MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD
NICOLSON pot-pourri in the vast china bowls should no longer be renewed year by year, but should moulder silently as the tourists lag along.
It is thus an agreeable experience to visit a house which has for fifty years been a museum, and to find the chandeliers blazing at an hour when the rooms are usually closed and darkened and when only the torch of the night-watchman throws its lonely circle upon the parquet floors. It was a fine party certainly, and it pleased me to suppose that through the warm hum of 1950 conversation I could detect the dry cackle of Lord Steyne, or catch the high ripple of Mimi Fagnani's laughter, or hear the soft insinuating accents of Becky Sharp.
The guests on Tuesday night were naturally preoccupied. not with the ghosts of a vanished or imagined past, but with the works of art with which they were surrounded. Yet the personalities and circumstances of that magnificent heritage are stranger even than those which the imaginations Thackeray or Disraeli could devise. In the background there is always the mysterious heiress Maria Fagnam. She was believed to be the daughter of the fourth Duke of Queensberry by an Italian opera-singer ; yet George Selwyn also claimed paternity and made her his ward ; and in the end she inherited large fortunes from each of her reputed fathers and married the third Marquis of Hertford. Her son, the fourth Marquis, resided for most of his life in Paris, where he perfected the collection which his father had begun and where he died unmarried in 1870. He bequeathed his collection, his house in the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, the splendid villa of Bagatelle, his Irish estates and Hertford House to his adopted son, Sir Richard Wallace. Until the day of his death in 1890, Sir Richard never knew the facts about his own parentage. It was assumed that he was the illegitimate son of Lord Hertford by a Mrs. Jackson, and as a youth he called himself " Richard Jackson." Yet Lord Hertford was only eighteen years of age at the date of Richard's birth, and it was widely asserted that the boy was, in fact, the son of Mimi Fagnani by an unknown father. Lord Hertford. it was rumoured, assumed parentage in order to protect his mother's reputation ; the truth will probably never be disclosed. Always throughout his life there hung around Sir Richard Wallace the mystery of his own origin.
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He was a reserved man, benevolent and somewhat lazy. He formed a connection with the daughter of a French officer, Julie Castelnau, by whom he had a son who died while young and whom he subsequently married. Living continuously either in the Boulevard des Italiens or at Bagatelle, he became a noted Parisian figure and was highly esteemed by the French. At the time of the sieee of Paris in 1870 he had remained in the capital and devoted much of his immense fortune to the relief of distress. It was he also who erected at,his own expense those ugly drinking-troughs (some of which still survive in the 'streets of Paris), which were known as " les wallaces." He shared the artistic and epicurean tastes of his reputed father, but his domestic life was eminently respectable and austere. He became, and remained for twelve years, a silent member of the House of Commons , he frequently visited his Irish estates ; but his spiritual home was Paris, and it was there that he died and was buried. His wife survived by seven years. The strange quirk of destiny which decreed that the Hertford fortune and collections should never be directly transmitted also contrived.a curious circumstance to which the nation is indirectly indebted. On one of his journeys to England Sir Richard Wallace was taken ill at Boulogne. He was attended by Mr. Murray Scott, a local English doctor. His correspondence, which was enormous, had accumulated during his illness, and he asked his doctor whether he knew of anyone who was bilingual in French and English and who could act as temporary secretary. Dr. Scott recommended his own son, John. It was by this strange chance that John Murray Scott entered the household of Sir Richard and Lady Wallace and came eventually to be regarded, not merely as a devoted amanuensis, but almost as a son.
Sir Richard Wallace in his later age was a nervous and irritable person, and he was soothed by John Murray Scott's efficiency, tact and calm. It was an advantage to him to have as his secretary a young man who could speak French and English with equal facility and who had an instinctive appreciation of works of art. Sir John Murray Scott, as he became, was, when I met him, an old man of enormous girth, benevolent and breathless, generous and gentle, cultivated and urbane. He had by then acquired an expert know- ledge of the beautiful objects by which he was surrounded and would touch or handle them with a delicacy which surprised. He had by that date sold Bagatelle to the French Government, but he retained the house on the Boulevard des Italiens, and it was there that he would entertain his guests. The rooms faced both on the Boulevard and on the Rue Lafitte ; they were hung with silk and packed to overflowing with busts and consoles, with tapestries and pictures. When one opened the double windows which gave on to the Boulevard, the roar of traffic would rumble through the rooms ; when one closed them the silken walls would relapse into silence, broken only by the ticking of a hundred clocks. Under the management of ,his major-domo, M. Baard, the wheels of life revolved easily in the Rue Lafitte ; Sir John's personal needs were attended to by his incomparable valet, Mr. Short ; his cook, Madame Binard, was recognised as a magician. Sir John did not live to see the First World War ; he had a seizure when attending a meeting of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection. He would not have understood or welcomed the modern world.
Few only of the many guests who attended the fine party last Tuesday can have known or remembered that it is largely to Sir John Murray Scott that we owe the great national collection in Hertford House. Lady Wallace, before her death, intimated to him that she intended to leave him the whole of Sir Richard's collection, both that in London and that in Paris. He persuaded her that it would be wrong for any private individual to inherit so many valuable possessions and that it was her duty to bequeath to the nation the works of art assembled in Hertford House. She agreed, therefore, to leave him only a portion of her husband's property and to hand the rest over to the najion in perpetuity. Thus in rendering thanks to Sir Richard and Lady Wallace for this bequest, we should not forget the part played by the son of the English doctor at Boulogne.
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