Kitabı oku: «Arthur O'Leary: His Wanderings And Ponderings In Many Lands», sayfa 11
CHAPTER IX. TABLE-TRAITS
Morgan O’Dogherty was wrong – and, sooth to say, he was not often so – when he pronounced a Mess to be ‘the perfection of dinner society.’ In the first place, there can be no perfection anywhere or in anything, it is evident, where ladies are not. Secondly, a number of persons so purely professional, and therefore so very much alike in their habits, tone of thinking, and expression, can scarcely be expected to make up that complex amalgam so indispensable to pleasant society. Lastly, the very fact of meeting the same people each day, looking the very same way too, is a sad damper to that flow of spirits which for their free current demand all the chances and vicissitudes of a fresh audience. In a word, in the one case a man becomes like a Dutch canal, standing stagnant and slow between its trim banks; in the other, he is a bounding rivulet, careering pleasantly through grassy meadows and smiling fields – now basking in the gay sunshine, now lingering in the cool shade; at one moment hurrying along between rocks and moss-grown pebbles, brawling, breaking, and foaming; at the next, expanding into some little lake, calm and deep and mirrorlike.
It is the very chances and changes of conversation, its ups and downs, its lights and shadows – so like those of life itself – that make its great charm; and for this, generally, a mixed party gives the only security. Now, a Mess has very little indeed of this requisite; on the contrary, its great stronghold is the fact that it offers an easy tableland for all capacities. It has its little, dry, stale jokes, as flat and as dull as the orderly book – the regular quiz about Jones’s whiskers, or Tobin’s horse; the hackneyed stories about Simpson of Ours, or Nokes of Yours – of which the major is never tired, and the newly-joined sub is enraptured. Bless their honest hearts! very little fun goes far in the army; like the regimental allowance of wine, it will never intoxicate, and no man is expected to call for a fresh supply.
I have dined at more Messes than any red-coat of them all, at home and abroad – cavalry, artillery, and infantry, ‘horse, foot, and dragoons,’ as Grattan has it. In gala parties, with a general and his staff for guests; after sweltering field-days, where all the claret could not clear your throat of pipe-clay and contract-powder; in the colonies, where flannel-jackets were substituted for regulation coats, and land-crabs and pepper-pot for saddles and sirloins; in Connemara, Calcutta, or Corfu – it was all the same: caelum non animum, etc. Not but that they had all their little peculiarities among themselves – so much so, indeed, that I offer a fifty, that, if you set me down blindfolded at any Mess in the service, I will tell you what corps they belong to before the cheese appears; and before the bottle goes half around, I’ll engage to distinguish the hussars from the heavies, the fusiliers from the light-bobs; and when the president is ringing for more claret, it will go hard with me if I don’t make a shrewd guess at the number of the regiment.
The great charm of the Mess is to those young, ardent spirits fresh from Sandhurst or Eton, sick of mathematics and bored with false quantities. To them the change is indeed a glorious one, and I’d ask nothing better than to be sixteen, and enjoy it all; but for the old stagers, it is slow work indeed. A man curls his whiskers at forty with far less satisfaction than he surveys their growth and development at eighteen; he tightens his waist, too, at that period, with a very different sense of enjoyment. His first trip to Jamaica is little more than a ‘lark’; his fourth or fifth, with a wife and four brats, is scarcely a party of pleasure – and all these things react on the Mess. Besides, it is against human nature itself to like the people who rival us; and who could enjoy the jokes of a man who stands between him and a majority?
Yet, taking them all in all, the military ‘cut up’ better than any other professionals. The doctors might be agreeable; they know a vast deal of life, and in a way too that other people never see it; but meet them en masse, they are little better than body-snatchers. There is not a malady too dreadful, nor an operation too bloody, to tell you over your soup; every slice of the turkey suggests an amputation, and they sever a wing with the anatomical precision they would extirpate a thigh bone. Life to them has no interest except where it verges on death; and from habit and hardening, they forget that human suffering has any other phase than a source of wealth to the medical profession.
The lawyers are even worse. To listen to them, you would suppose that the highest order of intellect was a skill in chicanery; that trick and stratagem were the foremost walks of talent; that to browbeat a poor man and to confound a simple one were great triumphs of genius; and that the fairest gift of the human mind was that which enabled a man to feign every emotion of charity, benevolence, pity, anger, grief, and joy, for the sum of twenty pounds sterling, wrung from abject poverty and briefed by an ‘honest attorney.’
As to the parsons, I must acquit them honestly of any portion of this charge. It has been my fortune to ‘assist’ at more than one visitation dinner, and I can safely aver that never by any accident did the conversation become professional, nor did I hear a word of piety during the entertainment.
Country gentlemen are scarcely professional, however the similarity of their tastes and occupations might seem to warrant the classification – fox-hunting, grouse-shooting, game-preserving, road-jobbing, rent-extracting, land-tilling, being propensities in common. They are the slowest of all; and the odds are long against any one keeping awake after the conversation has taken its steady turn into shorthorns, Swedish turnips, subsoiling, and southdowns.
Artists are occasionally well enough, if only for their vanity and self-conceit.
Authors are better still, for ditto and ditto.
Actors are most amusing from the innocent delusion they labour under that all that goes on in life is unreal, except what takes place in Covent Garden or Drury Lane.
In a word, professional cliques are usually detestable, the individuals who compose them being frequently admirable ingredients, but intolerable when unmixed; and society, like a macédoine, is never so good as when its details are a little incongruous.
For my own part, I knew few things better than a table d’hôte, that pleasant reunion of all nations, from Stockholm to Stamboul; of every rank, from the grand-duke to the bagman; men and women, or, if you like the phrase better, ladies and gentlemen – some travelling for pleasure, some for profit; some on wedding tours, some in the grief of widowhood; some rattling along the road of life in all the freshness of youth, health, and well-stored purses, others creeping by the wayside cautiously and quietly; sedate and sententious English, lively Italians, plodding Germans, witty Frenchmen, wily Russians, and stupid Belgians – all pell-mell, seated side by side, and actually shuffled into momentary intimacy by soup, fish, fowl, and entremets. The very fact that you are en route gives a frankness and a freedom to all you say. Your passport is signed, your carriage packed; to-morrow you will be a hundred miles away. What matter, then, if the old baron with the white moustache has smiled at your German, or if the thin-faced lady in the Dunstable bonnet has frowned at your morality? – you ‘ll never, in all likelihood, meet either again. You do your best to be agreeable – it is the only distinction recognised; here are no places of honour, no favoured guests – each starts fair in the race, and a pleasant course I have always deemed it.
Now, let no one, while condemning the vulgarity of this taste of mine – for such I anticipate as the ready objection, though the dissentient should be a tailor from Bond Street or a schoolmistress from Brighton – for a moment suppose that I mean to include all tables d’hôte in this sweeping laudation; far, very far from it. I, Arthur O’Leary, have travelled some hundreds of thousands of miles in every quarter and region of the globe, and yet would have considerable difficulty in enumerating even six such as fairly to warrant the praise I have pronounced.
In the first place, the table d’hôte, to possess all the requisites I desire, should not have its locale in any first-rate city, like Paris, London, or St. Petersburg; no, it should rather be in Brussels, Dresden, Munich, Berne, or Florence. Again, it should not be in the great overgrown mammoth-hotel of the town, with three hundred daily devourers, and a steam-engine to slice the bouilli. It should, and will usually, be found in some retired and quiet spot – frequently within a small court, with orange-trees round the walls, and a tiny modest jet d’eau in the middle; a glass-door entering from a flight of low steps into a neat ante-chamber, where an attentive but unobtrusive waiter is ready to take your hat and cane, and, instinctively divining your dinner intentions, ushers you respectfully into the salon, and leans down your chair beside the place you select.
The few guests already arrived have the air of habitués; they are chatting together when you enter, but they conceive it necessary to do the honours of the place to the stranger, and at once include you in the conversation; a word or two suffices, and you see that they are not chance folk, whom hunger has overtaken at the door, but daily visitors, who know the house and appreciate it. The table itself is far from large – at most sixteen persons could sit down at it; the usual number is about twelve or fourteen. There is, if it be summer, a delicious bouquet in the midst; and the snowy whiteness of the cloth and the clear lustre of the water strike you instantly. The covers are as bright as when they left the hands of the silversmith, and the temperature of the room at once shows that nothing has been neglected that can contribute to the comfort of the guests. The very plash of the fountain is a grateful sound, and the long necks of the hock-bottles, reposing in the little basin, have an air of luxury far from unpleasing. While the champagne indulges its more southern character in the ice-pails in the shade, a sweet, faint odour of pineapples and nectarines is diffused about; nor am I disposed to quarrel with the chance view I catch, between the orange-trees, of a window where asparagus, game, oranges, and melons are grouped confusedly together, yet with a harmony of colour and effect Schneider would have gloried in. There is a noiseless activity about, a certain air of preparation – not such as by bustle can interfere with the placid enjoyment you feel, but something which denotes care and skill. You feel, in fact, that impatience on your part would only militate against your own interest, and that when the moment arrives for serving, the potage has then received the last finishing touch of the artist. By this time the company are assembled; the majority are men, but there are four or five ladies. They are en chapeau too; but it is a toilette that shows taste and elegance, and the freshness – that delightful characteristic of foreign dress – of their light muslin dresses is in keeping with all about. Then follows that little pleasant bustle of meeting; the interchange of a number of small courtesies, which cost little but are very delightful; the news of the theatre for the night; some soiree, well known, or some promenade, forms the whole – and we are at table.
The destiny that made me a traveller has blessed me with either the contentment of the most simple or the perfect enjoyment of the most cultivated cuisine; and if I have eaten tripe de rocher with Parry at the Pole, I have never lost thereby the acme of my relish for truffles at the ‘Frères.’ Therefore, trust me that in my mention of a table d’hôte I have not forgotten the most essential of its features – for this, the smallness and consequent selectness of the party is always a guarantee.
Thus, then, you are at table; your napkin is spread, but you see no soup. The reason is at once evident, and you accept with gratefulness the little plate of Ostend oysters, each somewhat smaller than a five-franc piece, that are before you. Who would seek for pearls without when such treasures are to be found within the shell – cool and juicy and succulent; suggestive of delights to come, and so suited to the limpid glass of Chablis. What preparatives for the potage, which already I perceive to be a printanière.
But why dwell on all this? These memoranda of mine were intended rather to form a humble companion to some of John Murray’s inestimable treatises on the road; some stray recollection of what in my rambles had struck me as worth mention; something that might serve to lighten a half-hour here or an evening there; some hint for the wanderer of a hotel or a church or a view or an actor or a poet, a picture or a pâte, for which his halting-place is remarkable, but of whose existence he knew not. And to come back once more, such a picture as I have presented is but a weak and imperfect sketch of the Hôtel de France in Brussels – at least, of what I once remember it.
Poor Biennais, he was an artiste! He commenced his career under Chicaud, and rose to the dignity of rôtisseur under Napoleon. With what enthusiasm he used to speak of his successes during the Empire, when Bonaparte gave him carte-blanche to compose a dinner for a ‘party of kings!’ Napoleon himself was but an inferior gastronome. With him, the great requisite was to serve anywhere and at any moment; and though the bill of fare was a modest one, it was sometimes a matter of difficulty to prepare it in the depths of the Black Forest or on the sandy plains of Prussia, amid the mud-covered fields of Poland or the snows of Muscovy. A poulet, a cutlet, and a cup of coffee was the whole affair; but it should be ready as if by magic. Among his followers were several distinguished gourmets. Cambacérès was well known; Murat also, and Decrès, the Minister of Marine, kept admirable tables. Of these, Biennais spoke with ecstasy; he remembered their various tastes, and would ever remark, when placing some masterpiece of skill before you, how the King of Naples loved or the arch-chancellor praised it. To him the overthrow of the empire was but the downfall of the cuisine; and he saw nothing more affecting in the last days of Fontainebleau than that the Emperor had left untouched a fondue he had always eaten of with delight. ‘After that,’ said Biennais, ‘I saw the game was up.’ With the Hundred Days he was ‘restored,’ like his master; but, alas! the empire of casseroles was departed; the thunder of the cannon foundries, and the roar of the shot furnaces were more congenial sounds than the simmering of sauces and the gentle murmur of a stew-pan. No wonder, thought he, there should come a Waterloo, when the spirit of the nation had thus degenerated. Napoleon spent his last days in exile; Biennais took his departure for Belgium. The park was his Longwood; and, indeed, he himself saw invariable points of resemblance in the two destinies. Happily for those who frequented the Hôtel de France, he did not occupy his remaining years in dictating his memoirs to some Las Casas of the kitchen, but persevered to the last in the practice of his great art, and died, so to speak, ladle in hand.
To me the Hôtel de France has many charms. I remember it, I shall not say how many years – its cool, delightful salon, looking out upon that beautiful little park whose shady alleys are such a resource in the evenings of summer; its lime-trees, beneath which you may sit and sip your coffee, as you watch the groups that pass and repass before you, weaving stories to yourself which become thicker and thicker as the shade deepens, and the flitting shapes are barely seen as they glide along the silent alleys, while a distant sound of music – some air of the Fatherland – is all that breaks the stillness, and you forget in the dreamy silence that you are in the midst of a great city.
The Hôtel de France has other memories than these, too. I ‘m not sure that I shall not make a confession, yet somehow I half shrink from it. You might call it a love adventure, and I should not like that; besides, there is scarcely a moral in it – though who knows?
CHAPTER X. A DILEMMA
It was in the month of May – I won’t confess to the year – that I found myself, after trying various hotels in the Place Royale, at last deposited at the door of the Hôtel de France. It seemed to me, in my then ignorance, like a pis aller, when the postillion said, ‘Let us try the “France,”’ and little prepared me for the handsome, but somewhat small, hotel before me. It was nearly five o’clock when I arrived, and I had only time to make some slight change in my dress when the bell sounded for table d’hôte.
The guests were already seated when I entered, but a place had been reserved for me, which completed the table. I was a young – perhaps after reading a little farther you’ll say a very young– traveller at the time, but was soon struck by the quiet and decorous style in which the dinner was conducted. The servants were prompt, silent, and observant; the guests, easy and affable; the equipage of the table was even elegant; and the cookery, Biennais! I was the only Englishman present, the party being made up of Germans and French; but all spoke together like acquaintances, and before the dinner had proceeded far were polite enough to include me in the conversation.
At the head of the table sat a large and strikingly handsome man, of about eight-and-thirty or forty years of age – his dress a dark frock, richly braided, and ornamented by the decorations of several foreign orders; his forehead high and narrow, the temples strongly indented; his nose arched and thin, and his upper lip covered by a short black moustache raised at either extremity and slightly curled, as we see occasionally in a Van Dyck picture; indeed, his dark-brown features, somewhat sad in their expression, his rich hazel eyes and long waving hair, gave him all the character that great artist loved to perpetuate on his canvas. He spoke seldom, but when he did there was something indescribably pleasing in the low, mellow tones of his voice; a slight smile too lit up his features at these times, and his manner had in it – I know not what; some strange power it seemed, that made whoever he addressed feel pleased and flattered by his notice of them, just as we see a few words spoken by a sovereign caught up and dwelt upon by those around.
At his side sat a lady, of whom when I first came into the room I took little notice; her features seemed pleasing, but no more. But gradually, as I watched her I was struck by the singular delicacy of traits that rarely make their impression at first sight. She was about twenty-five, perhaps twenty-six, but of a character of looks that preserves something almost childish in their beauty. She was pale, and with brown hair – that light sunny brown that varies in its hue with every degree of light upon it; her face was oval and inclined to plumpness; her eyes were large, full, and lustrous, with an expression of softness and candour that won on you wonderfully the longer you looked at them; her nose was short, perhaps faultily so, but beautifully chiselled, and fine as a Greek statue; her mouth, rather large, displayed, however, two rows of teeth beautifully regular and of snowy whiteness; while her chin, rounded and dimpled, glided by an easy transition into a throat large and most gracefully formed. Her figure, as well as I could judge, was below the middle size, and inclined to embonpoint; and her dress, denoting some national peculiarity of which I was ignorant, was a velvet bodice laced in front and ornamented with small silver buttons, which terminated in a white muslin skirt; a small cap, something like what Mary Queen of Scots is usually represented in, sat on the back of her head and fell in deep lace folds on her shoulders. Lastly, her hands were small, white, and dimpled, and displayed on her taper and rounded fingers several rings of apparently great value.
I have been somewhat lengthy in my description of these two persons, and can scarcely ask my reader to accompany me round the circle; however, it is with them principally I have to do. The others at table were remarkable enough. There was a leading member of the Chamber of Deputies – an ex-minister – a tall, dark-browed, ill-favoured man, with a retiring forehead and coal-black eyes; he was a man of great cleverness, spoke eloquently and well, and was singularly open and frank in giving his opinion on the politics of the time. There was a German or two, from the grand-duchy of something – somewhat proud, reserved personages, as all the Germans of petty states are; they talked little, and were evidently impressed with the power they possessed of tantalising the company by not divulging the intention of the Gross Herzog of Hoch Donnerstadt regarding the present prospects of Europe. There were three Frenchmen and two French ladies, all pleasant, easy, and affable people; there was a doctor from Louvain, a shrewd, intelligent man; a Prussian major and his wife – well-bred, quiet people, and, like all Prussians, polite without inviting acquaintance. An Austrian secretary of legation, a wine-merchant from Bordeaux, and a celebrated pianist completed the party.
I have now put my readers in possession of information which I only obtained after some days myself; for though one or other of these personages was occasionally absent from table d’hôte, I soon perceived that they were all frequenters of the house, and well known there.
If the guests were seated at table wherever chance or accident might place them, I could perceive that a tone of deference was always used to the tall man, who invariably maintained his place at the head; and an air of even greater courtesy was assumed towards the lady beside him, who was his wife. He was always addressed as Monsieur le Comte, and her title of Countess was never forgotten in speaking to her. During dinner, whatever little chit-chat or gossip was the talk of the day was specially offered up to her. The younger guests occasionally ventured to present a bouquet, and even the rugged minister himself accomplished a more polite bow in accosting her than he could have summoned up for his presentation to royalty. To all these little attentions she returned a smile or a look or a word, or a gesture with her white hand, never exciting jealousy by any undue degree of favour, and distributing her honours with the practised equanimity of one accustomed to it.
Dinner over and coffee, a handsome britzka, drawn by two splendid dark-bay horses, would drive up, and Madame la Comtesse, conducted to the carriage by her husband, would receive the homage of the whole party, as they stood to let her pass. The count would then linger some twenty minutes or so, and take his leave to wander for an hour about the park, and afterwards to the theatre, where I used to see him in a private box with his wife.
Such was the little party at the ‘France’ when I took up my residence there in the month of May, and gradually one dropped off after another as the summer wore on. The Germans went back to sauer kraut and kreutzer whist; the secretary of legation was on leave; the wine-merchant was off to St. Petersburg; the pianist was in the bureau he once directed – and so on, leaving our party reduced to the count and madame, a stray traveller, a deaf abbé, and myself.
The dog-days in a Continental city are, every one knows, stupid and tiresome enough. Every one has taken his departure either to his château, if he has one, or to the watering-places; the theatre has no attraction, even if the heat permitted one to visit it; the streets are empty, parched, and grass-grown; and except the arrival and departure of that incessant locomotive, John Bull, there is no bustle or stir anywhere. Hapless, indeed, is the condition then of the man who is condemned from any accident to toil through this dreary season; to wander about in solitude the places he has seen filled by pleasant company; to behold the park and promenades given up to Flemish bonnes or Norman nurses, where he was wont to glad his eye with the sight of bright eyes and trim shapes, flitting past in all the tasty elegance of Parisian toilette; to see the lazy frotteur sleeping away his hours at the porte cochere, which a month before thundered with the deep roll of equipage coming and going. All this is very sad, and disposes one to be dull and discontented too.
For what reason I was detained at Brussels it is unnecessary to inquire. Some delay in remittances, if I remember aright, had its share in the cause. Who ever travelled without having cursed his banker or his agent or his uncle or his guardian, or somebody, in short, who had a deal of money belonging to him in his hands, and would not send it forward? In all my long experience of travelling and travellers, I don’t remember meeting with one person, who, if it were not for such mischances, would not have been amply supplied with cash. Some with a knowing wink throw the blame on the ‘Governor’; others, more openly indignant, confound Coutts and Drummond; a stray Irishman will now and then damn the ‘tenantry that haven’t paid up the last November’; but none, no matter how much their condition bespeaks that out-at-elbows habit which a ways-and-means style of life contracts, will ever confess to the fact that their expectations are as blank as their banker’s book, and that the only land they are ever to pretend to is a post-obit right in some six-feet-by-two in a churchyard. And yet the world is full of such people – well-informed, pleasant, good-looking folk, who inhabit first-rate hotels; drink, dine, and dress well; frequent theatres and promenades; spend their winters at Paris or Florence or Rome, their summers at Baden or Ems or Interlachen; have a strange half-intimacy with men in the higher circles, and occasionally dine with them; are never heard of in any dubious or unsafe affair; are reputed safe fellows to talk to; know every one, from the horse-dealer who will give credit to the Jew who will advance cash; and notwithstanding that they neither gamble nor bet nor speculate, yet contrive to live – ay, and well, too – without any known resources whatever. If English (and they are for the most part so), they usually are called by some well-known name of aristocratic reputation in England: they are thus Villiers or Paget or Seymour or Percy, which on the Continent is already a kind of half-nobility at once; and the question which seemingly needs no reply, ‘Ah, vous êtes parent de milord!’ is a receipt in full rank anywhere.
These men – and who that knows anything of the Continent has not met such everywhere – are the great riddles of our century; and I ‘d rather give a reward for their secret than all the discoveries about perpetual motion, or longitude, or North-west Passages, that ever were heard of. And strange it is, too, no one has ever blabbed. Some have emerged from this misty state to inherit large fortunes and live in the best style; yet I have never heard of a single man having turned king’s evidence on his fellows. And yet what a talent theirs must be, let any man confess who has waited three posts for a remittance without any tidings of its arrival! Think of the hundred-and-one petty annoyances and ironies to which he is subject! He fancies that the very waiters know he is à sec; that the landlord looks sour, and the landlady austere; the very clerk in the post-office appears to say, ‘No letter for you, sir,’ with a jibing and impertinent tone. From that moment, too, a dozen expensive tastes that he never dreamed of before enter his head: he wants to purchase a hack or give a dinner-party or bet at a racecourse, principally because he has not got a sou in his pocket, and he is afraid it may be guessed by others – such is the fatal tendency to strive or pretend to something which has no other value in our eyes than the effect it may have on our acquaintances, regardless of what sacrifices it may demand.
Forgive, I pray, this long digression, which although I hope not without its advantages would scarcely have been entered into were it not à propos to myself. And to go back – I began to feel excessively uncomfortable at the delay of my money. My first care every morning was to repair to the post-office; sometimes I arrived before it was open, and had to promenade up and down the gloomy Rue de l’Evecque till the clock struck; sometimes the mail would be late (a foreign mail is generally late when the weather is peculiarly fine and the roads good!); but always the same answer came, ‘Rien pour vous, Monsieur O’Leary’; and at last I imagined from the way the fellow spoke that he had set the response to a tune, and sang it.
Béranger has celebrated in one of his very prettiest lyrics ‘how happy one is at twenty in a garret.’ I have no doubt, for my part, that the vicinity of the slates and the poverty of the apartment would have much contributed to my peace of mind at the time I speak of. The fact of a magnificently furnished salon, a splendid dinner every day, champagne and Seltzer promiscuously, cab fares and theatre tickets innumerable being all scored against me were sad dampers to my happiness; and from being one of the cheeriest and most light-hearted of fellows, I sank into a state of fidgety and restless impatience, the nearest thing I ever remember to low spirits.
Such was I one day when the post, which I had been watching anxiously from mid-day, had not arrived at five o’clock. Leaving word with the commissionaire to wait and report to me at the hotel, I turned back to the table d’hôte. By accident, the only guests were the count and madame. There they were, as accurately dressed as ever; so handsome and so happy-looking; so attached, too, in their manner towards each other – that nice balance between affection and courtesy which before the world is so captivating. Disturbed as were my thoughts, I could not help feeling struck by their bright and pleasant looks.
