THE MEMOIRS OF SIR EDWARD BLOUNT, IC.C.B.*
THESE Memoirs of the late President of our Paris Chamber of Commerce do not run in the old hackneyed furrows. Sir Edward Blount's opportunities, sustained for a period of almost unexampled duration, as official, financial magnate, railway king, fashionable clubman, turfite, have placed him on a series of coigns of vantage. In vitality "none but him- self can be his parallel." What other Englishman is there who, having been present at the Grare Saint Lazare when a hired mob assailed President Loubet with cries of "Panama!" was a witness to the triumphal progress of Lord Anglesey on his return from Waterloo? Unbroken vigour of body and brain is not the less efficacious when backed by a patrician pedigree of prolonged continuity. Sir Edward Blount is a lineal descendant of the Le Blounds, Counts of Guisnes, who lorded it in Picardy in the days of the now, alas ! out-of-date operatic hero, Robert le Diable, whose son, William the Con- queror, was accompanied by some of the younger Blounds when he invaded England. One of the brothers commanded the Conqueror's fleet, and another was general of infantry at the battle of Hastings (we mean, of course, Senlac), services rewarded by the Normans with large gifts of land. With the family name any student of Domesday Book, Shakespeare, and Pope is well acquainted. The subject of the memoir calls it "one of the proudest boasts" of his race that through the vicissitudes of centuries they have never wavered in their loyalty to the Roman faith. Eighty-three years ago the little Blount, aged ten, went to Oscott, where, he says, the rough life and grimy victuals made the College a prototype of Dotheboys Hall. After a few weeks' training at a London bank he filled an interim position in the Home Office, where he copied the despatches which announced the inglorious victory of Navarino. His notices of the celebrities of the day whom he met at the weekly breakfasts of Holland House are brighter and more really descriptive than the average sweepings of the autobiographical dustbin.
Subsequently serving as Attaché in the Paris Embassy, the author next moved to the Consulate at Rome, where he was introduced to the ex-Queen Hortense and her son, after- wards Napoleon III. The Queen, asking him if he could dance, the young Blount answered, "Madame, je sais denser un petit," a specimen of the French of Stratford-atte-le-Bowe never forgotten by his Royal friend. Rejoining the Paris Embassy staff for a while, he decided, as his means were limited, to embark in business. This volume describes the enter- prises in banking and speculative finance by which, after the usual ups and downs, he put money in his purse. He is still on the directorate of certain London joint-stock institutions; he was chairman of the Paris Societe Generale till last year. The France of 1836 possessed only twenty-five miles of railroad against our two thousand miles. Putting pressure on the French Government, he was granted, in spite of the pessi- mistic objections of Thiers, a concession for a Paris-Rouen line (l'Ouest), the first step in a new departure which enriched our neighbours, and opened a wide field for the employment of English capital, builders, drivers, and train-men. There is a capital account of Blount's dare-devil ride on an engine from Paris to Amiens as voluntary bearer of the message which secured the timely arrival of the troops which enabled Cavaignac to drive the "Reds" from "the barricades of June." In 1894 he had his reward. Some newspaperian extremists, who were reinforced by a party in the Chamber, clamoured for his expulsion from the chairmanship of the Ouest Railway, a post. they said, whose occupant would possess the secrets of the Army mobilisation and movements if there were hostilities on the Channel coasts. This agitation being countenanced by General Mercier, the Minister of War, who prepared to legislate at Blount's expense, the chairman of thirty years' standing peaceably accepted the ostracism which repaid his many services to Paris and France.
The author's railway activities were not confined to the French net. As director of an Austrian line he happened to be received in audience by the Emperor Francis Joseph, when he took the opportunity of doing the travelling public a service. He says :— "I was accompanied by two English colleagues, who cherished • Memoirs of Sir &limed Blount, K.C.B., 1815-1902, Edited by Stuart J. Reid. London: Longmana and Co. [108.6d. net,/ great expectations from the interview. His Majesty pointedly asked what he could do for me. I did not wish for a personal decoration, and therefore said that, in the personal sense, I sought nothing, but if his Majesty would allow me, I should like to explain a public grievance which had probably escaped the notice of the Austrian Government. The Emperor graciously gave me permission, and I then mentioned that international trains from other parts of Europe were continually stopped, often in the dead of the night, on the frontiers of the Austrian Empire, in order that soldiers might demand passports. This sometimes occasioned alarm, and always delay and inconvenience, to passengers, and interfered with international communications. The 'Emperor turned to the officer in waiting and said, Make a note of that,' and within a fortnight passports were abolished throughout the Austrian Empire. This was better than getting a bit of tinsel for myself, though my colleagues were ruffled."
Had an Ambassador dared thus to denounce a recognised pillar of European order, the enlightened Monarch would
have graciously asked his Excellency to observe that the Ball-platz, not the Hof burg, was the proper place for the discussion of such matters. A glimpse of Victor Emmanuel was less pleasing. After the battle of Solferino our author was at Verona respecting an Italian railway question which had to be submitted to Napoleon III. Approaching an apartment where the Emperor was in con- ference with Victor Emmanuel and Cavour, Sir Edward met the King and his Minister coming out of the door for the purpose of a private consultation. Thereupon the Sardinian monarch, who had been lashed to fury by the conclusion of the armistice of Villafranca without his participation, must
needs "turn round and shake his fist against the room where the Emperor of the French and his secretary were sitting, making use of some violent expletives, as was his wont, against Napoleon."
The human memory, not being a kodak, when we want direct images of the past, often gives us mere second or third hand reflections of previous remembrances of earlier recollections. Under the operation of this law of Nature, our writer's Wahrheit may be tempered in places by involuntary Dichtung. Then, as the arrangement and editing of a book and seeing it through the press is a very onerous under- taking for a man of ninety-three, Sir Edward Blount en- trusted his responsibilities of this character to an auxiliary, who is not always perfectly surefooted. We read :—" After the conclusion of peace I had frequent opportunities of meeting Cavour at Turin, at the house of Sir Hudson
Lowe, the English Minister " ! How would the shades of Napoleon's guardian at St. Helena and Sir James Hudson
regard this "nice derangement" of their names ? This, however, is no doubt a slip of the pen, but the same cannot be said of the statement as to the French Minister for Foreign Affairs who, circa 1860, called the Pope's Nuncio "an ass" when that ecclesiastic had spoken of him as "an imbecile." This must have been Thouvenil, not, as our editor thinks, Darn, who came to the Quai d'Orsay in 1870. There was no Peace of Verona ; the treaty meant was negotiated at Zurich. These, however, are minor matters, and in no way detract from the vividness and interest of the book, nor do they derogate in essentials from the praise due to an able, and in general well equipped and painstaking, editor.
The frequency of the author's meetings with Cavour having been what it was, we are puzzled at his judgment that, though the Sardinian Minister's talk was "enlivened by caustic wit," he was "of homely manners and plain appearance," a view which would hardly have been endorsed by "Sir Hudson Lowe." Considering, however, that the programme of Italia libera fin' all' Adriatico did not appeal to Sir Edward Blount's sympathies, we will not complain of his appreciation of Cavour as a little lukewarm. He was not particularly edified by the unparalleled outburst of popular enthusiasm which greeted Garibaldi on his arrival in London in 1864, when, it will be remembered, that hero was driven by the Duchess of Sutherland at the head of a procession to Stafford House, where he was treated with quasi-Royal honours, and visited by the present King. We read :— " Garibaldi was, as everybody knows, a condottiere, dressed always in uniform (red shirt !) scarlet and blue. As the procession Passed the Reform Club the band which accompanied Garibaldi was playing La Marseillaise.' John Bright, who was also at the window, asked, What tune is that ?' I mischievously answered, The Rogue's March.' Bright looked round sharply and ex- claimed, Who said that 9' I replied, '1 did'; but Mr. Bright said no more, and the matter dropped." The writer's "backward glances" are very free from the vienz neuf, and they are serviceable contributions to history. His office in the Rue de Is Pain was a regular lounge of his intimate friend Disraeli. He tells of a drive along the boulevards with the statesman and his adoring spouse, who would not let her absent-minded husband sit back in the carriage, but roused him with the words, "Now, do put your- self forward, Dizzy, and show yourself." We have a useful parallel between Thiers, as quasi-amateur financier, and Gladstone, as unequalled master of all monetary and com- mercial questions, with new portraits of Lord Hertford and the munificent connoisseur and picture-buyer who presented Paris with the thousand artistic drinking-fountains known as "lee Wallace." By the side of our testhetic countryman stands the banker, society elegant, and wild visionnaire, the Saint Simonian Messiah, known as Pere Enfantin, who tried to carry out the barring of the Nile at Assouan recently taken in hand by our engineers. We come across that delight- ful representative of Parisian learning and statesmanship, translator of Aristotle and author of the annexation of Tunis, Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire. The siege of Paris in this volume has its novelties, and the writer describes with natural pride his energies as English Consul, a post to which he practically appointed himself, after the forced departure of Lord Lyons and his staff for the French seat of Government at Tours. When the days of roast elephant, camel humps, horse, mule, donkey ribs, and hams at
apiece, came to an end, the London Relief Committee despatched colossal supplies of food to Paris. The first consignment being found to contain pheasants and other luxuries, the delegates of the Provisional Govern. ment who received it exclaimed : " Ces choses-lh sont pour raiistocratie et non pour le peuple. Ii ne serait pas prudent de lee distribuer " ; thereupon the non-plebeian viands were sent back to England.
The author's affections were always less set on the " bears " and " bulls " than on horses. He was connected with the great racing establishment of the Comte de Lagrange, of
Gladiateur' memory, and he maintained a stud of his own ; his recollections of the Parisian turf and its adjuncts, the Jockey Club and the Union, are very pleasant. Every reader of this volume will be glad to see that the veteran's favourite occupation is by no means gone. In the stalls and paddocks of his comfortable East Grinstead retreat he is now breeding "much admired horses from Normandy mares and English sires,"—a remark which seems justified by a photograph of a fine pair of steppers. Sir Edward's proclivities extend to popular education. To him Birmingham owes the great building which is the daily resort of hundreds of pupils of his faith.
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