CHAPTER XXVII

FOREIGN NEIGHBOURS

“One of the prettiest dwellings in our neighbourhood,” writes Miss Mitford in one of her stories, “is the Lime Cottage at Burley-Hatch. It consists of a low-browed habitation, so entirely covered with jessamine, honeysuckle, passion-flowers and china roses, as to resemble a bower, and is placed in the centre of a large garden. On either side of the neat gravel walk which leads from the outer gate to the door of the cottage stand the large and beautiful trees to which it owes its name; spreading their strong, broad shadow over the turf beneath, and sending, on a summer afternoon, their rich spring fragrance half across the irregular village green....

“Such is the habitation of Thérèse de G., an _émigrée_ of distinction, whose aunt having married an English officer, was luckily able to afford her niece an asylum during the horrors of the Revolution, and to secure to her a small annuity and the Lime Cottage after her death. There she has lived for five-and-thirty years, gradually losing sight of her few and distant foreign connections, and finding all her happiness in her pleasant home and her kind neighbours—a standing lesson in cheerfulness and contentment.

“A very popular person is Mademoiselle Thérèse—popular both with high and low; for the prejudice which the country people almost universally entertain against foreigners vanished directly before the charm of her manners.... She is so kind to them too, so liberal of the produce of her orchard and garden and so full of resources in their difficulties. Among the rich she is equally beloved. No party is complete without the pleasant French woman. Her conversation is not very powerful, not very brilliant—but then it is so good-natured, so genuine, so constantly up and alive;—to say nothing of the charm which it derives from her language, which is alternately the most graceful and purest French and the most diverting and absurd broken English....

“Her appearance betrays her country almost as much as her speech. She is a French-looking little personage with a slight, active figure, exceedingly nimble and alert in every movement; a round and darkly complexioned face, somewhat faded and passée but still striking from the laughing eyes. Nevertheless, in her youth, she must have been pretty; so pretty that some of our young ladies, scandalised at finding their favourite an old maid, have invented sundry legends to excuse the solecism, and talk of duels fought _pour l’amour de ses beaux yeux_, and of a betrothed lover guillotined in the Revolution. And the thing may have been so; although one meets everywhere with old maids who have been pretty, and whose lovers have not been guillotined. I rather suspect our fair demoiselle of having been in her youth a little of a flirt.

“Even during her residence at Burley-Hatch hath not she indulged in divers very distant, very discreet, very decorous, but still very evident flirtations? Did not Doctor Abdy, the portly, ruddy schoolmaster of B. dangle after her for three mortal years, holidays excepted? And did she not refuse him at last? And Mr. Foreclose, the thin, withered, wrinkled city solicitor, a man, so to say, smoke-dried, who comes down every year to Burley for the air, did not he do suit and service to her during four long vacations with the same ill-success? Was not Sir Thomas himself a little smitten? Nay, even now, does not the good major, a halting veteran of seventy—but really it is too bad to tell tales out of the parish—all that is certain is that Mademoiselle Thérèse might have changed her name long before now had she so chosen.

“Her household consists of her little maid Betsy, a cherry-cheeked, blue-eyed country lass, who with a fair unmeaning countenance, copies the looks and gestures of her alert and vivacious mistress, and of a fat lap-dog, called Fido, silky, sleepy and sedate....

“If everybody is delighted to receive this most welcome visitor, so is everybody delighted to accept her graceful invitations, and meet to eat strawberries at Burley-Hatch.

“Oh, how pleasant are those summer afternoons, sitting under the blossomed limes, with the sun shedding a golden light through the broad branches, the bees murmuring overhead, roses and lilies all about us, and the choicest fruit served up in wicker baskets of her own making.... Those are pleasant meetings; nor are her little winter parties less agreeable, when to two or three female friends assembled round their coffee, she will tell thrilling stories of that terrible Revolution, so fertile in great crimes and great virtues. Or [relate] gayer anecdotes of the brilliant days preceding that convulsion, the days which Madame de Genlis has described so well, when Paris was the capital of pleasure, and amusement the business of life; illustrating her descriptions by a series of spirited drawings of costumes and characters done by herself, and always finishing by producing a group of Louis Seize, Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, and Madame Elizabeth, as she had last seen them at Versailles—the only recollections that ever bring tears into her smiling eyes.

“Madame Thérèse’s loyalty to the Bourbons was in truth a very real feeling. Her family had been about the Court, and she had imbibed an enthusiasm for the royal sufferers natural to a young and warm heart—she loved the Bourbons and hated Napoleon with like ardour. All her other French feelings had for some time been a little modified. She was not quite so sure as she had been that France was the only country, and Paris the only city of the world; that Shakespeare was a barbarian, and Milton no poet; that the perfume of English limes was nothing compared to French orange trees; that the sun never shone in England; and that sea-coal fires were bad things.... Her loyalty to her legitimate king was, however, as strong as ever, and that loyalty had nearly cost us our dear mademoiselle.

“After the Restoration, she hastened, as fast as steamboat and diligence could carry her, to enjoy the delight of seeing once more the Bourbons and the Tuileries; took leave, between smiles and tears, of her friends, and of Burley-Hatch, carrying with her a branch of the lime-tree, then in blossom, and commissioning her old lover, Mr. Foreclose, to dispose of the cottage: but in less than three months, luckily before Mr. Foreclose had found a purchaser, mademoiselle came home again. She complained of nobody; but times were altered. The house in which she was born was pulled down; her friends were scattered, her kindred dead; Madame (la Duchess d’Angoulême) did not remember her ... the King did not know her again (poor man! he had not seen her for these thirty years); Paris was a new city; the French were a new people; she missed the sea-coal fires; and for the stunted orange-trees at the Tuileries, what were they compared with the blossomed limes of Burley-Hatch!”[11]

[Footnote 11: We think this place may have been intended for Burghfield Hatch.]

Another foreign neighbour, described by Miss Mitford, was an old French _émigré_ who came to reside in “the small town of Hazelby”; a pretty little place where everything seemed at a standstill.... “It has not even a cheap shop,” she remarks, “for female gear.... The very literature of Hazelby is doled out at the pastry-cook’s, in a little one-windowed shop, kept by Matthew Wise. Tarts occupy one end of the counter and reviews the other; whilst the shelves are parcelled out between books, and dolls, and ginger-bread. It is a question by which of his trades poor Matthew gains least.”

Here it was that the old _émigré_ lodged “in a low three-cornered room, over the little shop, which Matthew Wise designated his ‘first floor.’” Little was known of him, but that he was a thin, pale, foreign-looking gentleman, who shrugged his shoulders in speaking, took a great deal of snuff, and made a remarkably low bow. But it soon appeared from a written paper placed in a conspicuous part of Matthew’s shop, that he was an Abbé, and that he would do himself the honour of teaching French to any of the nobility and gentry of Hazelby who might think fit to employ him. Pupils dropped in rather slowly. The curate’s daughters, and the attorney’s son, and Miss Deane the milliner—but she found the language difficult, and left off, asserting that M. l’Abbé’s snuff made her nervous. At last poor M. l’Abbé fell ill, really ill, dangerously ill, and Matthew Wise went in all haste to summon Mr. Hallett (the apothecary)....

“Now Mr. Hallett was what is usually called a rough diamond. He piqued himself on being a plain downright Englishman [and] he had such an aversion to a Frenchman, in general, as a cat has to a dog: and was wont to erect himself into an attitude of defiance and wrath at the mere sight of the object of his antipathy. He hated and despised the whole nation, abhorred the language, and “would as lief,” he assured Matthew, “have been called in to a toad.” He went, however, grew interested in the case, which was difficult and complicated; exerted all his skill, and in about a month accomplished a cure.”

By this time he had also become interested in his patient, whose piety, meekness, and resignation had won upon him in an extraordinary degree. The disease was gone, but a languor and lowness remained, which Mr. Hallett soon traced to a less curable disorder, poverty. The thought of the debt to himself evidently weighed on the poor Abbé’s spirits, and our good apothecary at last determined to learn French purely to liquidate his own long bill.

It was the drollest thing in the world to see this pupil of fifty, whose habits were so entirely unfitted for a learner, conning his task.... He was a most unpromising scholar, shuffled the syllables together in a manner that would seem incredible, and stumbled at every step of the pronunciation, against which his English tongue rebelled amain. Every now and then he solaced himself with a fluent volley of execrations in his own language, which the Abbé understood well enough to return, after rather a polite fashion, in French. It was a most amusing scene. But the motive! the generous noble motive!

M. l’Abbé after a few lessons detected this delicate artifice, and, touched almost to tears, insisted on dismissing his pupil, who, on his side, declared that nothing should induce him to abandon his studies. At last they came to a compromise. The cherry-cheeked Margaret ... [who kept the doctor’s house] took her uncle’s post as a learner, which she filled in a manner much more satisfactory; and the good old Frenchman not only allowed Mr. Hallett to administer gratis to his ailments, but partook of his Sunday dinner as long as he lived.

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