To Mr. Blackwood.
Windsor.
18th March.
Mr. Blackett’s sudden death without any arrangement for the care of his family has impressed me so much that I am very anxious to set my affairs in order, and I write to ask you whether you would kindly consent to be my executor and a kind of guardian to my boys in case of my death before they are grown up? I have asked Principal Tulloch to accept the same charge,...Should my death take place while the boys are still under age I have no doubt my pension would be continued to them, so that I think there would be enough properly managed to bring them up, especially as they both show promise of being able to help themselves in the way of scholarships, &c.
4th April.
…I will make any reasonable sacrifice to please you, but one of the passages you have marked I cannot see my way to leave out. It seems to me the very secret of all Cowper’s weakness, and one which it is for the good of everybody, and especially of religious people, to have fully indicated; and besides I take pains to say their Calvinism is not to blame, and that a Jesuit director would or might do the same as Newton did. So much of Cowper’s life is involved in this, that to take it out would be to omit the chief explanation of many of its mysteries, I will try if I can soften it, but even that I doubt.
4th May.
If your old contributors had to yield the pas to such writers only as the author of the ‘Battle of Dorking’ we should have little to complain of. It is wonderfully fine and powerful. Is it Laurence Oliphant? I can’t think of anybody else with such a power of realism and wonderful command of the subject. It is vivid as Defoe. I had it read to me last night, and I have done nothing but dream of invasion all the night through. The effect is almost too vivid. I hope you will make a separate publication of it. It ought to have a very great effect, unless, indeed, the public which consumed by the hundred thousand all that flat rubbish about ‘Dame Europa’ should be unable to understand this infinitely higher effort. I hope I have guessed rightly, and that it is my interesting namesake who has written it. If it is so, I wish you would convey to him the expression of my unbounded admiration, not to say emotion, in reading it. But how do you come to suffer such reflections on your friends the Prussians?
I had better put off my “New Books” paper until next month, as it is rather aggravating to fret and hurry to have a paper ready in time, and then find it cannot be used. Of course the Editor has to fume and fret enough on his side too — but we are all mortal. Perhaps we may have an opportunity when you come to London of talking on the “Cowper” paper, as I feel strongly that he is the beginner of the modern school, and my course will be incomplete without him.
Windsor,
18th November.
...I am glad to hear you are going to Paris. I am sure a little rest and change will do you good. I shall stay a day or two there, I think, as I come back, — about the 20th of December, — and should like much to see Mr. Oliphant. I thought of trying to do so, and to speak to him about the Continental series of books I once talked to you of. I don’t know whether you have dismissed the idea, but I have not, and he looks as if he might be a likely man. Talking of that, I had a distant notion of the pleasure of editorial surprises by a sudden proposal from the beautiful Marechale, Mrs. Macdonald’s daughter, to do Heine, whose family she knows and from whom she thought she could get unpublished matter! It was very funny. You or any mortal man would of course have undertaken to publish anything on the spot, for the sake of her beaux yeux. She is a very lovely young woman, and clever too, but whether in the way of books I should doubt.
...I had the most comical account of Mr. Oliphant’s colony the other day from Miss S. She said they held “community of wives and children” — or at least she knew the children were in common, and she supposed he had not mentioned the wives because of her presence! Don’t tell him.
A terrible winter visit to the Chateau of La Roche en Bressy — the country seat of the Montalemberts — was undertaken at this time for the purpose of obtaining materials for Comte de Montalembert’s biography. Mrs. Oliphant took her little Cecco with her for company, and had great need of the solace, for she hated to be out of her own house (except with one or two beloved friends), and she felt that her time and labour were being wasted. Some of the following letters are to the cousin who for several years was her intimate and housekeeper.
To Cousin Annie.
La Roche en Bressy.
Dec. 1.
...Nothing can well be less comfortable or more dreary than my life here, and but for the absolute duty I should have left La Roche before now. It has been raining more or less for three days. Yesterday and the day before Cecco and I (the only people in the house who thought of such a thing) ventured out a little, wading through the snow. This morning it is worse than ever, snowing fast, and nothing but a sheet of white visible from the windows. To crown all other desagrements, Lina [her maid], who was to have left for Switzerland to-day, is laid up, having had two of her attacks in succession. My materials come to me very slowly.
The course of life here is odd enough. I don’t know that it would suit you badly, but I can’t say I like it. We leave our rooms at midday only for the dejeuner. After that, unless there are visitors, all disperse again to their rooms, meeting only at dinner, which is at half-past six. We then go to the drawing-room till ten. So that the social life of the household is entirely confined to the three hours and a half in the evening. Sometimes, as this is an exceptional moment, and the family are all employed more or less upon M. de Montalembert’s papers, they all go to the library for an hour or two after the dejeuner; but this is evidently an accidental matter, and the natural way is what I have said. Of course they visit each other in their rooms, I suppose. Sometimes I feel as if this leisurely reading of a dozen pages or so of a journal might go on for ever and ever, and I grow intensely impatient, knowing how little time I have to give. But the idea of a life like mine of course could never enter into the heads of these good people, who are kind as kind can be, but evidently think my work is entirely a work of predilection, and that I can spend upon it as much time as pleases me — Alas!
To Mr. Blackwood.
La Roche en Bressy,
Dec, 2.
The vie de chateau is the coldest vie I ever had anything to do with. The journey was terrible, five hours driving after the railway; but the chateau might be (must be, I sometimes think) in Siberia instead of the Cote d’Or. I never in my life felt such cold. Everything is stone and ice. I inhabit a vast tapestried chamber, and have a section of a tower for my dressing-room, in the midst of which grandeur I shiver. I tremble too with impatience to find myself in the midst of masses of papers which would make my work most interesting and easy, but which I am not permitted to have access to. Montalembert, it appears, kept a journal from his twelfth year to the end of his life, and I am tantalised with the sight of these volumes, which Madame de M. reads to me for a couple of hours in the afternoon. We have been at it a week, and have got to his eighteenth year! Imagine my feelings. I have, however, raised a standard of rebellion, and declared that I cannot give more than next week entire, which begins to quicken the movements of my most kind hostess. It is very difficult, however, to intimate delicately to people whom any part of his life interests that all the details are not equally interesting to me. They are all extremely complimentary about the little paper in the Magazine, and I have been congratulated on all sides on having so thoroughly understood Montalembert’s character, which is satisfactory so far, though I have had such hours of explanation about his attitude in regard to the Infallibility question, that I wish the Pope at Jericho a hundred times in a day. The position is comical, and I think some time or other I must write a paper on the tribulations of a historian in search of information.
Letter from Cecco (aged eleven years).
Hotel Mirabeau, Paris,
14th Dec.
My dear Cousin Annie, — The principal reason why I have not written to you is that I have been working at the Montalembert genealogical-tree trying to get it done. I hope everybody at home is all right. I received all the letters on Wednesday. Last Friday at La Roche we drove to a stone cross in the woods (all of which nearly were planted by M. de Montalembert), which was also erected by him. The drive was cold and miserable enough for me as I sat on the box. I got some stamps and seals the other day from Mdlle. Le Duc; most of them I had got already, but there were some Belgian new issue which I had not got. We have no proper coachman here. A labourer called La Motte generally drives us, but not always, Sylvain the regisseur sometimes taking his place. On Tuesday, my birthday, we left for Semur.13 It was a very pretty road, but Semur, we found, was much prettier. The whole town slopes up to the middle, where stands the cathedral, which is very large and beautiful both outside and inside, though all the images had been torn from their niches in the front of the church. There were also four curious old towers at the gate. The rampart has within it another rampart of trees, which looks very pretty. A pretty broad stream runs through the town, and the view from the bridge is very pretty. The gardens, one above the other, only separated by little walls on the left, and to the right a dark pine-wood with a path quite white with snow leading up to it, which made a very pretty contrast. We arrived at Paris at half-past ten, but could not get into our cab before eleven. The roads were covered with snow, not white but brown, and it was about twelve when we reached the Mirabeau. Here we got apartments looking on the court, which we didn’t want them to be. I was out buying presents this morning in the Rue de Rivoli. Mama was this afternoon at Versailles, and is now at Lady Oliphant’s at dinner.
I can’t think of anything else to tell just now, so with love to Tiddy and Frank, I remain, your affectionate cousin.
To Mr. Blackwood.
Windsor,
18th Dec.
On the whole, though our sufferings were great, I am glad to have been at La Roche. It is impossible to understand any fashion of life without sharing it, and the curious little village community of a place so far out of the world is extremely quaint. Mme. de Montalembert begged me to say mille choses to you from her, and was very sorry she had not the chance of seeing you. She says her husband gave them a most charming account of Strathtyrum and all your surroundings. She intends to make a run over to England and Scotland in spring, coming in April, in order to take her daughter, a very charming girl, to all the places which Montalembert visited and described. The said Mdlle. Madeleine would give her ears to hunt, and describes herself as no end of a horsewoman. I told her that she must absolutely make acquaintance with Mrs. Blackwood, though I fear that the delights of hunting would scarcely be attainable in April.
...Mr. Oliphant showed me the proofs of your new photograph, which is lovely. It is by much the best and most true likeness which I have ever seen of you, though perhaps just a trifle too spruce. In short, it represents you as much too dangerous an individual to be allowed to go about gallivanting by yourself, and Mrs. Blackwood ought to look to it. Please let me have a copy when you get them. Lady Oliphant’s was extremely good also — very like her, but cutting at least thirty years off her age at one stroke. What a very delightful process!