An Englishman In Paris Part 24

"'Certainly, madame,' I replied, 'seeing that I am here to speak the truth, and, as such, your Majesty will pardon me. I told the Emperor that the Parisians spoke of "the Spanish woman," as they spoke seventy-five and eighty years ago of the Austrian woman.'"

"'The Spanish woman! the Spanish woman!' she jerked out three or four times--and I could see that her hands were clenched;--'I have become French, but I will show my enemies that I can be Spanish when occasion demands it.'

"With this she left as suddenly as she had come, taking no notice of the Emperor's uplifted hand to detain her. When the door closed upon her, I said to the Emperor, 'I am more than grieved, sire, that I spoke.'

"'You did your duty,' he said, grasping my hand."

As a matter of course, the threat to show her enemies that she could be Spanish when occasion required was, in this instance, an empty one, because "the enemies" happened to be legion. A scapegoat was found, however, in the honest functionary who had, in the exercise of his duty, frankly warned the Emperor of the ugly things that were said about her.

Next morning, M. Hyrvoix was appointed Receiver-General for one of the departments--that is, exiled to the provinces.

This system of ostracism was indiscriminately applied to all who happened to offend her. Unfortunately, the slightest divergence of opinion on the most trifling matter was construed into an offence; hence in a few years the so-called counsellors around the Emperor were simply so many automata, moving at her will, and at her will only. Men who ventured to think for themselves were removed, or else voluntarily retired from the precincts of the court sooner than submit to a tyranny, not based like that of Catherine II. or Elizabeth upon great intellectual gifts, but upon the wayward impulses of a woman in no way distinguished mentally from the meanest of her s.e.x, except by an overweening ambition and an equally overweening conceit.

And as nothing is so apt to breed injustice as injustice, men, who might have proved the salvation of the Second Empire in its hour of direst need, were absolutely driven into opposition, and so blinded by resentment as to be unable to distinguish any longer between France and those who impelled her to her ruin.

Lest I should be taxed with exaggeration, a few instances among the many will suffice. One evening, in the course of those charades of which I have already spoken, some of the performers, both men and women, had thrown all decorum to the winds in their improvised dialogue. A young colonel, by no means strait-laced or a hypocrite, who was a great favourite with the Emperor and Empress, professed himself shocked, in the hearing of the latter, at so much licence in the presence of the sovereigns. In reality, it was an honest but indirect comment upon the Empress's blamable lat.i.tude in that respect. The Empress took up the cudgels for the offenders. "Vous n'etes pas content, colonel; he bien!

je m'en _fiche_, _refiche_ et _contrefiche_." ("You don't like it, colonel; well, I don't care a snap, nor two snaps, nor a thousand snaps."[72]) The Emperor laughed, and applauded his Consort; the colonel took the hint, and was seen at court no more. Shortly afterward he went to Mexico, where all who saw him at work concurred in saying that he was not only a most valuable soldier, but probably the only one in the French army, of those days, capable of handling large ma.s.ses.

Nevertheless, when the war of '70 broke out, he was still a colonel, and no attempt at offering him a command was made. The republicans, for once in a way, were wiser in their generation: at this hour he holds a high position in the army, and is destined to occupy a still higher. It was he who counselled Bazaine, in the beginning of the investment of Metz, to leave twenty or thirty thousand men behind to defend the fortress, and to break through with the rest. According to the best authorities of the German general staff, the advice, had it been followed, would have materially altered the state of affairs. It is not my intention to enlarge upon that soldier's career or capabilities; I have merely mentioned them to show that, when her resentment was roused, Eugenie threw all considerations for the welfare of France to the winds, and systematically ostracized men, whatever their merits; for I may add that the young colonel, at the time of the scene described above, was known to be one of the ablest of strategists.

[Footnote 72: My translation by no means renders the vulgarity of the sentence. The French have three words to express their contempt for a speaker's opinion, _se moquer_, _se ficher_, and _se_ ... I omit the latter, but even the second is rarely used in decent society.--EDITOR.]

We have heard a great deal of the Empress's charity. Truth to tell, that charity was often as indiscriminate as her anger; it was sporadic, largely admixed with the histrionic element, not unfrequently prompted by sentimentalism rather than by sentiment; and woe to him or to her who ventured to hint that it, the charity, was misplaced. In those days there was a prefect of police, M. Boitelle. He was a worthy man, endowed with a great deal of common sense, and, above all, honest to a degree.

Belonging to the middle cla.s.ses, he was free from the vulgar greed that so often distinguishes them in France; and, after leaving the army as a non-commissioned officer, had settled on a small farm left to him by his parents. Now, it so happened that M. de Persigny, whose real name was Fialin, had been a sergeant in the same regiment, and one day, after the advent of the Empire, being in the north, went to pay his former comrade a visit. I am perfectly certain that M. Boitelle, whom I knew, and with whose son I have continued the amicable relations subsisting between his father and myself, did not solicit any honours or appointment from the then powerful friend of the Emperor; nevertheless, Persigny appointed his fellow-messmate to the sub-prefectors.h.i.+p of St. Quentin. The emoluments, even in those days, were not large, but M. Boitelle was only a small farmer, and the promise of quick preferment may have induced him to leave his peaceful homestead; in short, M. Boitelle accepted, and, after several promotions, found himself at last at the Paris Prefecture of Police. In this instance the choice was really a good one.

I have known a good many prefects of police, among others M. de Maupas, who officiated on the night of the Coup d'etat, and who was also a personal friend; but I never knew one so thoroughly fitted for the arduous post as M. Boitelle. Though not a man of vast reading or brilliant education, he was essentially a man of the world in the best sense of the word. He was not a martinet, but a capable disciplinarian, and, what was better still, endowed with a feeling of great tolerance for the foibles of modern society. The soldier and the philosopher were so inextricably mixed up in him, that it would have been difficult to say where the one ended and the other began. M. de Maupas was at times too conscious of his own importance; there was too much of the French official in him. His successful co-operation in the Coup d'etat had imbued him with an exaggerated notion of his own capabilities of "taking people by the scruff of the neck and running them in" (a empoigner les gens). An English friend of mine, to whom I introduced him, summed him up, perhaps, more fitly. "He is like the policeman who ran in a woman of sixty all by himself, and boasted that he could have done it if she had been eighty."

But M. Boitelle, though kind-hearted, had no sympathy whatsoever with mawkish philanthropy. The Empress, on the other hand, had absolute paroxysms of it. She was like the Spanish high-born dame who insisted upon a tombstone for the grave of a bull, the killing and torturing of which in the ring she had frantically applauded. One day she expressed her wish to M. Boitelle to pay a visit to Saint-Lazare. There is nothing a.n.a.logous to that inst.i.tution in England. The "unfortunate woman" who prowls about the streets before or after nightfall is--except in a few garrison towns--tacitly ignored by our legislators, and when she offends against the common law, treated by our magistrates like any other member of society. We have no establishments where the moral cancer eats deeper into the flesh and the mind by the very attempt to isolate those who suffer most from it; we have no system which virtually bars the way to a reformed life by having given official authority to sin, and by recording for evermore the names of those whom want alone compelled to have themselves inscribed as outcasts on those h.e.l.lish registers. We have no Saint-Lazare, and Heaven be praised for it!

M. Boitelle knew the moral and mental state of most of the inmates of Saint-Lazare sufficiently well to foster no illusions with regard to the benefit to be derived by them from the solitary visit of so exalted a personage, while, on the other hand, he felt perfectly aware that it was morbid curiosity, however well disguised, that prompted the step. At the same time, the respect due to his sovereign made him reluctant to expose her, needlessly, to a possible, if not to a probable insult; in short, he considered the projected "tour of inspection" an ill-concerted one.

He also knew that it would be idle to bring his fund of shrewd philosophy to bear upon the Empress, to make her relinquish her design, so he adopted instead the outspoken method of the soldier. "Whatever your charitable feelings may be for those who suffer, madame," he said, "your place is not among them." The words sound a shade more abrupt in French, but a moment's reflection would have shown the most fastidious lady that no offence on the speaker's part was intended. The Empress, however, drew herself up to her full height. "Charity can go any and everywhere, monsieur," she replied. "You will please take me to Saint-Lazare to-morrow."

I would fain say as little as possible about the occupants of that gloomy building at the top of the Faubourg St. Denis, but am compelled to state in common fairness that, when once they are incarcerated and behave themselves--of course, according to _their_ lights--they are not treated with unnecessary harshness. I will go further, and say that they are treated more leniently than female prisoners in other penal establishments. The milder method is due to the presence in greater numbers than elsewhere of that admirable angel of patience, the Sister of Charity, who has no private grievances to avenge upon her own s.e.x, who does not look upon the fallen woman as an erstwhile and unsuccessful rival for the favours of men, who consequently does not apply the _vae victis_, either by sign, deed, or word. During my long stay in Paris, I have been allowed to visit Saint-Lazare twice, and I can honestly say that, though the laws that relegate these women there are a disgrace to nineteenth-century civilization, their application inside Saint-Lazare is not at all brutal. This does not imply that they lie upon down beds, and that their food is of the most delicate description; but they are well cared for bodily. The Empress, however, in a gush of misplaced charity, thought fit to take objection to their daily meals not being concluded with dessert. Thereupon, M. Boitelle, whose sound common sense had already been severely tried during that morning, could not help smiling. "Really, madame," he said; "you allow your kindness to run away with your good sense. If they are to have a dessert, what are we to give to honest women?"

Next day, M. Boitelle was appointed a senator; that is, removed from his post as prefect of police, which he had so worthily filled, and where he had done a great deal of unostentatious good. The next time M. Boitelle came in contact with the Empress was at the last hour of the Empire, when he tried, but in vain, to overcome her resentment, caused by his unhappy speech of many years before.

Yet the woman who could indulge in sentiment about the absence of dessert in the Saint-Lazare refectory, would, at the end of the hunt, deliberately jump off her horse, plunge the gleaming knife in the throat of the panting stag, and revel in the sight of blood. Many who saw her do this argued that in the hour of danger she would as boldly face the enemies of herself and her dynasty. I need not say that they were utterly mistaken. She slunk away at the supreme hour; while the princess, whom she had presumed to teach the manners of a court, left like a princess in an open landau, preceded by an outrider. I am alluding to Princess Clotilde.

CHAPTER XVI.

The story of a celebrated sculptor and his model -- David d'Angers at the funeral of Cortot, the sculptor -- How I became acquainted with him -- The sculptor leaves the funeral procession to speak to a woman -- He tells me the story -- David d'Angers'

sympathy with Greece in her struggle for independence -- When Botzaris falls at Missolonghi, he makes up his mind to carve his monument -- Wishes to do something original -- He finds his idea in the cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise -- In search of a model -- Comes unexpectedly upon her in the Rue du Montparna.s.se, while in company of Victor Hugo -- The model and her mother -- The bronze Christ on the studio wall -- David gives it to his model -- The latter dismissed -- A plot against the sculptor's life -- His model saves him -- He tries to find her and fails -- Only meets with her when walking behind the hea.r.s.e of Cortot -- She appears utterly dest.i.tute -- Loses sight of her again -- Meets her on the outer boulevards with a nondescript of the worst character -- He endeavours to rescue her, but fails -- Canler, of the Paris police, reveals the tactics pursued with regard to "unfortunates"

-- David's exile and death -- The Botzaris Monument is brought back to Paris to be restored -- The model at the door of the exhibition -- Her death.

In connection with the treatment of "fallen women" in Paris, I may give the following story, which becomes interesting in virtue of the personality of one of the actors. In 1843 the sculptor Cortot died, and I followed his funeral on foot, as was the custom in those days. I walked by the side of one of the greatest artists France, or, for that matter, the world, has ever produced--David d'Angers. The name of his native town was adopted to distinguish him from his celebrated namesake, the painter. I had become acquainted with the great sculptor a twelvemonth previously, in Delacroix's studio. All at once, as the procession went along the Quai Malaquais, I saw him start violently, and break through what, for want of a more appropriate term, I must call the ranks of mourners. For a moment only; the next, he was back by my side: but I noticed that he was frightfully agitated. He probably saw my concern for him in my face, for, though I asked him no questions, he said of his own accord, "It is all right. I just caught sight of a woman who saved my life, and, by the looks of her, she is in great straits, but, by the time I got out of the crowd, she had disappeared. I have an idea of the errand she was bent upon, and will inquire to-morrow, but I am afraid it will be of very little use."

I kept silent for a moment or two, but my curiosity was aroused, for, I repeat, at that time, the artistic world was ringing with the name of David d'Angers.

"I did not know you had been in such great danger," I said at last.

"Very few people do know it," he replied sadly; "besides, it happened a good many years ago, when you were very young. The next time we meet I will tell you all about it."

A week or so afterwards, as I was leaving the Cafe de Paris one evening, and going to the tobacconist at the corner of the Rue Laffite, I ran against the celebrated sculptor. The weather was mild, and we sat outside Tortoni's, where he told me the story, part of which I give in his own words, as far as I can remember them after the lapse of more than forty years.

"If there were any need," he began, "to apologize to an Englishman for my sympathy with the Philh.e.l.lenism which shortened the life of Byron, I might say that I sucked the principle of the independence of nations with the mother's milk, for I was born in 1789. Be that as it may, when Marcos Botzaris fell at Missolonghi I felt determined that he should have a monument worthy of his heroism and patriotism, as far as my talents could contribute to it. I was sufficiently young to be enthusiastic, and, at the same time, sufficiently presumptuous to imagine that I could do something which had never been done before. You have seen the engraving of the monument; you may judge for yourself how far I succeeded. But the idea of the composition, however out of the common, was, I am bound to admit, not the offspring of my own imagination. I was, perhaps, clever enough to see the poesy of it when presented to me, and to appropriate it; but the young, fragile girl lying on the tombstone and tracing the name of Marcos Botzaris was suggested to me by a scene I witnessed one day at Pere-la-Chaise. I saw a child stooping over a gravestone, and trying to spell out the words carved on it. It was all I wanted. I own, from that moment, my composition took shape in my mind. I was, however, still at a loss where to find the ideal child. The little girl of whom I had caught a glimpse would not have done at all for my purpose, even if her parents would have consented to let her sit, which was not at all likely--she was the prosperous-looking demoiselle of a probably prosperous bourgeoise family, well-fed, plump, and not above seven or eight. I, on the contrary, wanted a girl double that age just budding into womanhood, but with the travail of the transition expressed in every feature, in every limb. She was to represent to the most casual observer the sufferings engendered by the struggle against tutelage for freedom. She was to bend over the tomb of Botzaris to drag the secret of that freedom from him.

Dawning life was to drag the secret from the dead.

"That was my idea, and for several days I cudgelled my brain to find among my models one that would, physically and morally, represent all this. In vain; the grisettes of the Rue Fleurus and the Quartier-Latin, in spite of all that has been said of them by the poets and novelists of that time, were not at all the visible incarnations of lofty sentiment; whatever pain and grief an unrequited romantic pa.s.sion might entail, they left no appreciable traces on their complexions or in their outline; they were saucy madams, and looked it. I had communicated my wants to some of my friends, and one of them sent me what he thought would suit. The face was certainly a very beautiful one, as an absolutely perfect ensemble of cla.s.sical features I have never seen the like; but there was about as much expression in it as in my hand, and, as for the body, it was simply bursting out of its dress. I told her she would not do, and the reason why. 'Monsieur can't expect me to go into a consumption for two francs fifty an hour,' she remarked, bouncing out of the room.

"I was fast becoming a nuisance to all my cronies, when, one day, going to dine with Victor Hugo at La Mere Saget's, which was at the Barriere du Maine, I came unexpectedly, in the Rue du Montparna.s.se, upon the very girl for which I had been looking out for months. Notwithstanding her rags, she was simply charming. She was not above fourteen or fifteen, and, although very tall for her age, she had scarcely any flesh on her bones. I only knew her Christian name--Clementine: I doubt whether she had any other. Next morning she came with her mother, an old hag, dissipation and drunkenness written in every line of her face. But the child herself was perfectly innocent--at any rate, as innocent as she could be with such a parent, and tractable to a degree. After a little while the old woman, tired of twirling her thumbs, disgusted, perhaps, at my want of hospitality in not offering her refreshments, left off accompanying her, Clementine came henceforth alone.

"My studio was in the Rue de Fleurus in those days, and on the wall hung a very handsome bronze Christ on a velvet panel and in a dark satin frame. Curiously enough, I often caught the mother watching it; it seemed to have an irresistible fascination for her: and, one day, while the child was dressing, after two or three hours of hard work, she suddenly exclaimed, 'That's why my mother will not come here; she says she'd commit a robbery. She never leaves off talking about it. I wonder whether you'd like to part with it, M. David? A Christ like that would be beautiful in our attic. It would comfort and cheer me. If you like, I'll buy it of you. Of course, I have no money, but you can deduct it from my sittings. You can have as many as you like, not only for this statue, but for any other you may want later on.'

"We democrats, professed republicans, and more than suspected revolutionaries, are not credited by the majority with a great reverence for religious dogma; we are generally branded as absolute freethinkers, not to say atheists. This is frequently a mistake.[73] I have no occasion to recite my _credo_ to you, but a great many of the republicans of '89 and of to-day were and are believers. At any rate, I fondly imagined that the Christ for which the mother and child were longing might exercise some salutary influence on their lives, so I simply took down the frame and its contents and handed them to her. She staggered under the weight. 'You want that Christ,' I said; 'here it is: and when you are tempted to do evil look at it, and think of me, who gave it you as a present.'

[Footnote 73: It is a mistake. Not to mention Camille Desmoulins, who, when asked his age by his judge, replied, "The age of another _sans-culotte_, Jesus." Esquiros frequently spoke of "that good patriot, Christ;" Lammenais began the draft of his const.i.tution with "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and by the will of the French people."--EDITOR.]

"'As a present?' she shrieked for joy; and hurried away as fast as her legs would carry her.

"In about six months from that day the statue was finished. I had no further need of Clementine's services, and gradually all thought of her slipped from my mind. You may have heard that some time after my work was despatched to Greece, I was a.s.saulted one night in the Rue Childebert, on my way to Gerard de Nerval's. My skull was split open in two places, I was left for dead in the street, and but for a workman who stumbled over me, took me home, and sat up with me until morning, I might not have lived to tell the tale. From the very first I suspected the ident.i.ty of my a.s.sailant, though I have never breathed his name to any one. I am glad to say I never had many enemies, nor have I now, as far as I am aware; but I had offended the man by withholding my vote in a prize compet.i.tion. He was, however, not responsible for his actions; for even at that time he must have been mad. A few years afterwards, the suspicion both of his madness and his attempt upon my life became a certainty, for he repeated the latter. You are very young, and youth is either very credulous or very sceptical. We should be neither. If what I am going to tell you now were to be represented to you at the Ambigu or Porte Saint-Martin, you, as an educated man, would shrug your shoulders, and look with a kind of good-natured contempt upon the grisette or workman or bourgeois who would sit spellbound and take it all in as so much gospel. Providence, fate, call it what you will, concocts more striking dramatic situations and a greater number of them than M. Scribe and all his compeers have constructed in the course of their professional careers. Listen, and you shall judge for yourself.

"About seven years after the attack in the Rue Childebert, I received a letter one morning, inviting me to attend a meeting that same night between twelve and one, at a house in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, near the hospital of the Val-de-Grace. The letter told me how to proceed.

There being no concierge in the house, I was to provide myself with a 'dark lantern,' and to go up four flights of stairs, where I should find a door with a cross chalked upon it. It would be opened by my giving a particular knock. My previous danger notwithstanding, I had not the least suspicion of this being a trap. I did not for one moment connect the letter with the other event, the recollection of which, strange as it may seem to you, did not obtrude itself at all then. But there was another reason for the absence of caution on my part. In one of its corners the letter bore a sign, not exactly that of a secret society, but agreed upon among certain patriots.

"In short, a little before twelve o'clock that night, I went to the place appointed. I had no difficulty in finding the house, and reached the fourth story without meeting a soul. There was the door, with the cross chalked on it. I knocked once, twice, without receiving an answer.

Still, the thought of evil never entered my head. I began to think that I had been the victim of a hoax of some youngsters of the ecole des Beaux-Arts, most of whom were aware of my political opinions. I was just turning round to go down again, when a door by the side of that indicated was slowly opened, and a young girl with a lighted candle appeared on the threshold. Though both the candle and my lantern did not shed much light, I perceived that, at the sight of me, she turned very pale, but, until she spoke, I failed to recognize her. Then I saw it was Clementine, my model. She scarcely gave me time to speak. 'It is you, M.

David,' she said, in a voice trembling with fear and emotion. 'You,' she repeated. 'For Heaven's sake, go!--go as quickly as you can! If you stay another moment, you will be a corpse; for G.o.d's sake, go! And let me beg of you not to breathe a word of this to any one; if you do, my mother and I will pay for this with our lives. For G.o.d's sake, go. I did not know that you were the person expected. Go--go!'

"I do not think I answered a single word. I felt instinctively that this was no hoax, as I had imagined, but terrible reality. I went downstairs as fast as I could, but it was not until I got into the street that a connection between the two events presented itself to me. Then I decided to wait and watch. I hid myself in the doorway of a house a few steps away. Scarcely ten minutes had elapsed when half a dozen individuals arrived, one by one, and disappeared into the house that sheltered Clementine and her mother. One of them, I feel sure, was the man whom I suspected of having attempted my life before. A few years more went by, during which I often thought of my former model; and then, one day, I felt I would like to see her again. In plain daylight this time, I repaired to the house of the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, clambered up the stairs, and knocked at the door I had such good cause to remember. The door was opened by a workman, and a rapid glance at the inside of the room showed me that he was a lastmaker. 'Mademoiselle Clementine?' I asked. The man stared at me, and said, 'No such person lives here.' I made inquiries on all the lower floors--n.o.body had ever heard of her.

Clementine had disappeared. I never saw her again until a few days ago, when I walked by your side behind the body of Cortot. I should not have recognized her but for the bronze Christ she carried under her arm, and which attracted my notice. If what I surmise be correct, she must have reached the last stage of misery; for I feel convinced that nothing but absolute want would make her part with it. I have, however, failed to trace it in any of the bric-a-brac shops on the quays, and I believe that I have pretty well inquired at every one; so I must fain be content until fate throws her again across my path."

So far the story as told by the great sculptor himself. During the next eight years, in fact up to the Coup d'etat, I met him frequently, and, curiously enough, rarely failed to inquire whether in his many wanderings through Paris he had caught a glimpse of his former model. I felt unaccountably interested in the fate of that woman whom I had never seen, and, if we had been able to find her, would have endeavoured to find a decent home for her. But for about three years my inquiries always met with the same answer. Then, one evening in the latter end of '46 or beginning of '47, David told me that he had met her on the outer boulevards, arm in arm with one of those terrible nondescripts of which one is often compelled to speak again and again, and which, as far as I am aware, are nowhere to be found as a cla.s.s except in the French metropolis and great provincial centres. Clementine evidently wished to avoid David. A little while after, he met her again, and this time followed her, but, though by no means a coward, lacked the courage to enter the hovel into which she had disappeared with her companion. The last time he saw her was in the middle of '47, in the Rue des Boucheries. She seemed to have returned to her old quarters, and she was by herself. Until she spoke, David did not recognize her. Her face was positively seamed with horrible scars, "wounds inflicted by her lovers"--Heaven save the mark! She asked him to help her, and he did; but she had scarcely gone a few steps when she was arrested and taken to the prison of l'Abbaye de St. Germain, hard by, whither David followed to intercede for her. He was told to come back next morning, and that same evening communicated the affair to me. I decided there and then to accompany him, in order to carry out my plan of redeeming that human soul if possible. I failed, though through no fault of my own, but my attempt brought me in contact with a personage scarcely less interesting in his own way than David, namely, M. Canler, the future head of the Paris detective force. It was through him that I got an insight into some of the most revolting features of criminal life in Paris. But, before dealing with that subject, I wish to devote a few more lines to David, whom I had the honour of numbering among my friends till the day of his death, albeit that the last few years of his life were spent away from France, whither he returned, however, to die in '56. After the Coup d'etat he was exiled by Louis-Napoleon--ostensibly, for his political opinions; in reality, because he had refused to finish the monument for Queen Hortense's tomb after her son's fiasco at Boulogne.

Writing about France and Frenchmen, I feel somewhat reluctant to make too lavish a use of the words "patriot" and "patriotism," especially with the patriots and the patriotism of the Third Republic around me.

But I have no hesitation in saying that, to David d'Angers, these words meant something almost sacred. Sprung from exceedingly poor parents, he had ama.s.sed, by honest work, a fortune which, to men born in a higher sphere and with far more expensive tastes, might seem sufficient. Seeing that he was frugality and simplicity personified, that his income was mainly spent in alleviating distress, and that his daughter was even more simple-minded than her father, he had nothing to gain by the advent of a republic, nothing to lose by the establishment of a monarchy or empire, and his ardent champions.h.i.+p of republican inst.i.tutions--such as he conceived them--was prompted solely by his n.o.ble nature. That Louis-Napoleon should have exiled such a man was an error his warmest friends could scarcely forgive him. But David never complained, any more than he ever uttered a harsh word against the memory of Flaxman, who, in his youth, had shut his doors against him under the impression that he was a relation of Louis David who had voted for the death of Louis XVI.

On the contrary, the memory of the great English sculptor was held in deep reverence.

And so David departed, a wanderer on the face of the earth with his daughter. He first endeavoured to settle in Brussels, but the irresistible desire to behold once more what he himself considered his greatest work, the monument to Marcos Botzaris, attracted him to Greece.

A friend, to whom he communicated his intention, wrote to him, "Do not go." He gave him no further reason; he even withheld from him the fact that he had been at Missolonghi a twelvemonth previously. The explanation of this reticence may be gathered from David's letter to him a few days after his, David's, return. I have been allowed to copy it, and give it verbatim.

"Long before our vessel anch.o.r.ed near the spot where Byron died, I caught a glimpse of the tumulus erected at the foot of the bastion, in honour of Botzaris and his fellow-heroes. It made a small dark spot on the horizon, and above it was a speck, much smaller and perfectly white.

I knew instinctively that this was my statue of the 'young Greek girl,'

and I watched and watched with bated breath, fancying as the s.h.i.+p sped along that the speck moved. Of course, it was only my imagination, the presumptuous thought that the marble effigy would start into life at the approach of its creator.

"Alas, would I had proceeded no further--that I had been satisfied with the mirage instead of pus.h.i.+ng on in hot haste towards the reality! For the reality was heart-rending, so heart-rending that I wept like a child, and clenched my fists like a giant in despair. The right hand of the statue, the index finger of which pointed to the name, had been broken; the ears had disappeared, one of the feet was broken to atoms, and the face slashed with knives. It was like the face of the girl that had sat for me, when I last saw it, under the circ.u.mstances which, you may remember, I told you. The whole was riddled with bullets, and some tourists, British ones probably, had cut their names on the back of the child. And so ends the most glorious chapter of my artist's career--the model itself fallen beyond redemption, the work mutilated beyond repair, the author of it in exile.

"I felt powerless to repair the mischief. I did not stay long. Perhaps I ought not to complain. I knew that Byron had been buried near the fortifications at Missolonghi, but all my efforts to find the spot have proved useless.[74] The house where he breathed his last had been pulled down. Why should the Greeks have more reverence for Botzaris or Mavrocordato than they had for the poet? and if these three are so little to them, what must I be, whose name they probably never heard?

Still, as I stood at the stern of the departing vessel, I felt heart-broken. I have no illusions left."