days when sermons were three-quarters of an hour in length, and when it was the habit of easily exhausted ladies to take scent bottles to church. They were of Bristol glass, in lovely shades of blue or red, divided in the centre, one side taking smelling salts, the other eau de Cologne. I believe I had a vague hope that I might one day become old and important enough to own such a gem myself; I could buy a dozen to-day at the market. Books are here in abundance. If anyone desires some volumes of old sermons, let him take a wheelbarrow to Islington, and fill it cheaply. If he admires pictures in silk of King Solomon, or any other Biblical character, he will get them for 'a song,' for, as a friend of mine remarked sadly, 'there's no money in sacreds.'

I was beginning to moralise over the contents of the stalls, to think what rubbish we all collect and leave behind, in short to become a prig. I was saved by a glass walking-stick. I almost defy anyone to think of anything more utterly, hopelessly useless. There it lay on the pavement; it had a nice crook, easily slipped over the arm, and a thread of lovely blue followed the white twist along its entire length. I am no collector of glass, but I have a friend who is passionately fond of it, and whose collection lacked a glass walking-stick.

'Five shillings.'

Of course it came home with me, an object of fearful care. I learnt that whilst you may walk down the Caledonian Road carrying a stuffed gorilla, if you like, without attracting any comment, a few miles westward a glass walking-stick becomes an object of interest. Truly no Londoner's education is finished. until he has visited the Caledonian Market: he may not find any of the wonderful bargains of which legends tell; he may be inclined to doubt the absolute accuracy of the shout which goes up: Any price you please! any price you please!' but he will find a gay and amusing scene, just touched with pathos, and will understand better than ever the meaning of Coventry Patmore's poem The Toys.

SYDNEY K. PHELPS.

THE CHILDHOOD OF MADAME DE GENLIS

If a study in contrasts be sought, what can be a better subject than the childhood of Mme. de Genlis and that of her ideal creation Adèle in Adèle et Théodore? An unkind critic (and the poor lady had and still has plenty) might say that her whole life was in startling contrast to that of her literary characters. Of course she wished to be thought like that paragon of virtue Mme. la Baronne d'Almane, whereas in reality. . . But it is not for us, happily, to sift records in search of evidence against her or to decide whether Hermine or Pamela or both were her daughters by Philippe-Egalité; we are not here to throw stones: that grateful task may be left to her supposed descendants. For my part, I have a weakness for the lady. I am willing to think that she sometimes told the truth, I bow to her energy and industry, and I believe that she was in her youth almost as charming and talented as she herself makes out.

You remember Adèle. You recollect how she and her brother were brought up in their babyhood according to the rules which Locke mildly advised and Rousseau loudly commanded. And when she was six her parents forsook the world and retired into Languedoc to watch every movement, every word, of their unfortunate children and manufacture experiences which should test their qualities of endurance, of hospitality, of discretion, of what not. That house in Languedoc, too, where the delicate art of Riesener, the frivolous engravings of Moreau, were banished in favour of dreary cabinets of geological specimens and paintings in gouache of Roman emperors, so oppressively educational and so ugly!

Adèle only becomes amusing when she leaves the country, goes to a party complete with rouge and a grand corps, eats more cakes than a whaleboned middle can hold, and sickens only too literally of the world, or when she goes to Rome, where the ladies, hearing that 'les Françaises sont fort parfumées,' come to meet her, their nostrils stuffed with herbs. Let us leave Adèle. She is a dull, conventional-minded little person in herself, only interesting as a specimen of the children so carefully and painfully brought up by those pathetic parents of the seventeen-seventies VOL. XCVII-No. 576

221

and eighties who believed in human perfectibility and nourished, with infinite solicitude, so much fodder for the guillotine.

Mme. de Genlis herself, child of an earlier, more casual generation, had no such exemplary upbringing. That she survived to be brought up at all was something of a miracle. At birth she was thought too small and weak to be swaddled, and so all but her little head disappeared into a big pillow stuffed with feathers, and they put her down on an armchair. The local bailli, old and blind, hobbled up to the chateau with his felicitations and was just spreading out the great skirts of his coat and making ready to sit on the new arrival when some horrified person pulled him away. The wet-nurse being unable, for the best of reasons, to feed her, gave her wine and water with a few crumbs of rye bread and never a drop of milk, an agreeable diet called miaulée.

But neither that treatment, nor a serious fall, nor a prolonged bath in the pond could kill such a dauntless young person; she survived to spend six years between a little damp room in the corner of the chateau and the garden where she ran wild with her brother. Her mother does not seem to have cared for little children or to have felt much responsibility for the health and education of her own, but she did eventually take her daughter to Paris, where a fashionable aunt, Mme. de Bellevau, took her rustic six-year-old niece severely in hand. The process sounds like a Grand Inquisitor's diversion with a stubborn heretic. They pulled out two of the wretched baby's teeth (she does not explain why); they squeezed her round little body into whaleboned stays, and her plump feet into narrow shoes; her hair was put into 'three or four thousand' curlpapers; she wore a hoop and, pour m'ôter mon air provincial,' an iron collar. Poor little mite. Yet it comforted her, at six years old, to be taken to the opera and to perform the part of 'Friendship' in an allegorical fête.

The next entertainment devised by the pious aunt (mother of two illegitimate children) was to take her niece and her own daughter to Lyons to be received as canonesses in the noble Order of Alix. A fortnight was spent waiting in Lyons whilst the little postulants' proofs of nobility were examined. The examiners' tongues must have wagged about Mme. de Bellevau's daughter, one would think, but perhaps a little casual illegitimacy did not matter if the blood were blue enough. The little girls were next taken to the great abbatial palace of Alix, with its family of little houses clustered round, and there the abbess and her ladies stuffed them with so many sweets that they began to feel a strong vocation for the state of canoness.

Then came a day of trial, of hair-curling, trying on clothes, being lectured and put through one's paces; lastly came a day of glory when two small persons dressed in white were taken in all

due pomp to the church of the Chapter. The religious ladies, in ermine hoods and black silk gowns spread over monstrous hoops, were assembled in the choir. (Let us hope the stalls were wide.) The Grand Prior advanced, questioned, made the children recite the Creed, cut off a lock of each child's hair and, since he was as blind as the bailli of St. Aubin, snipped off a bit of our heroine's ear too, but she bore the wound with admirable fortitude. He placed on their fingers a golden ring, round their necks the Order with its enamelled cross, on their heads a little slip of black and white material called a 'husband.' And so it was done; our heroine could thenceforward call herself Mme. la Comtesse de Lancy. The ecstasy of hearing herself called 'Madame ' surpassed, she said, all other pleasures.

There was a great deal of shrewd common-sense beneath this pompous absurdity, or the system would never have flourished in France. The French nobleman left nothing to chance in the disposal of his daughters and younger sons, and even as Mme. la Comtesse was being received at Alix her father was arranging for the reception of his second son, aged eighteen months, into the Order of the Knights of Malta. The baby, however, did not live to adorn the knighthood. He died just before his sister returned to St. Aubin of a surfeited, perhaps, with miaulée.

The Chapter of Alix was beautifully accommodating. If your daughter grew up pretty and you could afford her a dôt a husband was found, and her canonry entailed nothing more than wearing the orders and bearing the rank of countess becomingly. If, on the contrary, she was plain and dull, or if the cards had been against you, you packed her off to Alix to make her vows, to reside there for two years out of every three and to draw a comfortable stipend. Still better, an elderly canoness might adopt her (aniécer it was called), and leave her eventually all her jewels, her furniture, her house. What in the world could be more practical and convenient? A certain Mme. de Clugny, indeed, offered to adopt little Félicité, who, in her sad old age, sighs over the peaceful life she might have led, but I doubt whether the Pope himself could have made her pronounce her vows at twenty.

Félicité, by the way, seems really to have been her name, though few people probably used it. Later on, when admirers addressed her poetically, she was either called 'Genlis,' as the fashion then was, or else they made use of the ugly but popular name of 'Thémire,' which had so many useful rhymes: 'J'admire,' 'Je désire,' 'Je soupire.' She herself uses her true name slightly modified in her first collection of memoirs: Souvenirs de Félicie.

The initiation over, Mme. de Lancy was taken back to Burgundy by her mother, who handed her to a governess, aged sixteen, and to her father, whose one idea was to make her 'une

femme forte.' Do you know what it is to be 'une femme forte'? It is to be able to handle spiders and toads without fainting. This invaluable piece of moral training was M. Ducrest de St. Aubin's contribution to his daughter's education. To this the sixteenyear-old Mlle. de Mars added the Catechism, the harpsichord, Clélie, and the tragedies of Mlle. Barbier. Thus began the education of the keenest of educationists, who did not begin to learn geography herself till she was married and had a post at Court.

Nevertheless, the love of teaching, which was her true vocation, was strong in her already. She was discovered leaning over the terrace wall teaching passages from Mlle. Barbier to a handful of little village boys who came to cut rushes by the moat. The school had been open for a long time on the days when Mlle. de Mars shut herself up in her room to write letters to her family, modelled on the style of Mlle. de Scudéry, no doubt, and the scholars were very willing because, at the end of the lesson, it rained fruit and cake from the terrace.

In spite of his weakness for spiders, Félicité missed her father when he went off to Paris, with the intention of staying six months. The little brother had already been sent to school there at five years old or barely more. When the half-year was nearly up Mme. Ducrest thought of arranging theatricals to celebrate her husband's return, or rather, one thinks, to mitigate the dulness of provincial life. Whatever the cause may have been, there is no record of her ever having such another burst of energy. She composed a pastoral play with a mythological prologue (it would have that), for she was a literary lady, and, although she did not 'perfectly know the rules' of versification, she had, her daughter says, much natural talent for poetry. Then she drove her elegant bergeries into the heads of her four housemaids and cut up her old ball gowns to make their pastoral attire. And as if that were not enough she aimed at a performance of Iphigènie en Aulide with herself as Clytemnestra, the local doctor as Agamemnon, his son as a ranting, roaring contortionist of an Achilles and little Mme. Félicité herself as Iphigenia in a great hoop, cherry-coloured and silver and trimmed with fur.

But Félicité's greatest hit was as Cupid in the pastoral play.

'Au plaisir j'arrache les ailes

Pour mieux le fixer près de vous,'

she warbled, fell on poor 'Plaisir,' a little village boy, snatched at his wings, which were too firmly gummed on, and was so determined to 'fix' poor Pleasure that she threw him screaming to the ground and tugged till at last his wings gave way.

But all these well-turned couplets, all the posturing of M. Pinot jeune as 'le bouillant Achille,' did not bring M. Ducrest home