BOOKS.
MISS BERRY'S MEMOIRS.*
TILE defect of this book is its mass. We expect memoirs to be garrulous, but fifteen hundred octavo pages of diary, letters, and gossipy memoranda are a little too much for any but the strongest digestion. In this instance the quantity annoys us the more because so very much might have been judiciously left out. Miss Berry did not belong to the class whose nothings interest the world, and when she had nothing to say the words in which she says it might have been omitted. The whole of the Italian diary might, for ex- ample, have been excised ; it reads like a poor chapter out of Murray. Several of the letters might have shared the same fate, and every entry of this kind, of which there are many scores :—" Sunday, August 23rd.—Left London. Monday, 24th. —Embarked at Dover for Boulogne. Tuesday, 25th.—Abbeville. Wednesday, 26th.—Stopped a short time at Amiens to see the Cathedral, which is one of the finest and most ornamented Gothic. churches I have ever seen. Slept at Clermont." For the rest, the book will we doubt not charm that wide circle to whom anecdot- age is at once the substitute for fiction and the most acceptable form of history. Miss Berry was not very witty or very shrewd, and was very much given to caste prejudice, as witness her
strange account of the men who surrounded Napoleon and the Court of Josephine. The under-breeding of the "new world," as she calls it, almost entirely conceals from her its vigour
and its force, and she thinks it ground of complaint that men who were guiding armies or carrying on the haute politique of Europe were indifferent to the propriety of returning visits or keeping up useless little social observances. But she had a sound and clear judgment, was wholly free from insularity, lived to an • Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry. From the Year 1783 to 1852: Edited by Lady Theresa Lewis. yak London: Irmgman and Co.
immense age, and for nearly seventy years had talked freely with leading personages. In England she was the friend of a large circle of the best society, and in France she was nearly as well received. She wrote well, too, in her diary as well as her books, and there are bits of these records of considerable literary interest Such, for example, is the account of the assassination of the Due de Berri, and the frightful scene as he lay dying, wearying for the arrival of the King, but anxious only for the fate of his illegitimate children. The following is a touch characteristic alike of French manners and of Miss Berry's mode of judging. The Duke had asked openly for two children born to him before his marriage, but "the poor dying man then, in a whisper to his brother, the Duc d'Angouleme, reminded him that he had another child, a boy, born since his marriage, by Virginie, a dancer of the Opera, whom he recommended to his protection. His not offending the feel- ings of his wife with the mention of this child showed his power of thinking of others in the midst of his cruel sufferings, with the blood mounting higher and higher in his heart every moment."
Miss Berry was in France in 1802, was presented to Madame Mere, and had opportunities of seeing all the personages of the Consular Court. She tickets them off in brief sentences, Moreau, for instance, being "a middle-sized, quiet-looking man, who at a distance gave me a little the idea of Sir G. Beaumont, though shorter and blacker ; but I was not near enough to see his countenance." Eugene Beauhamois "was among the dancers ; he is rather good-looking, but by no means distinguished." . . . . "General Bruno (who commanded in Holland) ; is one of the very tallest men I ever saw, between thirty and forty, rather awkward, with a sensible but not agreeable countenance. Maasena was there, not in uniform ; a crop, with thick black hair ; a vulgar-looking, intelligent countenance, and rather a short thick figure." . . . " Cambaceres, the Second Consul, was among the company : he came late, and was received without any sort of distinction. He is an uncommonly ill-looking, shortish, thick man, with his eyes sunk in his head ; his hair badly dressed ; his dress the undress uniform of the Consuls—blue velvet, with a broad gold embroidery, fustian breeches, and common turn- down boots." . . . She went, too, into worse society than that of Ministers, and seems rather to have appreciated it. Nothing can mark better the change which has taken place in manners than the visit paid by Miss Berry, herself of the straitest caste, to a sort of Parisian casino :—
" After all the repeated histories one has heard of the indecency of the dress and manners of Paris, I felt some degree of uneasiness before I went in, for fear of seeing somewhat too much. My fears were quite superfluous. I never was in a more quiet decent assembly ; there was not one woman dressed the least indecorously, not one-half as naked as those at the Bal des Etrangers. Nor was there any impropriety of manners ; there was indeed much less gaiety than I should have expected in such a meeting, much less than I have formerly seen in dances of this order of people in France. The dances wore principally waltzes, for which there is such a rage at present, that in every society they have in a manner superseded their own pretty country dances, in which they excel, while they don't waltz half as well as the Germans. All.the women who dance in the sort of balls I am now speaking of are sensees to be of bad character, which made the decency of their dress and manners the more remarkable. There were several bons bourgeois, both men and women, walking up and down the room, for it is only dancing which is forbid a des honnites fenunes in these places. There were several women in men's clothes, a fashion now very general in this order of people, sometimes for convenience, and at other times, I dare say, for less excusable reasons. There were likewise several men in women's clothes, but these wore masks, or intended to do so. We remained at this ball near an hoar, and left the room much fuller than when we entered."
'1113 extraordinary impropriety of female dress which prevailed from 1795 to 1805, and was produced by the mania for the man- ners of antiquity, struck Miss Berry with a force which is the more remarkable as she frequently sat out ballets in which the dancers wore nothing from the waist upwards but flesh-coloured tricot, with perfect unconsciousness that such a costume was offen- sive to English feeling. Her general impression of the French Court was that its manners were vulgar, and its men not to be com- pared as gentlemen with those of the "old world," but she attempts in her diary no formal comparison, and her memoranda are almost free from political reflections. She seems indeed, owing perhaps to the deep-seated melancholy which from a very early age seems to have underlaid her character, to have regarded all personages ex- cept a few intimate friends as characters in a drama, and to have criticized them in the same way. This man "gets up " well, that one speaks badly, this other is playing too high a part—that is the substance of Miss Berry's reflections. They are usually sensible, and always entertaining as specimens of contemporary observa- tion, but they add wonderfully little to our knowledge. All we gain is an idea of the effect which great men produced on an
average contemporary observer, with a wide experience and few prejudices. Here, for instance, is a little bit about a person for whom an entire nation once wept—the Princess Charlotte :— " I don't know whether her face is improved ; her month is less pleasing and less resembling her father's than it 'was; but her bust is perfect ; her head not too large, and well placed ; has much intelligence in her countenance, though the expression is not very agreeable ; her walk is dreadful, but I think it is only girlish affectation, which will cure itself." . . . . "And thus is this girl, now a woman, who in three short years may be called to reign over this country, with all her senses awake, eager and curious about everything and everybody, sent away with her governess, and during the hours not spent with her she has Mrs. — to form her mind, manners, and disposition ! Alas ! poor Princes, one and all, can you ever be pitied enough, or even judged with com- mon justice in all the disadvantages under which you labour? True, this poor thing is taught music, and taught Latin, neither of which will certainly be of much service to her in governing this country, in detecting folly and knavery, in surrounding herself with talents, and above all, in acquiring truth and stability of character. She knows no creature but the Royal Family and their attendants ; she has never yet seen a play or an opera ; and whenever she is her own mistress, what must be her first idea but to satiate herself with pleasures, which every other girl of fifteen is beginning to appreciate at their just value, provided they are not entirely new to them." Lady Charlotte Bury was terribly abused for saying the same thing. And here are two little bits about the Duke of Wellington, "The simplicity and frankness of his manners, and the way in which he speaks of public affairs, are really those of a great man ; although, talking of the allied sovereigns, their views, &c., &c., he says we found so-and-so—we intend such-and-such things —quite as treating de Couronne a Couronne." The sense that he had once been the first man in Europe never quitted the Duke. Miss Berry adds, "The Duke told me at dinner that Bonaparte would never do justice to Marmont, or pardon his defeat, till he saw his (Duke of Wellington's) account of the action in which he had beat Marmont ; and Marmont has since acknowledged his obli- gation to the Duke, which is much in a person naturally so insolent (to the English in particular). The Duke added, that Bonaparte had always waited for, and depended on, his accounts of the actions in which he was engaged with the French, to judge of his generals' conduct, and seemed proud, as well he might, of such a decisive proof of confidence in his truth and honotir, hardly less glorious than the great events which call for their exercise. The Duke told me, in speaking of the military disposition which all Europe had acquired during these last twenty years, that such was its preponderance, and such its effects on the armies collected last year in the second crusade against France, that at the time the armistice was concluded, and the allitm were rather blamed for making peace so suddenly, and allowing such-and-such terms, they were hardly themselves masters of their own troops, or able to control their intentions, and were dreading that some unforeseen event might have discovered this dangerous secret." If that remark is correctly reported, it is one of the most note- worthy ever ascribed to the Duke, and it is strongly borne out by Sir It. Wilson's memoir, and by the language ascribed by all German anecdotists to Blucher. And here is a story of Queen Caroline, the woman whose wrongs interested all England, till all England failed for one year to comprehend the meaning of evi- dence. The narrator is Sir William Gell, the Queen's Chamberlain, now known only by his account of Pompeii :—
"If fate ever puts you in the way, make her toll you how the Empress Marie Louisa invited her to Parma •' how the attendants dined in the outer room ; and how, in full-dress feathers, and velvet chairs with heavy gold legs and backs, the two ladies sat at a very long tete-a e before dinner at a fire. 'You imagine it not very entertaining ; I assure you, very doll (dull), I yarn (yawn), and she de same; mein Gott, I balance on my chaire mit my feet pon die fire. What you tink ? I tomble all back mit di chair, and mit memo legs in die air; man see nothing more als my feet. I die from laugh, and what you tink she do She stir not, she laugh not ; but mit the utmost gravity she say, 'Mon Dieu, Madame, comma vow; m'avez effray.' I go in fits of laugh, and she repeat di same word witout variation or change of feature. I not able to resist bursting out every moment at dinner, and die to get away to my gens to tel die story. We all scream mit di ridiculousness for my. situation."
These volumes are full of stories like these, and a few which his- torically are mere valuable, but though the plums are numerous there is a great deal of dough. It is not the less heavy because the index is a most imperfect performance. There is not, for instance, a reference to Napoleon either as Napoleon, Bonaparte, or Consul, except under the head of "Paris," where it would not occur to any one to seek for it.
Previous page
