The Cockaynes in Paris; Or, 'Gone abroad'

The story I have to tell is disjointed. I throw it out as I picked it up. My duties, the nature of which is neither here nor there, have borne me to various parts of Europe. I am a man, not with an establishment-but with two portmanteaus. I have two hats in Paris and two in London always. I have seen everything in both cities, and like Paris, on the whole, best. There are many reasons, it seems to me, why an Englishman who has the tastes of a duke and the means of a half-pay major, should prefer the banks of the Seine to those of the Thames-even with the new Embankment.

Everybody affects a distinct and deep knowledge of Paris in these times; and most people do know how to get the dearest dinner Bignon can supply for their money; and to secure the apartments which are let by the people of the West whom nature has provided with an infinitesimal quantity of conscience. But there are now crowds of English men and women who know their Paris well; men who never dine in the restaurant of the stranger, and women who are equal to a controversy with a French cook. These sons and daughters of Albion who have transplanted themselves to French soil, can show good and true reasons why they prefer the French to the English life. The wearying comparative estimates of household expenses in Westbournia, and household expenses in the Faubourg St. Honoré! One of the disadvantages of living in Paris is the constant contact with the odious atmosphere of comparisons.

"Pray, sir-you have been in London lately-what did you pay for veal cutlet?"

CROSSING THE CHANNEL-RATHER SQUALLY.

The new arrivals are the keenest torments. "In London, where I have kept house for over twenty years, and have had to endure every conceivable development of servants' extortion, no cook ever demanded a supply of white aprons yet." You explain for the hundredth time that it is the custom in Paris. There are people who believe Kensington is the domestic model of the civilized world, and travel only to prove at every stage how far the rest of the universe is behind that favoured spot. He who desires to see how narrow his countrymen and countrywomen can be abroad, and how completely the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honoré-if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes which enliven the bronze shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; the prints in the windows under the Rivoli colonnade; the monsters with fangs, red hair, and Glengarry caps, of Cham, and Doré, and Bertall, and the female sticks with ringlets who pass in the terra-cotta show of the Palais Royal for our countrywomen, have long ago ceased to warm my indignation. All I can say now is, that the artists and modellers have not travelled. They have studied the strange British apparitions which disfigure the Boulevard des Italiens in the autumn, their knowledge of our race is limited to the unfortunate selection of specimens who strut about their streets, and-according to their light-they are not guilty of outrageous exaggeration. I venture to assert that an Englishman will meet more unpleasant samples of his countrymen and countrywomen in an August day's walk in Paris, than he will come across during a month in London. To begin with, we English treat Paris as though it were a back garden, in which a person may lounge in his old clothes, or indulge his fancy for the ugly and slovenly. Why, on broiling days, men and women should sally forth from their hotel with a travelling-bag and an opera-glass slung about their shoulders, passes my comprehension. Conceive the condition of mind of that man who imagines that he is an impressive presence when he is patrolling the Rue de la Paix with an alpenstock in his hand! At home we are a plain, well-dressed, well-behaved people, fully up in Art and Letters-that is, among our educated classes, to any other nation-in most elegant studies before all; but our travellers in France and Switzerland slander us, and the "Paris in 10 hours" system has lowered Frenchmen's estimate of the national character. The Exhibition of 1867, far from promoting the brotherhood of the peoples, and hinting to the soldier that his vocation was coming to an end, spread a dislike of Englishmen through Paris. It attracted rough men from the North, and ill-bred men from the South, whose swagger, and noise, and unceremonious manners in cafés and restaurants chafed the polite Frenchman. They could not bring themselves to salute the dame de comptoir, they were loud at the table d'h?te and commanding in their airs to the waiter. In brief, the English mass jarred upon their neighbours; and Frenchmen went the length of saying that the two peoples-like relatives-would remain better friends apart. The disadvantage is, beyond doubt, with us; since the froissement was produced by the British lack of that suavity which the French cultivate-and which may be hollow, but is pleasant, and oils the wheels of life.

ROBINSON CRUSOE AND FRIDAY.

From French designs.

Mrs. Rowe's was in the Rue-say the Rue Millevoye, so that we may not interfere with possible vested interests. Was it respectable? Was it genteel? Did good country families frequent it? Were all the comforts of an English home to be had? Had Mrs. Grundy cast an approving eye into every nook and corner? Of course there were Bibles in the bedrooms; and you were not made to pay a franc for every cake of soap. Mrs. Rowe had her tea direct from Twinings'. Twinings' tea she had drunk through her better time, when Rowe had one of the finest houses in all Shepherd's Bush, and come what might, Twinings' tea she would drink while she was permitted to drink tea at all. Brown Windsor-no other soap for Mrs. Rowe, if you please. People who wanted any of the fanciful soaps of Rimmel or Piver must buy them. Brown Windsor was all she kept. Yes, she was obliged to have Gruyère-and people did ask occasionally for Roquefort; but her opinion was that the person who did not prefer a good Cheshire to any other cheese, deserved to go without any. She had been twenty-one years in Paris, and seven times only had she missed morning service on Sundays. Hereupon, a particular history of each occasion, and the superhuman difficulty which had bound Mrs. Rowe hand and foot to the Rue Millevoye from eleven till one. She had a faithful note of a beautiful sermon preached in the year 1850 by the Rev. John Bobbin, in which he compared life to a boarding-house. He was staying with Mrs. Howe at the time. He was an earnest worker in the true way; and she distinctly saw her salle-à-manger in his eye, when he enlarged on the bounteous table spread by Nature, and the little that was needed from man to secure all its blessings.

PAPA & THE DEAR BOYS.

Mrs. Rowe took a maternal interest in me. I had made an economical arrangement by which I secured a little room to myself throughout the year, under the slates. I had many friends. I constantly arrived, bringing new lodgers in my wake. For the house was quiet, well-ordered, cheap, and tremendously respectable. I say, Mrs. Rowe took a maternal interest in me-that is, she said so. There were ill-natured people who had another description for her solicitude; but she had brought herself to believe that she had an unselfish regard for your humble servant, and that she was necessary to my comfort in the world, and I was pleased at the innocent humbug. It afforded me excellent creature comforts; and I was indebted to it for a constant welcome when I got to Paris-which is something to the traveller. We cling to an old hotel, after we have found the service bad, the cooking execrable, and the rooms dirty. It is an ancient house, and the people know us, and have a cheery word and a home look.

THE DOWAGER AND TALL FOOTMAN.

Many years were passed in the Rue Millevoye by Mrs. Rowe and her niece, without more incident than the packing and unpacking of luggage, and genteel disputes over items in the bills conducted with icy politeness on both sides, and concluded by Mrs. Rowe invariably with the withering observation, that it was the first remark of the kind which had ever been made on one of her little notes. People usually came to a settlement with complimentary expressions of surprise at the extreme-almost reckless-moderation of her charges; and expressed themselves as at a loss to understand how she could make it worth her while to do so very much for so very little. The people who came and went were alike in the mass. The reader is requested to bear in mind that Mrs. Rowe had a connexion of her own. She was seldom angry; but when an advertising agent made his way to her business parlour, and took the liberty of submitting the value of a Western States paper as a medium for making her establishment known, she confessed that the impertinence was too much for her temper. Mrs. Rowe advertise! Mrs. Rowe would just as soon throw herself off the Pont Neuf, or-miss church next Sunday.

"They don't come a second time!" Mrs. Rowe would say to me, with a fierce compression of the lip, that might lead a nervous person to imagine she made away with them in the cellars.

When Mrs. Rowe took you into her confidence-a slow and tedious admission-she was pleased, usually, to fortify your stock of knowledge with a comprehensive view of her family connexions; intended to set the Whytes of Battersea (from whom she derived, before the vulgar Park was there) upon an eminence of glory, with a circle of cringing and designing Rowes at the base. How she-Whyte on both sides, for her father married his first cousin-ever came to marry Joshua Rowe, was something her mother never understood to her dying day. She was graciously open to consolation in the reflection that nobles and princes had made humble matches before her; and particularly in this, that the Prince Regent married Mrs. Fitzherbert.

Lucy Rowe was favoured with these observations, heightened by occasional hits at her own misfortune in that she was a Rowe, and could not boast one thimbleful of Whyte blood in her veins.

It was the almost daily care of Mrs. Rowe to impress the people with whom her business brought her in contact, with the gulf that lay between her and her niece; although, through the early and inexplicable condescension of a Miss Harriet Whyte, of Battersea, they bore the same name, Miss Rowe was no blood relation whatever.

It was surprising to see how Lucy bore up under the misfortune. She was not a Whyte, but she had lived beside one. Youth is so elastic! Lucy, albeit she had the Rowe lip and nose, and, worse than all, the Rowe hair (a warm auburn, which Mrs. Rowe described in one syllable, with a picturesque and popular comparison comprehended in two), was daring enough to meet the daylight, without showing the smallest signs of giving way to melancholy. When new comers, as a common effort of politeness, saw a strong likeness between Mrs. Rowe and her niece, the representative of the Whytes of Battersea drew herself to her full height, which was a trifle above her niece's shoulders, and answered-"Oh dear, no, madam! It would be very strange if there were, as there is not the slightest blood relationship between us."

Lucy Rowe was about fifteen when I first saw her. A slender, golden-haired, shy and quiet girl, much in bashful and sensitive demeanour like her romantic namesake of "the untrodden ways." It is quite true that she had no Whyte blood in her veins, and Mrs. Rowe could most conscientiously declare that there was not the least resemblance between them. The Whyte features were of a type which none would envy the possessor, save as the stamp of the illustrious house of Battersea. The House of Savoy is not attractive by reason of its faultless profile; but there are persons of almost matchless grace who would exchange their beauty for its blood. In her very early days, I have no doubt. Lucy Rowe would have given her sweet blue eyes, her pouting lips, and pretty head (just enough to fold lovingly between the palms of a man's hand), for the square jaw and high cheek-bone of the Whytes. She felt very humble when she contemplated the grandeur of her aunt's family, and very grateful to her aunt who had stooped so far as to give her shelter when she was left alone in the world. She kept the accounts, ran errands, looked after the house linen, and made herself agreeable to the boarders' children; but all this was the very least she could do to express her humble thankfulness to the great lady-relative who had befriended her, after having been good enough to commit the sacrifice of marrying her uncle Joshua.

Lucy sat many hours alone in the business parlour-an apartment not decorated with the distinct view of imparting cheerfulness to the human temperament. The mantelpiece was covered with files of bills. There were rows of numbered keys against the wall. Mrs. Rowe's old desk-style Empire she said, when any visitor noticed the handsome ruin-stood in a corner by the window, covered with account books, prospectuses and cards of the establishment, and heaps of old newspapers. Another corner showed heaps of folded linen, parcels left for boarders, umbrellas and sticks, which had been forgotten by old customers (Mrs. Rowe called them clients), and aunt's walking-boots. One corner was Lucy's, which she occupied in conjunction with a little table, at which, from seven in the morning until bedtime, she worked with pen or needle (it was provoking she could not learn to ply both at one time), when she was not running about the house, or nursing a boarder's baby. On the rare evenings when her aunt could not find work of any description for her, Lucy was requested to take the Bible from the shelf, and read a chapter aloud. When her aunt went to sleep during the reading Lucy continued steadily, knowing that the scion of the illustrious house of Whyte would wake directly her voice ceased.

Occasionally the clergyman would drop in; whereupon Lucy would hear much improving discourse between her aunt and the reverend gentleman. Mrs. Rowe poured all her griefs into the ear of the Reverend Horace Mohun-griefs which she kept from the world. Before Lucy she spoke freely-being accustomed to regard the timid girl as a child still, whose mind could not gather the threads of her narrative. Lucy sate-not listening, but hearing snatches of the mournful circumstances with which Mrs. Rowe troubled Mr. Mohun. The reverend gentleman was a patient and an attentive listener; and drank his tea and ate his toast (it was only at Mrs. Rowe's he said he could ever get a good English round of toast), shaking his head, or offering a consoling "dear, dear me!" as the droning proceeded. Lucy was at work. If Mrs. Rowe caught her pausing she would break her story to say-"If you have finished 42 account, put down two candles to 10, and a foot-bath to 14." And Lucy-who seldom paused because she had finished her task, as her aunt knew well-bent over the table again, and was as content as she was weary. When she went up to her bedroom (which the cook had peremptorily refused to occupy) she prayed for good Aunt Rowe every night of her dull life, before she lay upon her truckle bed to rest for the morrow's cheerful round of hard duties. Was it likely that a child put thus into the harness of life, would pass the talk of her aunt with Mr. Mohun as the idle wind?

The mysteries which lay in the talk, and perplexed her, were cleared up in due time.

* * *

"He has but stumbled in the path

Thou hast in weakness trod."-A. A. Procter

"He's here again, Mum."

He was there at the servant's entrance to the highly respectable boarding-house in the Rue Millevoye. It was five in the morning-a winter's morning.

Mrs. Rowe hastened from her room, behind the business parlour, in her dressing-gown, her teeth chattering, and her eyes flashing the fire of hate. The boarders sleeping upstairs would not have known the godly landlady, who glided about the house by day, rubbing her hands and hoping every soul under her roof was comfortable-or would at once complain to her, who lived only to make people comfortable-bills being but mere accidental accessories, fortuitously concurrent with the arrival of a cab and the descent of luggage.

"At the back door, mum, with his coat tucked over his ears, and such a cold in his head. Shall I show him in?"

"My life is a long misery, Jane," Mrs. Rowe said, under her voice.

"La! mum, it's quite safe. I'm sure I shouldn't trouble much about it-'specially in this country, as--"

"Silence!" Mrs. Rowe hissed. The thorns in her cross consisted chiefly of Jane's awkward attempts at consolation. "The villain is bent on my ruin. A bad boy he was; a bad man he is. Show him in; and see that Fran?ois doesn't come here. Get some coffee yourself, Jane, and bring it. Let the brute in."

"You're hard upon him, mum, indeed you are. I'm sure he'd be a credit to--"

"Go, and hold your tongue. You presume, Jane, on the privileges of an old servant."

"Indeed I hope not, mum; but--"

"Go!"

Jane went to summon the early visitor; and was heard talking amiably to him, as she led him to the bureau. "Now, you must be good, Mr. Charles, to-day, and not stay more than a quarter of an hour. Don't talk loud, like the last time; promise me. Missus means well-you know she does."

With an impatient "All right" the stranger pushed into the business parlour, and sharply closed the door.

Mrs. Rowe stood, her knuckles firmly planted upon the closed desk, her face rigidly set, to receive her visitor-keeping the table between him and herself. He was advancing to take her hand.

"Stand there," she said, with an authority he had not the courage to defy. He stood there-abashed, or hesitating as to the way in which he should enter upon his business.

"Well!" Mrs. Rowe said, firmly and impatiently.

Mr. Charles, stung by the manner, turned upon his victim. "Well!" he jeered, "yes, and well again, Mrs. Rowe. Is it necessary for me to explain myself? Do you think I have come to see you!"

"I have no money at present; I wrote you so."

"And I didn't believe you, and have come to fetch what you wouldn't send. If you think I'm going into a corner to starve for your personal satisfaction, you are very much mistaken. I'm surprised you don't understand me better by this time."

"You were a rascal, Charles, before you left school."

"School! Pretty school! D-n it, don't blame me-woman!"

Mrs. Rowe was alarmed by the outburst, lest it should wake some of the boarders.

"The Dean and his lady are sleeping overhead. If you don't respect me, think--"

"I'm not here to respect, or think about anybody. I'm cast alone into the world-tossed into it; left to shift for myself, and to be ashamed of myself; and I want a little help through it, and it's for you to give it me, and give it me YOU SHALL."

Mr. Charles held out his left hand, and slapped its open palm vehemently with his right-pantomime to indicate the exact whereabouts he had selected for the reception of Mrs. Rowe's money.

"I told you I had no money. You'll drive me from this house by bringing disgrace upon it."

"That's very good," Mr. Charles said, with a cruel laugh. "That's a capital joke."

Jane entered with coffee. "That's right," she whispered, encouragingly to Mr. Charles; "laugh and be cheerful, Mr. Charles, and make haste with your coffee."

The face of Mr. Charles blackened to night. He turned like a tiger upon the servant. "Laugh and be cheerful?" he roared; and then he raised a hoarse mock laugh, that moved Mrs. Rowe, in her agony of fear, to turn the key in the lock of her desk.

Shaking her hands wildly in the air, Jane left the room, and shut the door.

"You are an arrant coward, Charles," Mrs. Rowe hissed, leaning across the table and shaking her head violently.

Mr. Charles imitated her gesture, answering-"I am what heartless people have made me. I have been dragged up under a cloud; made the scape-goat. How often in the course of your hypocritical days have you wished me dead? You hear I've a cough; but I cannot promise you it's a churchyard one. I'm a nuisance; but I suppose I'm not responsible for my existence, Mrs. Rowe. I was not consulted."

"Viper!"

"And devil too, when needful: remember that." Mr. Charles moved round the table in the direction of the desk.

"Stand where you are. I would rather give you the clothes from my back than touch you." Mrs. Rowe, as she stood still turning the lock of the bureau, and keeping her angry eyes fixed upon the man, was the picture of all the hate she expressed.

She never took her eyes off him, nor did he quail, while she fumbled in the drawer in which she kept money. The musical rattle of the gold smote upon the ear of Mr. Charles.

"Pretty sound," he said, with a smile of hate in his face; "but there is crisp paper sounds sweeter. Mrs. Rowe, I'm not here for a couple of yellow-boys. Do you hear that?" He banged the table, and advanced a step.

"You can't bleed a stone, miscreant."

"Nay, but you can break it, Mrs. Rowe. I mean business to-day. The rarer I make my visits the better for both of us."

"I am quite of that opinion."

"Then make it as long as you like; you know how."

"Is this ever to end? Have you no shame? Charles, you will end with some tragedy. A man who can play the part you are playing, must be ready for crime!"

Mr. Charles shook his head in impatient rage, and made another step towards Mrs. Rowe.

"Move nearer, and I wake the house, come what may." Mrs. Rowe's face looked like one cut in grey stone.

"What! and wake the Dean and his lady! What! affright the Reverend Horace Mohun who counts Mrs. Rowe among the milk-white sheep of his flock! No; Mrs. Rowe is too prudent a woman-Now." As he ended, she drew forth a roll of notes. He made a clutch at them-and she started back.

"Charles, it has come to that! Robber! It will be murder some day."

"This day-by--"

Mr. Charles looked the man to make his word good.

Mrs. Rowe was amazed and terrified by the fiend she had conjured up in the man. He seized the table, and looked a giant in the mighty expression of his iron will.

"Lay that roll upon the table-or I'll shiver it into a thousand pieces-and then-and then--Am I to say more?"

Mrs. Rowe fell into a chair. Mr. Charles was at her in an instant, and had possession of the notes. The poor woman had swooned.

He rang the bell-Jane appeared.

"Look after her," said Mr. Charles, his eyes flaming, as they fell on the unconscious figure of Mrs. Rowe. "But let me out, first."

"You'll kill me with fright, that you will. What have you done to your own--"

"Mind your own business. A smell of salts'll put her right enough."

Mr. Charles was gone.

"And what a sweet gentleman he can be, when he likes," said Jane.

* * *

I must be permitted to tell the rambling stories that ran parallel during my experiences of Mrs. Rowe's establishment in my own manner-filling up with what I guessed, all I heard from Lucy, or saw for myself. Mr. Charles was a visitor at intervals who always arrived when the house was quiet; and after whose visits Mrs.

Rowe regularly took to her room for the day, leaving the accounts and the keys wholly to Lucy, and the kitchen to Jane-with strict injunctions to look after the Reverend Horace Mohun's tea and his round of toast if he called-and let him see the Times before it went up to the general sitting-room. On these days Lucy looked pale; and Jane called her "poor child" to me, and begged me to say a few words of comfort to her, for she would listen to me.

What a fool Jane was!

Visitors came and went. The serious, who inspected Paris as Mr. Redgrave inspects a factory, or as the late Mr. Braidwood inspected a fire on the morrow; who did the Louvre and called for bread-and-butter and tea on the Boulevards at five. The new-rich, who would not have breakfasted with the general company to save their vulgar little souls, threw their money to the fleecing shopkeepers (who knew their monde), and misbehaved themselves in all the most expensive ways possible. The jolly ignorant, who were loud and unabashed in the sincerity and heartiness of their enjoyment, and had more litres of brandy in their bedrooms than the rest of the house, as Jane had it, "put together." The frugal, who counted the lumps of sugar, found fault with the dinners, lived with the fixed and savage determination to eat well up to the rate at which they were paying for their board, and stole in, in the evening, with their brandy hidden about them. Somehow, although there never was a house in which more differences of opinion were held on nearly every question of human interest, there was a surprising harmony of ideas as to French brandy. A Boulogne excursion boat on its homeward journey hardly contains more uncorked bottles of cognac, than were thrust in all kinds of secret places in the bedrooms under Mrs. Rowe's roof.

The hypocrisy and scandal which brandy produced in the general room were occasionally very fierce, especially when whispers had travelled quietly as the flies all over the house that one of the ladies had certainly, on one occasion, revoked at cards-for one reason, and one only. Free speculations would be cheerfully indulged in at other times on the exact quantity the visitor who left yesterday had taken during his stay, and the number of months which the charitable might give him to live.

ON THE BOULEVARDS.

After the general brandy, in degree of interest, stood dress. The shopping was prodigious. The carts of the Louvre, the Ville de Paris, the Coin de Rue, and other famous houses of nouveautés were for ever rattling to Mrs. Rowe's door. With a toss of the head a parcel from the Bon Marché was handed to its owner. Mrs. Jones must have come to Paris with just one change-and such a change! Mrs. Tottenham had nothing fit to wear. Mrs. Court must still be wearing out her trousseau-and her youngest was three! Mrs. Rhode had no more taste, my dear, than our cook. The men were not far behind-had looked out for Captain Tottenham in the Army List; went to Galignani's expressly: not in it, by Jove, sir! Court paid four shillings in the pound hardly two years ago, and met him swelling it with his wife (deuced pretty creature!) yesterday at Bignon's. Is quite up to Marennes oysters: wonder where he could have heard of 'em. Rhode is a bore; plenty of money, very good-natured; read a good deal-but can't the fellow come to table in something better than those eternal plaid trousers? Bad enough in Lord Brougham. Eccentricity with the genius, galling enough; but without, not to be borne, sir. Last night Jones was simply drunk, and got a wigging, no doubt, when he found his room. He looks it all.

We are an amiable people!

Happily, I have forgotten the Joneses and the Tottenhams, and the Courts and the Rhodes! The two "sets" who dwell in my memory-who are, I may say, somewhat linked with my own life, and of whom I have something to tell-were, as a visitor said of the fowls of Boulogne hotels-birds apart. They crossed and re-crossed under Mrs. Rowe's roof until they hooked together; and I was mixed up with them, until a tragedy and a happy event made us part company.

Now, so complicated are our treaties-offensive and defensive-that I have to refer to my note-book, where I am likely to meet any one of them, to see whether I am on speaking terms with the coming man or woman as the case may be.

I shall first introduce the Cockaynes as holding the greater "lengths" on my stage.

* * *