else; whereas, in order to be treated differently, I was resigned in advance to being treated worse.  A further proof, if any were needed, of that vast and, as it were, fluid waste (I have so often dwelt on to you) which attends the process of philosophic secretion.  I’ve not, I repeat, fully explained to myself this logical contradiction; but this is the explanation to which I tend.  The French are so exclusively occupied with the idea of themselves that in spite of the very definite image the German personality presented to them by the war of 1870 they have at present no distinct apprehension of its existence.  They are not very sure that there are, concretely, any Germans; they have already forgotten the convincing proofs presented to them nine years ago.  A German was something disagreeable and disconcerting, an irreducible mass, which they determined to keep out of their conception of things.  I therefore hold we’re wrong to govern ourselves upon the hypothesis of the revanche; the French nature is too shallow for that large and powerful plant to bloom in it.

The English-speaking specimens, too, I’ve not been willing to neglect the opportunity to examine; and among these I’ve paid special attention to the American varieties, of which I find here several singular examples.  The two most remarkable are a young man who presents all the characteristics of a period of national decadence; reminding me strongly of some diminutive Hellenised Roman of the third century.  He’s an illustration of the period of culture in which the faculty of appreciation has obtained such a preponderance over that of production that the latter sinks into a kind of rank sterility, and the mental condition becomes analogous to that of a malarious bog.  I hear from him of the existence of an immense number of Americans exactly resembling him, and that the city of Boston indeed is almost exclusively composed of them.  (He communicated this fact very proudly, as if it were greatly to the credit of his native country; little perceiving the truly sinister impression it made on me.)

What strikes one in it is that it is a phenomenon to the best of my knowledge—and you know what my knowledge is—unprecedented and unique in the history of mankind; the arrival of a nation at an ultimate stage of evolution without having passed through the mediate one; the passage of the fruit, in other words, from crudity to rottenness, without the interposition of a period of useful (and ornamental) ripeness.  With the Americans indeed the crudity and the rottenness are identical and simultaneous; it is impossible to say, as in the conversation of this deplorable young man, which is the one and which the other: they’re inextricably confused.  Homunculus for homunculus I prefer that of the Frenchman; he’s at least more amusing.

It’s interesting in this manner to perceive, so largely developed, the germs of extinction in the so-called powerful Anglo-Saxon family.  I find them in almost as recognisable a form in a young woman from the State of Maine, in the province of New England, with whom I have had a good deal of conversation.  She differs somewhat from the young man I just mentioned in that the state of affirmation, faculty of production and capacity for action are things, in her, less inanimate; she has more of the freshness and vigour that we suppose to belong to a young civilisation.  But unfortunately she produces nothing but evil, and her tastes and habits are similarly those of a Roman lady of the lower Empire.  She makes no secret of them and has in fact worked out a complete scheme of experimental adventure, that is of personal licence, which she is now engaged in carrying out.  As the opportunities she finds in her own country fail to satisfy her she has come to Europe “to try,” as she says, “for herself.”  It’s the doctrine of universal “unprejudiced” experience professed with a cynicism that is really most extraordinary, and which, presenting itself in a young woman of considerable education, appears to me to be the judgement of a society.

Another observation which pushes me to the same induction—that of the premature vitiation of the American population—is the attitude of the Americans whom I have before me with regard to each other.  I have before me a second flower of the same huge so-called democratic garden, who is less abnormally developed than the one I have just described, but who yet bears the stamp of this peculiar combination of the barbarous and, to apply to them one of their own favourite terms, the ausgespielt, the “played-out.”  These three little persons look with the greatest mistrust and aversion upon each other; and each has repeatedly taken me apart and assured me secretly, that he or she only is the real, the genuine, the typical American.  A type that has lost itself before it has been fixed—what can you look for from this?

Add to this that there are two young Englanders in the house who hate all the Americans in a lump, making between them none of the distinctions and favourable comparisons which they insist upon, and for which, as involving the recognition of shades and a certain play of the critical sense, the still quite primitive insular understanding is wholly inapt, and you will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that, between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family is destined to consume itself, and that with its decline the prospect of successfully-organised conquest and unarrested incalculable expansion, to which I alluded above, will brighten for the deep-lunged children of the Fatherland!

IX

MIRANDA HOPE TO HER MOTHER

October 22.

Dear Mother,

I’m off in a day or two to visit some new country; I haven’t yet decided which.  I’ve satisfied myself with regard to France, and obtained a good knowledge of the language.  I’ve enjoyed my visit to Madame de Maisonrouge deeply, and feel as if I were leaving a circle of real friends.  Everything has gone on beautifully up to the end, and every one has been as kind and attentive as if I were their own sister, especially Mr. Verdier, the French gentleman, from whom I have gained more than I ever expected (in six weeks) and with whom I have promised to correspond.  So you can imagine me dashing off the liveliest and yet the most elegant French letters; and if you don’t believe in them I’ll keep the rough drafts to show you when I go back.

The German gentleman is also more interesting the more you know him; it seems sometimes as if I could fairly drink in his ideas.  I’ve found out why the young lady from New York doesn’t like me!  It’s because I said one day at dinner that I admired to go to the Louvre.  Well, when I first came it seemed as if I did admire everything!  Tell William Platt his letter has come.  I knew he’d have to write, and I was bound I’d make him!  I haven’t decided what country I’ll visit next; it seems as if there were so many to choose from.  But I must take care to pick out a good one and to meet plenty of fresh experiences.  Dearest mother, my money holds out, and it is most interesting!

THE POINT OF VIEW

I

FROM MISS AURORA CHURCH AT SEA TO MISS WHITESIDE IN PARIS

September 1880.

My dear child, the bromide of sodium (if that’s what you call it) proved perfectly useless.  I don’t mean that it did me no good, but that I never had occasion to take the bottle out of my bag.  It might have done wonders for me if I had needed it; but I didn’t, simply because I’ve been a wonder myself.  Will you believe that I’ve spent the whole voyage on deck, in the most animated conversation and exercise?  Twelve times round the deck make a mile, I believe; and by this measurement I’ve been walking twenty miles a day.  And down to every meal, if you please, where I’ve displayed the appetite of a fishwife.  Of course the weather has been lovely; so there’s no great merit.  The wicked old Atlantic has been as blue as the sapphire in my only ring—rather a good one—and as smooth as the slippery floor of Madame Galopin’s dining-room.  We’ve been for the last three hours in sight of land, and are soon to enter the Bay of New York which is said to be exquisitely beautiful.  But of course you recall it, though they say everything changes so fast over here.  I find I don’t remember anything, for my recollections of our voyage to Europe so many years ago are exceedingly dim; I’ve only a painful impression that mamma shut me up for an hour every day in the stateroom and made me learn by heart some religious poem.  I was only five years old and I believe that as a child I was extremely timid; on the other hand mamma, as you know, had what she called a method with me.  She has it to this day; only I’ve become indifferent; I’ve been so pinched and pushed—morally speaking, bien entendu.  It’s true, however, that there are children of five on the vessel to-day who have been extremely conspicuous—ranging all over the ship and always under one’s feet.  Of course they’re little compatriots, which means that they’re little barbarians.  I don’t mean to pronounce all our compatriots barbarous; they seem to improve somehow after their first communion.  I don’t know whether it’s that ceremony that improves them, especially as so few of them go in for it; but the women are certainly nicer than the little girls; I mean of course in proportion, you know.  You warned me not to generalise, and you see I’ve already begun, before we’ve arrived.  But I suppose there’s no harm in it so long as it’s favourable.

Isn’t it favourable when I say I’ve had the most lovely time?  I’ve never had so much liberty in my life, and I’ve been out alone, as you may say, every day of the voyage.  If it’s a foretaste of what’s to come I shall take very kindly to that.  When I say I’ve been out alone I mean we’ve always been two.  But we two were alone, so to speak, and it wasn’t like always having mamma or Madame Galopin, or some lady in the pension or the temporary cook.  Mamma has been very poorly; she’s so very well on land that it’s a wonder to see her at all taken down.  She says, however, that it isn’t the being at sea; it’s on the contrary approaching the land.  She’s not in a hurry to arrive; she keeps well before her that great disillusions await us.  I didn’t know she had any illusions—she has too many opinions, I should think, for that: she discriminates, as she’s always saying, from morning till night.  Where would the poor illusions find room?  She’s meanwhile very serious; she sits for hours in perfect silence, her eyes fixed on the horizon.  I heard her say yesterday to an English gentleman—a very odd Mr. Antrobus, the only person with whom she converses—that she was afraid she shouldn’t like her native land, and that she shouldn’t like not liking it.  But this is a mistake; she’ll like that immensely—I mean the not liking it.  If it should prove at all agreeable she’ll be furious, for that will go against her system.  You know all about mamma’s system; I’ve explained it so often.  It goes against her system that we should come back at all; that was my system—I’ve had at last to invent one!  She consented to come only because she saw that, having no dot, I should never marry in Europe; and I pretended to be immensely preoccupied with this idea in order to make her start.  In reality cela m’est parfaitement égal.  I’m only afraid I shall like it too much—I don’t mean marriage, of course, but the sense of a native land.  Say what you will, it’s a charming thing to go out alone, and I’ve given notice that I mean to be always en course.  When I tell mamma this she looks at me in the same silence; her eyes dilate and then she slowly closes them.  It’s as if the sea were affecting her a little, though it’s so beautifully calm.  I ask her if she’ll try my bromide, which is there in my bag; but she motions me off and I begin to walk again, tapping my little boot-soles on the smooth clean deck.  This allusion to my boot-soles, by the way, isn’t prompted by vanity; but it’s a fact that at sea one’s feet and one’s shoes assume the most extraordinary importance, so that one should take the precaution to have nice ones.  They’re all you seem to see as the people walk about the deck; you get to know them intimately and to dislike some of them so much.  I’m afraid you’ll think that I’ve already broken loose; and for aught I know I’m writing as a demoiselle bien-élévee shouldn’t write.  I don’t know whether it’s the American air; if it is, all I can say is that the American air’s very charming.  It makes me impatient and restless, and I sit scribbling here because I’m so eager to arrive and the time passes better if I occupy myself.

I’m in the saloon, where we have our meals, and opposite me is a big round porthole, wide open to let in the smell of the land.  Every now and then I rise a little and look through it to see if we’re arriving.  I mean in the Bay, you know, for we shall not come up to the city till dark.  I don’t want to lose the Bay; it appears it’s so wonderful.  I don’t exactly understand what it contains except some beautiful islands; but I suppose you’ll know all about that.  It’s easy to see that these are the last hours, for all the people about me are writing letters to put into the post as soon as we come up to the dock.  I believe they’re dreadful at the custom-house, and you’ll remember how many new things you persuaded mamma that—with my preoccupation of marriage—I should take to this country, where even the prettiest girls are expected not to go unadorned.  We ruined ourselves in Paris—that’s partly accountable for mamma’s solemnity—mais au moins je serai belle!  Moreover I believe that mamma’s prepared to say or to do anything that may be necessary for escaping from their odious duties; as she very justly remarks she can’t afford to be ruined twice.  I don’t know how one approaches these terrible douaniers, but I mean to invent something very charming.  I mean to say “Voyons, Messieurs, a young girl like me, brought up in the strictest foreign traditions, kept always in the background by a very superior mother—la voilà; you can see for yourself!—what is it possible that she should attempt to smuggle in?  Nothing but a few simple relics of her convent!”  I won’t tell them my convent was called the Magasin du Bon Marché.  Mamma began to scold me three days ago for insisting on so many trunks, and the truth is that between us we’ve not fewer than seven.  For relics, that’s a good many!  We’re all writing very long letters—or at least we’re writing a great number.  There’s no news of the Bay as yet.  Mr. Antrobus, mamma’s friend, opposite to me, is beginning on his ninth.  He’s a Right Honourable and a Member of Parliament; he has written during the voyage about a hundred letters and seems greatly alarmed at the number of stamps he’ll have to buy when he arrives.  He’s full of information, but he hasn’t enough, for he asks as many questions as mamma when she goes to hire apartments.  He’s going to “look into” various things; he speaks as if they had a little hole for the purpose.  He walks almost as much as I, and has enormous shoes.  He asks questions even of me, and I tell him again and again that I know nothing about America.  But it makes no difference; he always begins again, and indeed it’s not strange he should find my ignorance incredible.  “Now how would it be in one of your South-western States?”—that’s his favourite way of opening conversation.  Fancy me giving an account of one of “my” South-western States!  I tell him he had better ask mamma—a little to tease that lady, who knows no more about such places than I.  Mr. Antrobus is very big and black; he speaks with a sort of brogue; he has a wife and ten children; he doesn’t say—apart from his talking—anything at all to me.  But he has lots of letters to people là-bas—I forget that we’re just arriving—and mamma, who takes an interest in him in spite of his views (which are dreadfully advanced, and not at all like mamma’s own) has promised to give him the entrée to the best society.  I don’t know what she knows about the best society over here to-day, for we’ve not kept up our connexions at all, and no one will know—or, I am afraid, care—anything about us.  She has an idea we shall be immensely recognised; but really, except the poor little Rucks, who are bankrupt and, I’m told, in no society at all, I don’t know on whom we can count.  C’est égal, mamma has an idea that, whether or no we appreciate America ourselves, we shall at least be universally appreciated.  It’s true we have begun to be, a little; you would see that from the way Mr. Cockerel and Mr. Louis Leverett are always inviting me to walk.  Both of these gentlemen, who are Americans, have asked leave to call on me in New York, and I’ve said Mon Dieu oui, if it’s the custom of the country.  Of course I’ve not dared to tell this to mamma, who flatters herself that we’ve brought with us in our trunks a complete set of customs of our own and that we shall only have to shake them out a little and put them on when we arrive.  If only the two gentlemen I just spoke of don’t call at the same time I don’t think I shall be too much frightened.  If they do, on the other hand, I won’t answer for it.  They’ve a particular aversion to each other and are ready to fight about poor little me.  I’m only the pretext, however; for, as Mr. Leverett says, it’s really the opposition of temperaments.  I hope they won’t cut each other’s throats, for I’m not crazy about either of them.  They’re very well for the deck of a ship, but I shouldn’t care about them in a salon; they’re not at all distinguished.  They think they are, but they’re not; at least Mr. Louis Leverett does; Mr. Cockerel doesn’t appear to care so much.  They’re extremely different—with their opposed temperaments—and each very amusing for a while; but I should get dreadfully tired of passing my life with either.  Neither has proposed that as yet; but it’s evidently what they’re coming to.  It will be in a great measure to spite each other, for I think that au fond they don’t quite believe in me.  If they don’t, it’s the only point on which they agree.  They hate each other awfully; they take such different views.  That is Mr. Cockerel hates Mr. Leverett—he calls him a sickly little ass; he pronounces his opinions half affectation and the other half dyspepsia.  Mr. Leverett speaks of Mr. Cockerel as a “strident savage,” but he allows he finds him most diverting.  He says there’s nothing in which we can’t find a certain entertainment if we only look at it in the right way, and that we have no business with either hating or loving: we ought only to strive to understand.  He “claims”—he’s always claiming—that to understand is to forgive.  Which is very pretty, but I don’t like the suppression of our affections, though I’ve no desire to fix mine upon Mr. Leverett.  He’s very artistic and talks like an article in some review.  He has lived a great deal in Paris, and Mr. Cockerel, who doesn’t believe in Paris, says it’s what has made him such an idiot.