Four Years in France Part 11

Yet I calculate that at the end of forty-two months, including what the journey to Avignon cost me, and the difference between the price at which my furniture was bought, and that at which it was sold,--I had spent, within one twentieth, as much as it would have cost me to live in my county town in England with the the same establishment and in the same manner. The smaller the income annually expended, the greater in proportion will be the saving; because it is chiefly on the necessary articles of living, that expense is spared; but a man of large, or even of moderate fortune, will hardly think it worth his while to dwell many years in a foreign country merely for the sake of saving five pounds in a hundred. The less the distance to which he travels, and the longer his stay; the more he becomes acquainted with the mode of dealing, and learns what are just prices;--the greater proportionably will be the savings of the economizing resident. A saving of five per cent is at least not a loss. Wise men should not entertain extravagant expectations, and prudent men should know what they are about to undertake. Those who are neither wise nor prudent had better stay at home: I do not write for such; but to give to family men such advice as I found no one capable of giving me; but which, through much toil and cost and peril, I had obtained the faculty of offering to others.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] O cherished liberty! in vain I follow after thee: I see thy _tree_ every where, and thy fruits no where.

[51] But it is in suffering continually.

[52] But what would you have? the air is on fire.

[53] A mean or medium winter.

[54] I am a better gentleman than my father, because I have one generation more.

[55] There is no harm in that.

[56] There is no bad smell. This fire makes itself respected. What a heat!

CHAP. XII.

Excepting only Rome and its immediate neighbourhood, no part of Italy can exhibit so many remains of Roman antiquity as are to be found within a short distance of Avignon. The Romans seem to have united Provence to Italy, as the French have since united Piedmont to France. Our English travellers, who, according to the plan mentioned in the first chapter, pa.s.s one summer in going to Italy and another in returning from it, will do well to make Avignon their head quarters for some time, and visit the curiosities around. There is Nismes with the Pont du Gard, Arles, St.

Remy, Orange, already mentioned, and other places. There is also the far-famed fountain of Vaucluse. A commission of antiquarian research is established within the department; at Nismes also much attention is paid to these objects, and with good reason; for no town in Europe, Rome excepted, possesses such precious remains.

In the beginning of the month of September of my second year, I hired a coach with three horses again, (for no G.o.d of them all is so fond of an uneven number as these coach-masters,) and, with part of my family, took the road to Vaucluse. It pa.s.ses first over a fertile alluvial plain, formed, in remote ages, by the Rhone and Durance when they overflowed their banks, as the Oby and Tobol do now. Then we traversed a country of corn, wine, and oil, and descended to Lisle, a little town on the Sorgues, the river of Vaucluse, from whose fountain it is distant about four miles. For three of these four miles as far as the village, we were able to proceed in our carriage; but, from this point, the Naiad requires to be reverentially approached on foot. We ascended a gentle steep, the Sorgues on our right-hand,--a stream, which, even here, so near its head, has force to turn several mills that harmonise well with the landscape. Above the mills it began to a.s.sume more and more a torrent-like appearance; the rocks approached nearer on each side, and confined us within a still closer valley. Whither has the nymph of the stream retired? At length the termination of the valley appeared before us; a lofty curtain of rock, at half the height of which was seen a wide and dusky arch, overshadowed by a fig-tree growing out of the precipice above. Over a shelving rock, at the foot of this arch, the water throws itself.

But there was at this time no cascade; the fountain was more than ordinarily low; streams gushed through fissures at the foot and sides of the rock below the arch, and indicated their source. The shelf or lip, at the mouth of the cavern, forms a natural bridge over these streams: we ascended to this shelf, and went down into the cavern a considerable depth before we arrived at the water: here, a rock projecting into the water prevented us from going into a second cavern; but we could see, (for the opening above afforded sufficient light,) that this second cavern was the last.

I thought it very fortunate that the fountain was so low: had it been full, we should have seen a water-fall; but I had now seen the Helicon of Petrarch,--had penetrated to the source of his inspiration,

------atque sacri libamina palleo fontis,

as was written by a young man of genius at Oxford, in my time, whose name I do not remember, though I have not forgotten this striking and beautiful expression. In sober sadness, I think it an advantage to understand the nature and situation of the fountain better than I should have done had I seen only a picturesque cascade. I do not believe the immediate source of the fountain to be within the cavern, but that its waters are supplied in subterranean courses by the surrounding country: this is proved, I think, by their quant.i.ty being so much affected by rain or drought. St. Winifred's well at Holywell, in Flints.h.i.+re,--a fountain as copious as that of the Sorgues,--is not at all increased or diminished by any change of the seasons.

We loitered for two hours on the bank of the tumbling torrent, sat under the shade of walnut trees, and eat of their fallen fruit; drank water from the fountain, talked about Petrarch and Laura, and refused, from incredulity, and on account of the heat of the sun, to mount a hill to a house which, we were a.s.sured, had been inhabited by the bard. At the village of Vaucluse, we took into our carriage some delicious grapes, and returned to Lisle, where we dined on eels and trout, the boasted fare of the place, prepared in three several ways. As the landlord at Lisle is said sometimes to over-charge, I will do his reputation the justice to observe that, for a dejeune a la fourchette, and dinner for five persons, with good vin du pays, he demanded twenty-five francs,--perhaps ten sous a head too much. We got into our coach as the sun set and the moon rose, and our three horses took us back to Avignon in two hours.

In the very heart and centre of the romantic scenery of the Vallis Clausa, a little to the right of the cavern out of which issues the fountain, on the ledge over which it falls, is stuck a mean ugly pillar, put there by somebody to commemorate something. I mention this pillar only in the hope that good taste will command its demolition. Even if it were fine and rare, it would be there misplaced: "forta.s.se cupressum scis simulare," but what has that to do with a s.h.i.+pwreck?

My younger son had accompanied to Vaucluse the lady whose visit of fifteen days had so much astonished the Avignonais a few months before.

Our excursion thither was made under the conduct of my elder son, and was rendered more agreeable by his frank manners and cheerful attentions. As the fate of this young man, now in his nineteenth year, is the occurrence the most important to me, and, I am persuaded, the subject most interesting to my readers in the contents of this narrative,--I will give some account of the infancy of this son, that he may be introduced to their acquaintance, and the last scene of his life in some sort prepared for. Alas! within two years, on the anniversary of our journey to Vaucluse, the delirium of his fever deprived me for the remainder of my life of the comfort of his society, excepting only one short and consoling conversation immediately before his death. I trust, in the divine mercy, to rejoin him in the abodes of the just.

His birth was announced to me at three o'clock in the morning of the 5th of May 1801. In anxious expectation of this news I had forborn to retire to rest. It was still necessary for me to wait some little time before I could be admitted to see my first-born. I then lived at Bath, in the west wing of Lansdown Crescent: behind each house of this building is a long strip of garden, of the breadth of the house. In the tumult of new affections I went out into my garden: the twilight of the morning was visible: I offered to G.o.d this child, who, by the ancient law, would have been consecrated to him, to serve at the altar, if such were the divine will; praying that, in whatever state, he might so live as to secure his own salvation, and contribute to the edification of others: that if he were not to fulfil this only worthy purpose of existence, he might now die in infancy; but that rather his days might be prolonged, if that were to the glory of G.o.d, and the increase of his own merit and reward. My prayer was heard: I returned into the house, and gave a father's blessing to the stranger.

He received in baptism the names Henry Kenelm; the former adopted in his family for the last four generations, the latter derived from my maternal grandfather. His sponsors were Sir Thomas Fletewood, the last of an ancient and pious family of Ches.h.i.+re; and his lady, afterwards married to the Count St. Martin de Front, Sardinian amba.s.sador at London. To her it is no doubt a source of Christian consolation to know, even in this life, that her G.o.dson fulfilled the engagement contracted in his name.

They who have attentively observed the early years of children must be convinced that each and every one of them is born with a distinct and individual character. Two men of fifty, "stained with the variation of each soil," will differ from each other in manners and opinions more than two children of the same family: but two children of the same family will, in character, differ from each other as much as two men of fifty. Pascal suggests a doubt whether, as custom is called a second nature, nature itself may not be a former custom. This profound thought leads to the question whether human souls have existed previously to their imprisonment in this "body of our humiliation." That they have so existed I think extremely probable for many very cogent reasons: it is an opinion which I could defend, merely as an opinion, by many powerful arguments. I am contented "not to be wise beyond what is written." Yet it is written that, when the disciples asked our Lord, "Did this man sin or his parents, that he was born blind?" our Lord, without reproving the supposition that the man might have sinned before his birth, simply answered, "Neither did this man sin, nor his parents."

Henry Kenelm manifested, as early as the natural character can be manifested, a proud, impetuous, obstinate, angry temper: that he wanted any thing was, with him, a reason why he should have it; that any other child was younger or weaker than himself, ent.i.tled him, as he thought, to domineer. He had also the good qualities usually opposed to these faults in the same character; he was generous, grateful, confiding, compa.s.sionate. As no one, in so short a life, ever more completely subdued than he did the faults of his natural temper, I record them for the sake of doing homage to that religion by the aid of which he was enabled to correct them.

His understanding was quick and lively, and he learned readily and with pleasure. A cause of hindrance and delay that occurred to him in learning to read shall here be mentioned as a caution to parents, inst.i.tutors, and governesses. To play at learning to read is regarded as a great improvement on the "Reading-made-easy," of less enlightened times. A lady made him a present of a cylindrical ivory box containing counters, on which were inscribed the letters of the alphabet. He trundled the box on the carpet, he threw the letters on the carpet, and viewed them in all directions, sometimes sideways, sometimes topsy-turvy; so that he no longer knew them again when he saw them upright in a book: b and q and d and p more especially puzzled him: besides, the place of letters in words is of great use towards learning their power, and this help his counters did not afford him. To impose on him the task of arranging the letters in _verbal_ order, would have included all the restraint of a formal lesson. The conclusion is, that if children play, they do not learn; and while they learn, they must not play: there is a time for all things: their lessons must be short on account of the softness of the brain, but attention must be insisted on; they cannot be cheated as to the nature of the occupation, but they have sense enough to find pleasure in the consciousness of improvement.

When Kenelm was little more than five years and a half old, his elder sister died: she was thirteen months younger than himself. Never was child more lovely in death than this little girl. I gazed on her with the feeling, since portrayed in the inimitable lines of the Giaour, beginning

He who hath bent him o'er the dead.

These lines I read fourteen years afterwards at Avignon; they thrilled and electrified me: the touch of genius recalled the scene I had witnessed. Yet it should seem that a.s.sociations supplied by reason and experience are requisite to the contemplation of such an object with the sentiments described by Lord Byron. I led Kenelm to see his sister two hours after her death: terror was his predominant emotion; the immobility of what still so much resembled life appalled him. He burst into tears. "If I had thought she would have looked _so_, I would not have come to see her;" nor could he for some time pa.s.s the door of that chamber without shuddering.

When he was twelve years old, I placed him at Stoneyhurst college in Lancas.h.i.+re. This society of English Jesuits, the dreadful Jesuits of St. Omers, of the Popish plot, had, within half a century, suffered three removes or _demenagemens_, which both the French and English proverb says are worse than a fire. They had been expelled from St.

Omers by the French government, had been obliged by Joseph II. to quit Bruges, and had been driven from Liege by the approach of the French armies. They had now been established for some years in a country-seat of the family of Lulworth castle. Mr. Weld had given them a beneficial lease of the house and domain of Stoneyhurst, for which they expressed much grat.i.tude. It is good to be grateful: grat.i.tude is a Christian virtue, and well-becoming those who by their missions, their literary labours, and their inst.i.tutions for education, have acquired so much glory to themselves, and rendered such signal services to the Christian world. Let them always be grateful.

An account of their plan of education may not be unacceptable, and may furnish some hints to the heads of our great schools. I am inclined to think that the Jesuits, though as much spoken against, are very little more known in England than at the time when I left it.

The whole number of boys, about two hundred and fifty, is divided into six schools or cla.s.ses, to each of which a master is appointed, who, in the course of six years, conducts his set of boys, from the elements of grammar in the French, Latin, and Greek languages, to rhetoric, or the reading of the best cla.s.sical authors. The fifth year, or that before rhetoric, is set apart for the study of the poets only. After this course of six years, lectures are given by the professors of moral and natural philosophy.

The masters have no intercourse with their scholars except during the holding the cla.s.s or saying the lesson: prefects are appointed to superintend them at all other times. They study in a large room destined to this use only: a prefect, in a lofty tribune, enforces application: a prefect attends them while at play to prevent violence, quarrelling, or indecorous language: a prefect sleeps in a little room with a gla.s.s door at the end of the dormitory.

The play-ground is divided into two equal portions, one of which is allotted to the boys of the three higher, the other to the boys of the three lower schools, and no one is allowed to cross the bisecting line.

Thus the tyranny of the great boys over the little ones, and the requisition of petty, irregular, or mischievous services is prevented: thus also the years and strength of those who play together are generally more equal.

No master or other superior, who conceives that a boy has deserved punishment, is allowed to inflict that punishment himself, but is obliged to send such boy to the prefect appointed for the time administrator of the ferula: the boys, either from custom or the point of honour, or the fear of worse, always ask for the number of strokes of the ferula which they may be ordered by the superior to receive. A whimsical result of subordination, that a lad of seventeen shall go to a man of five and twenty, and say, "Please, Sir, to give me nine ferulas."

Horace talks of the ferula; he does not say that he pet.i.tioned for it himself; and I saw, by an al fresco at Portici, that boys were flogged, two thousand years ago, just as they now are in our country schools.

The dormitory is a lofty room, in which each boy has his bed-place to himself, separated from his neighbours by a wainscot part.i.tion six feet high; a curtain, with a number upon it, is drawn at the foot of the bed-place, which is open at the top. During the day-time the dormitory is locked, and none but the servants of the house are, on any account, permitted to go into it.

The eleves of Stoneyhurst wear an uniform: this regulation, I am persuaded, has a better moral influence on their minds than ferulas and disciplines: "their feet are accommodated," as a fine writer once expressed it, with very thick shoes; "and their heads are protected" by a leathern cap: this cap is made to shade the face or to be turned up at pleasure; it is trimmed with fur, and, while fresh, looks very smart: but it is soon _degraded_, as the French phrase is, by the various uses to which caprice or convenience induces the boys to apply it: they sit upon it; they kneel upon it; they blow, or rather fan the fire with it; they use it for a bag, and perhaps sometimes, when unseen by the prefect, they give each other slaps on the face with it;--a trait d'ecolier for the which its form, when folded, is admirably well adapted. A blue jacket and red waistcoat of coa.r.s.e cloth, dark velveteen pantalon, and worsted stockings, a black velvet stock round the collar of a very coa.r.s.e s.h.i.+rt, complete the habiliments of the Stoneyhurst collegian. "Forsan et haec olim," &c.

The boys rise at half past five in the morning and go to bed at half past eight in the evening. Prayers in the chapel begin and end every day, and they a.s.sist at ma.s.s daily. Those who are of sufficient age confess and communicate once a fortnight.

Such are, in the main, the regulations of this Jesuits' college. During their unsettled state, the society had admitted but few new members; in consequence, the education of their youth was, at this time, conducted chiefly by old men without activity, and young men without experience.

The course of a few years has remedied this evil.

When Kenelm arrived at Stoneyhurst, his heart bounded within him at the sight of the s.p.a.cious buildings, and of between two and three hundred playfellows: he immediately procured a cap and black collar, and was as vain of them as a young ensign of his c.o.c.kade and sword. The superior led me over the college; Kenelm followed and considered all as provided for his use and convenience. I tried to persuade him that his visits to the library, the academy-room, the strangers' apartment, and the garden of the superiors, would not hereafter be very frequent; that his repasts in the refectory, though sufficient and wholesome, would not be luxurious. I was unable to moderate his transport: hardly could I prevail on him to show some signs of regret at parting from me. I appealed to "Philip when sober."

The next summer, I found him sober enough: he had discovered that he was only one of a crowd; he felt the want of domestic affections, and of those comforts which home only can supply. I consoled him however, and left him, after three days spent at Whalley, in a disposition to endure all that his duty and the destined course of his studies might require.

"O Athenians," said Themistocles, "how much do I suffer to gain your applause!" Children have but too much reason to exclaim, "O Themistocles, how much do we suffer to be able to read your history!"

The next summer, I sent for him to Park Gate, where he rejoined his brother and sisters after two years absence. To the number of his sisters was added one, whose infancy, unsuited for travelling, delayed my journey to France. At this time he was gay and cheerful: he did not know the world, and was not afraid of it; yet his behaviour was directed by an ever sure sense of propriety. I was pleased and satisfied with him:--he pa.s.sed five weeks with us. I had given him the meeting at Liverpool, whither he had been conducted by a prefect: I now took him back to the same town, where we found a prefect with whom he returned to his college.

In the month of July of the following year, 1816, I received a letter from one of the superiors of the college, informing me that my son, with thirty-six other boys, had fallen ill of the measles; that my son had recovered, but, having been allowed to go out too soon, had again fallen ill. The letter was couched in terms so ambiguous, and implying so much doubt of the event, that it caused great alarm. I set off immediately: no other letter was written, and Kenelm's mother was kept in a state of fearful anxiety, till I wrote to her from Stoneyhurst that her son was recovered from the relapse. He was however so much weakened, that I thought it advisable to take him to the sea-coast. I pa.s.sed ten days with him alone, and had an opportunity of appreciating his character, of observing his unaffected good sense, his gentle and amiable manners, his watchfulness over his conscience, his dutiful affection to his father, his piety towards G.o.d.

We returned to college to be present at the academy-day, and the distribution of the prizes. Kenelm had been a.s.sured that, but for his illness, one of these prizes would have fallen to his share. I comforted him as well as I could, quoting--"satis est potuisse videri."

In the spring of the following year, I took my younger son to Stoneyhurst, in the hope that the brothers would find present pleasure in each others' company, and hereafter talk over together the scenes of their boyhood. I observed that Kenelm's spirits appeared depressed: I questioned him; he a.s.sured me he had nothing to complain of: I interrogated the master: he spoke of Kenelm with great regard, and knew not that any cause of uneasiness existed for him. I pa.s.sed three days with my sons, during which time Kenelm's cheerfulness returned, or seemed to return; and I left them together.

Towards the end of this year, I finally resolved to put in execution my long-projected, long-delayed, continental plan. I advised the brothers of my purpose, who were, of course, delighted with the news. A kind and much-esteemed friend, who wished to see Stoneyhurst college, brought them back with him into Lincolns.h.i.+re at the end of March following.