Part 17
For days afterwards the Marquise’s grandmother entertained her friends with a humorous account of Madame de Genlis, and the sort of education she was giving her pupils.
Nevertheless, it is doubtful if any of those who made a joke of the Countess’s system, had an idea of how eminently practical it was in certain respects. During the winter season, which was passed at Paris, she aimed at utilising for her pupils every moment of their time—above all, that devoted to recreation. She had got a lathe installed in one of the ante-chambers, and at recreation time all her pupils, as well as herself, learned to turn it. She had them taught all the handicrafts that did not require much bodily force: leather-work, basket-making, the manufacture of bootlaces, ribbons, gauze, cardboard boxes, raised maps, artificial flowers, wire-netting, marbled paper, gilding, all sorts of hair work that it is possible to imagine, even to the making of wigs. The boys in addition were taught carpentry—and they succeeded so well in this that the two elder, quite unassisted, made a large wardrobe and a table with drawers in it for a poor woman of St. Leu in whom they were interested, and these articles are said to have been as well made as if they had come from the workshop of a first-class joiner. All their play-things had an educational scope—and all their walks and excursions had a similar end in view. At Paris they only went out to see the picture galleries (it was in one of these expeditions the future Marquise de Laroche-Jaquelin encountered them) or museums. They visited workshops and saw the various manufactures of Paris in different stages of their production. Previous to these excursions they read together the article in the _Encyclopedia_ dealing with the particular manufacture they were going to inspect.
For the “_corpus sanum_” in which she wished the “_mens sana_” of each pupil to develop, Madame de Genlis had invented a whole system of gymnastics, which demanded an elaborate installation of pulleys, horizontal bars, etc. In addition she made her pupils walk with weighted shoes; carry graduated loads on their backs, or heads, or in their arms, etc. In addition dancing was taught with the greatest care, and the famous _danseur_ of the Opera, d’Auberval, gave lessons to Mademoiselle, Pamela and Henrietta—whose dancing was something exquisite. They were also taught riding and swimming, and Madame, herself, one of the finest performers of her time, taught them the harp.
At a certain hour every evening the children assembled for their reading lesson. Each pupil read aloud for a quarter of an hour, Madame correcting their pronunciation when necessary, and making suitable comments on the subject matter which was always of an improving nature. At the end of the lesson the Countess read aloud for a few minutes herself, just to give the correct model.
When the children were a little older their “Governor” hired a box at the theatre for them, and thither they went about once a week to see the masterpieces of the French stage played by the greatest actors of the age.
Every Saturday the Princes and their sister held a reception at Bellechasse, so as to form them early to habits of polite conversation.
At the end of her account of her “academy,” Madame de Genlis sketches a series of portraits of her _élèves_. We are only interested in that of Pamela: “Pamela was loveliness itself; candour and sensibility were the chief traits of her character. She never told a falsehood, or employed the slightest deceit. She was a fascinating talker. Her chief fault was want of application. She had a very bad memory, and was thoughtless and impulsive. In person she was very active and light of foot. She ran like a wood nymph.”
* * * * *
It was part of the system of Bellechasse to interest its pupils in the great currents of thought which agitated the day. As early as 1786 the Countess had shown the popular and democratic direction she gave to the education of the princes of Orleans when the young Duke of Chartres, acting under her influence, destroyed the famous iron cage of Saint Michel.
When the States General met in May, 1789, Madame de Genlis threw open the salon of Bellechasse to some of the more noted deputies. Among the names of its _habitués_ figure Barère and Brissot, Pétion, Tallyrand, Alexandre Lameth, and even Volney, Barneve, Alguié, the painter David—and Camille Desmoulins.
The outbreak of the Revolution found the young princes and their father on the popular side, and their choice has been traced to the influence of Madame de Genlis.
We get brief but very vivid glimpses of Pamela amid the gossip, enshrined in contemporary memoirs, which the Countess’s political action inspired. When the Duke of Orleans settled an annuity on her, she is said to have chosen Barère, then present at one of the Bellechasse Sunday receptions, as her guardian. She was seen, a striking figure on horseback, in riding habit and large black hat laden with black plumes, followed by two grooms in the Orleans livery of blue and red riding up and down between two lines of shrieking populace who proclaimed: “there’s the queen we want.” And on the day of the fall of the Bastille she was said to have been seen moving among the people all dressed in red, destined to draw all eyes to her.
It seems much more probable that she assisted at this historic spectacle with the rest of Madame de Genlis’s pupils from the terrace of the new gardens of Beaumarchais which the latter had put at their disposition.
* * * * *
The indignation of the Duchess of Orleans at the direction given to her children’s political education by their “Governor” led to the latter’s dismissal in 1791. But the separation from her teacher had such a disastrous effect on the health of Mademoiselle d’Orléans that Madame de Genlis had to be recalled.
In October, 1791, the Countess escorted Mademoiselle to England, accompanied by Pamela, Henriette de Sercey, and her little grand-daughter, Eglantine de Lawoestine. During this visit the Countess made the acquaintance of Sheridan, who had recently lost his beautiful wife. The resemblance of Pamela to his lost love (which is said to have later attracted Lord Edward) gained the heart of Sheridan, and he begged for her hand. His offer, it is said was accepted, and when the Duke of Orleans recalled his daughter to France, in order to avoid the penalties designed for “_émigrés_,” Pamela left England as the affianced bride of the distinguished dramatist.
But there was waiting in Paris another lover than Sheridan—and it was he, though they had never seen each other up to this, with whom Pamela’s lot was to be bound up.
One night at the theatre in Paris Lord Edward Fitzgerald saw in a _loge grillée_ an exquisite looking girl. He made inquiries, and having learned her identity, had himself presented to Madame de Genlis and her beautiful charge. The following day Madame de Genlis and Pamela, acting on the instructions of the Duke of Orleans, set out for Flanders, with Mademoiselle d’Orléans. They were followed by that ardent and impetuous wooer, Lord Edward Fitzgerald.
At Tournay Lord Edward made formal proposals for Pamela’s hand, and his suit was accepted, on the condition of him receiving his family’s consent to the marriage.
This consent the Duchess of Leinster, wise mother that she was, gave very readily, and within a fortnight, Lord Edward was back in London with his bride.
The “good family” gave the warmest of welcomes to its new member. The diary of Lady Sophia Fitzgerald records the impression made on them by “Eddy’s dear little wife.” “We all took a prodigious fancy to her, and I do hope and trust Dearest Edward has met with a woman that will fix him at last, and likely to make him happy the remainder of his life. Besides being very handsome she is uncommonly sensible and agreeable, very pretty, with the most engaging pleasing manner I ever saw, and very much accomplished. They spent a fortnight with us in London before they went to Ireland where they are now.” Lady Sarah Napier, who was to be Pamela’s true friend to the end, fell in love with her at first sight. “I never saw,” she wrote to Lady Susan O’Brien, “such a sweet little, engaging, bewitching creature as Ly. Edward is, and childish to a degree with the greatest sense. The upper part of her face is like poor Mrs. Sheridan, the lower part like my beloved child Louise; of course I am disposed to dote upon her. I am _sure_ she is not _vile Egalité’s_ child; it is impossible.”
That letter of Lady Sarah’s is dated from Celbridge, February, 1793, and showed that by that time Pamela and her husband had arrived in Ireland. Into the gay social round of the Irish capital, the beautiful French girl entered _con brio_. “Dublin has been very gay,” Lord Edward writes to his mother in April, 1793, “a great number of balls, of which the lady misses none. Dancing is a great passion with her; I wish you could see her dance, you would delight in it, she dances so with all her heart and soul. Everybody seems to like her, and behave civilly and kindly to her. There was a kind of something about visiting with Lady Leitrim, but it is all over now. We dined there on Sunday, and she was quite pleasant, and Pamela likes her very much.”
Unfortunately for Pamela’s happiness, her husband was wrong in thinking everybody seemed to like her. The ladies of the Ascendancy party hated her with all their hearts, and behaved with inconceivable rudeness to her. Her husband, ever since his return from Paris (whence the stories of his “revolutionary” doings had preceded him), had been a marked man for the “Old Gang,” and his bride’s supposed relationship to Egalité (who had recently been guilty of the infamy of voting for Louis XVI’s death) was not calculated to re-establish him with them. The vilest stories were set in circulation about poor Pamela. One lady is supposed to have seen her in the streets of Dublin “with a handkerchief on her neck spotted with Louis XVI’s blood; that some of her friends had sent from Paris.” When everybody else was in mourning for Louis, she is said to have worn red ribbons “which she said were _couleur du sang des Aristocrats_.”
On one occasion the whim took her to go to a ball, dressed all in black with nothing to relieve the sombre effect, except the pink upon her head. The _Doblin Lidies_, according to her sister-in-law, Lady Lucy, “stared her out of countenance” and sent her home in a rage to Eddy.
Her sisters-in-law, and specially Lady Sophia, were quick to see that it was jealousy of Pamela’s beauty and charm, her exquisite dancing, her French toilettes, her husband’s undisguised admiration—far more than their hatred of her and Lord Edward’s politics which made Dublin society so hostile to her. Other sections of Irish society worshipped her. We have a pretty picture of Lord Edward and her driving in a very high phaeton one day through College Green and Dame Street, amid the enthusiastic cheers of the multitude, who were raised to congenial heights of enthusiasm as much by her beauty as Lord Edward’s conspicuous green neck-cloth. Lord Edward’s boyish delight at the reception accorded them, and the impression produced by his bride’s beauty, was very delightful to witness.
Nor was it the populace alone whom Pamela won by her beauty. Lord Charlemont, whose authority in all matters of taste was regarded as second to none in Europe, was charmed by her. Jepham was with him one day in 1793 in Charlemont house, when Pamela and Lord Edward came to view its treasures, and he wrote to his uncle describing the visit. “She is elegant and engaging in the highest degree, and showed the most judicious taste in her remarks about the library and curiosities. The Dublin ladies wish to put her down. She promised Lord Charlemont with great good humour to assist him in keeping her husband in order.... She was dressed in a plain riding habit, and they came to the door in a curricle.”[82]
Footnote 82:
Moore tells us that Lord Edward first introduced this style of vehicle into Ireland.
The attitude of the women of her class whom she met in society, probably spoiled her party-going for her, and doubtless she was eager enough, before long, to share with her husband the quiet country life, which he loved so well. After a few months in the Duchess of Leinster’s charming seaside residence, Frescati, Blackrock (where Pamela had plenty of opportunity, in conjunction with the enthusiastic gardener, who was her husband, to put into practice the gardening lore she had acquired at Saint Leu) the young couple settled in a lodge belonging to Mr. Connolly (husband of Lady Louisa Connolly, Lord Edward’s aunt), in Kildare. Lord Edward has left in a letter to his mother, dated June 23rd, 1794, a charming description of the place, which was to be the setting for their lives during the short years that were destined for them to spend together. In that little cottage a good deal of Irish history was to be made in the short space of four years. Let us then look in it as Lord Edward has painted it for us—for, alas! no trace of it now remains.
“After going up a little lane, and in at a close gate, you come on a little white house, with a small gravel court before it. You see but three small windows, the court surrounded by large old elms; one side of the house covered with shrubs, on the other side a tolerable large ash; upon the stairs going up to the house, two wicker cages, in which there are at this moment two thrushes, singing _à gorge déployée_. In coming into the house you find a small passage-hall very clean, the floor tiled; upon your left a small room; on the right, the staircase. In front you come into the parlour, a good room, with a bay window looking into the garden, which is a small green plot, surrounded by good trees, and in it three of the finest thorns I ever saw, and all the trees so placed that you may shade yourself from the sun all hours of the day; the bay window covered with honeysuckle, and up to the window some roses.
“Going upstairs you find another bay-room, the honeysuckle almost up to it, and a little room the same size as that below; this, with a kitchen or servants’ hall below, is the whole house. There is, on the left, in the courtyard another building which makes a kitchen; it is covered by trees, so as to look pretty; at the back of it there is a yard, which looks into a lane. On the side of the house opposite the grass-plot, there is ground enough for a flower-garden, communicating with the front garden by a little walk.
“The whole place is situated in a kind of rampart, of a circular form surrounded by a wall; which wall, towards the village, and lane is high, but covered with trees and shrubs—the trees old and large, giving a great deal of shade. Towards the country the wall is not higher than your knee, and this covered with bushes; from these open parts you have a view of a pretty cultivated country, till your eye is stopped by the Curragh. From our place there is a back way to these fields, so as to go out and walk without having to do with the town.
“This, dearest mother, is the spot as well as I can give it to you, but it don’t describe well; one must see it and feel it; it is all the little peeps and ideas that go with it that make the beauty of it to me. My dear wife dotes on it, and becomes it. She is busy in her little American jacket, planting sweet peas and mignonette. Her table and workbox, with the little one’s caps, are on the table. I wish my dearest mother was here, and the scene to me would be complete.”
The “little one,” portion of whose _layette_, with Pamela’s exquisite stitching, was then lying on the table, was born in Leinster House in October, 1794, and was christened Edward Fox Fitzgerald. While his wife and little son are gaining strength to travel, Lord Edward has been down at Kildare, two or three times, making all things “snug” for the delightful winter he promises himself there. He has laid in a generous provision of turf—two fine big clumps which look both “comfortable and pretty.” He has paled in his little flower garden before the hall door with a lath paling like the cottage, and filled it with roses and sweet briar, honeysuckle and Spanish broom. He has got his flower-beds all ready for their destined occupants. “The little fellow,” the proud father thinks, “will be a great addition to the party.” “I think,” he goes on, giving us a glimpse of his ideal of a happy life (and making us realise how hard a sacrifice his own fate demanded of him), “that when I am down there with Pam. and the child, of a blustery evening, with a good turf fire and a pleasant book, coming in, after seeing my poultry put up, my garden settled—flower-beds and plants covered for fear of frost—the place looking comfortable, and taken care of, I shall be as happy as possible; and sure I am I shall regret nothing but not being nearer my dearest mother, and her not being of our party.”
In 1796 Lord Edward became a “United Man,” and from that period the little cottage in Kildare was seldom without guests. Chief among these was Lord Edward’s parliamentary colleague, Arthur O’Connor, but Lady Lucy Fitzgerald who spent a considerable time with her brother and sister-in-law after their return from Hamburg in October, 1796, mentions many others: Jackson, Oliver Bond, MacNevin, Father Connolly—and the sinister figure of Hughes, who, unknown to them all, was a government spy.
The visit to Hamburg to which we have alluded, took place in May, 1796, and its supposed object was to give Pamela an opportunity of visiting Madame de Genlis, who was then living in Hamburg, as a guest of M. Matthiessen, who had married her niece, and Pamela’s schoolmate, Henrietta de Sercey. Lord Edward and Arthur O’Connor went really as agents of the United Irishmen to negotiate with the French Government for a French expedition to assist the Irish in freeing themselves from the yoke of England. The Matthiessens’ house in Hamburg became a centre of Irish political activities, and we learn from Froude and Fitzpatrick that the long unsuspected spy, Samuel Turner, got much of the information, for which he was pensioned by the English Government, by his frequentation of that house.
It was at Hamburg, Pamela’s second child, her little daughter, Pamela, was born. She had left her boy with his grandmother in London, and when Lord Edward’s business was done, and they were in the English capital again on their way home to Ireland, little Eddie was given to the Duchess “for her very own.”
Was his father clearing the decks for action? It would seem so. Two months after his return to Ireland the French were in Bantry Bay.
In February of 1797, Arthur O’Connor was arrested for his address to the Electors of Antrim, and was lodged in Newgate. From this time Lord Edward was indefatigable in his activities. He was one of those who believed—as did the greater number of the Northern leaders—that the time had come “to rise,” without waiting any longer for the French aid, which had been such a rotten crutch to them. But the Dublin leaders, influenced by the more cautious counsel of men like John Keogh and MacCormick, were dead against the attempt. The moment passed—and affairs hastened to their tragic end.
In February, 1798, Arthur O’Connor who had been liberated from his captivity in Birmingham Tower, Dublin Castle, after six months stay there, was again arrested with Father Quigley at Margate, on his way to France, on a political mission. Among O’Connor’s papers were found documents incriminating Lord Edward. But the Government were loth from his family and political connections to proceed against him. Even Lord Castlereagh entreated his aunt, Lady Louisa Connolly, to get him to leave the country, and much pressure was put on Pamela to influence him to seek safety in flight.
It was in vain. Lord Edward refused to desert his post; and whatever remained to be endured he would endure it even to the end.
We must leave him for a time, passing from hiding place to hiding place between the fatal March 12th when the other leaders were captured, until May the 19th, when he himself was run to earth at Murphy’s, while we turn to the poor little frightened wife, who with no kind friend near at hand to console her, lonely and desolate in a foreign land, with her little helpless child, must bear her woman’s burden, and go through her woman’s hour of mortal anguish all alone. After Lord Edward went “on his keeping” she found it desirable to leave Leinster House for a less conspicuous lodging in Denzille Street, whither she went with no other companion than her maid and Lord Edward’s black servant, the faithful Tony. Once or twice Lord Edward managed to see her. Once the maid, going into Lady Edward’s room, found him sitting in the firelight with her, and both of them weeping over little two-year-old Pamela who had been roused from her cot that her father might see her.
In April, Pamela’s third child, a little girl called Lucy, was born—prematurely, as Moore informs us, owing to a fright caused the poor mother by the risk run by her husband in order to see her again. It has been asserted, somewhere, that so high was the political feeling of the period that no doctor could be found to attend Lady Edward. For the honour of Ireland it is pleasing to be able to contradict this assertion, on the unassailable authority of Lady Sarah Napier. Lady Moira “mothered” the desolate creature, and saw that as far as nurse and doctor went, there was nothing to be desired.
When Pamela recovered, her kind friend took her to Moira House, and it was there the news of Lord Edward’s capture on May the 18th reached her.
Three days later, Government ordered Lady Edward to leave Ireland. The order, which it was not possible for her to disobey, caused her the most heartbreaking distress. But she was spared, then at least, the grief of knowing that Lord Edward’s wounds were fatal.
We know from Charles H. Teeling that she made her way into Newgate, in spite of Lord Castlereagh’s refusal—and we know that it was the same chivalrous, romantic boy who took on himself the perilous duty of escorting her. He had known Lady Edward in the happy days when the eager young band of patriots gathered in Kildare Lodge, and his brother, poor Bartle, saw in Lady Lucy (as so many have seen her in the loved form of some fair, living woman) the realisation of his dreams of Kathleen Ni Houlihan. The sense of chivalry and romance which was for so much in the heart of young Charles Teeling made the lad one of the most devoted knights whom Pamela’s fascination enlisted in her service. “Formed to charm every heart, and command every arm that had not been enlisted in the cause of Ireland”—it is thus, thirty years after, he remembers her. “Ireland was her constant theme, and Edward’s glory the darling object of her ambition. She entered into all his views; she had a noble and heroic soul, but the softer feelings of her sex would sometimes betray the anxiety with which she anticipated the approaching contest, and as hopes and fears alternately influenced her mind, she expressed them with all the sensibility characteristic of her country. In the most sweet and impressive tone of voice, rendered still more interesting by her foreign accent, and imperfect English, she would, with unaffected simplicity, implore us to protect her Edward. ‘You are all good Irish,’ she would say; ‘Irish are all good and brave, and _Edward is Irish_—your Edward and my Edward,’ while her dark brilliant eye, rivetted on the manly countenance of her lord, borrowed fresh lustre from the tear which she vainly endeavoured to conceal. These were to me some of the most interesting moments I have experienced, and memory still retraces them with a mingled feeling of pleasure and pain.”