Part 9

The ways of our musings are as devious, as unexpected, as those of a general conversation: there is no presiding spirit to keep us to a standing topic! This topic, with us, should be “Our Sentimental Garden.” And our tattle should, really, be connected, even if but distantly; with plants or scenery; with country life and friends ‹or foes›; with emotions or reminiscences plausibly evoked by the flower side of life. Happily it is pleasant enough to be brought back to the right theme; as I am just now by a thought of the head-line.

To one who has taken somewhat late in the day to a life in the country, most of its interests seem to be a rediscovery of early, simple, and intimate delights; to be connected with impressions long forgotten.

There is an episode in the biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which, if I remember aright, bears upon this point. I have not got the Confessions by me—it is, no doubt, in that cynical autobiography that the anecdote is recorded—nor, indeed, any other work of that exceedingly antipathetic writer. ‹This is the usual course: the books I require for reference when in the country happen oftener than not to be on my London bookshelves; and mutatis mutandis, vice versa!› The precise wording cannot in consequence be given here. But it is a small matter; the story is to this effect:

In his young and singularly impressionable days, Jean-Jacques was taking a country walk with one very near to his heart. At a certain spot of the garden, or the wood, in which he was tasting the subtle joys of solitude à deux, the lady suddenly exclaimed:

“See, yonder is a pervenche!”

“Indeed,” returned the youth, little intent then, upon the beauties of the outer world, and gazed absently upon the tender blue peeping out of the tender green. “So, that is a periwinkle?” And he resumed the thread of his interrupted discourse.

But, later—much later on, in twilight days of his life—some one happened again to say in his hearing:

“See—a Periwinkle!”

And Rousseau, now old Jean-Jacques, amazed the company by an almost incredible exhibition of sensibility.

“Une pervenche! Where—where?” he called out, throwing himself down on his knees to look for the flower, with eyes bathed in tears.

If this is not quite the exact tale, it matters, as I said above, very little. It is the story, in its essence. The age of sensibility ‹praise be to our fate!› is no longer with us; but there is something permanently true in the picture it sets forth. To the philosophe of mature years the mere word pervenche suddenly recalled, in a poignantly intimate manner, the first love of his spring-time. Veteris vestigia flammae!

And we are not to wonder that the echo from a world irremediably lost should have affected the morose, self-centred reprobate in an uncontrollable manner. I venture to think that, with the least sentimental of us, the sudden rediscovery, of some long forgotten youthful impression can hardly fail to evoke, however transiently, a certain dreamy emotion: half pleasure, half melancholy.

Now, in the case of the Master of the House—and he is thankful to realize it—early memories of delight in flowers and such things are associated, not with the troublous times of young manhood’s protean heart affairs, not with the Sturm und Drang days of the dawning moustache, but rather with the quaintly fanciful inner life of boyhood. They come back borne upon the colours and odours of such early friends as Lilac and Acacia; common Wallflower—Giroflée, our Gillyflower; wild Violet and Primrose—gallicé “Coucou”; Hollyhock or rather Rose-trémière; Lily-of-the-Valley; Muguet.... It is the old French name that most readily slips from my pen.

Owing perhaps to a childhood spent almost wholly in France, and to the completeness of the break that necessarily ensued when the English born but French nurtured boy was at last allowed back to his own and proper land, all these memories seem to belong to a world utterly apart—to something rather fantastic, unconnected with later life and interests. Moreover, being of childhood and of a time when the world seemed uniformly kind, they retain an allurement all their own. One pleasant recollection of those far-off days does not hook on to others, bitter, regretful, or let it be even merely ruffling ... inevitable chain of responsible experiences!

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Our early memories are like works of art: they have a way of perpetuating in beauty things that perhaps were not really beautiful in themselves. About them there is an unconscious selection which, having been made by a mind still essentially serene, has contrived a subtle harmony of all the elements. Upon the pictures of its store, a child’s memory lays an emphasis strangely different to that which the critical powers of later growth would set. And it is this quaint insistence on certain “odd corners of things” which ‹among other reasons› makes them so dearly personal and private to the older mind.

In my own case, as I have said, they belong to a world still more remote than the childhood of most men of “Grandpa” status—a world which has not even the link of language to connect it with the present!

Paradoxically, this is perhaps the reason why I take so much pleasure in finding these happy-hued and odorous things now rising, and living under their right English names, in a garden of my own. To the other denizens of Villino Loki they are part of the excellent general company foregathering in our garden: but to me they are in many ways my intimates. We seem “to have known things together”; things doubtless of no importance, but pleasant to recall in casual intercourse.

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The Lilac and Acacia, for instance, were the flower-bearers of the tree-planted playground of that jocund old school where I received the first rudiments of education: the Institution Delescluze, then situate in a kind of backwater of the faubourg St. Honoré at the angle facing the Palais de l’Elysée. It has, alas long since been swept away to make room for modern mansions. This ancient Institution, or preparatory school, would seem to have dated from the distant days, early Louis XV probably, when the north side of the then lengthening noble faubourg must still have been occupied by meadows and orchards.

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By the way, it has never occurred to me before to look up that little topographical matter authoritatively. I do so now. I have here a copy of a wonderful work, the “perspective” map of Paris as it stood in the ’thirties, of the eighteenth century. It is called the Plan de Turgot, having been surveyed, and engraved, in lavishly decorative style, by order of Louis-le-Bien-Aimé, under the care of the celebrated Prévost des Marchands. The book is quite the most fascinating of its kind I know—and I think I have handled as goodly a number of such works as any man alive. ‹The nearest approach to it, in point of what one may call picturesque perspicuity, is the wonderful bird’s-eye view of Edinburgh set down by James Gordon of Rothiemay, and engraved at Amsterdam by F. de Wit, about a century earlier.› This plan of Turgot is an elaborate affair indeed—an atlas of twenty large sheets, showing practically every individual house of any importance. Would we had such a work in existence dealing with Georgian London!

Well, to investigate.... Aye, here are the orchards and market gardens, beginning at the very back of a narrow line of houses, covering all the ground of what nowadays is a close network of stone-fronted streets! Here stands the Hôtel d’Evreux, the last, moving westward, of that array of lordly mansions: the Hôtels de Montbazon, de Guébrian, de Charost, de Duras.... A few of these patrician dwellings, each with their own formal gardens stretching southwards to the Champs Elysées, have retained to our own times their dignity unimpaired. But where are now scattered most of these grand French family names, since the tornado of the great Revolution? But, to our map.... Yes, this Hôtel d’Evreux—whilom appanage of Madame de Pompadour, now the aforesaid Palais de l’Elysée; residence, in due rotation, of the swift-changing presidents of the Republic—is here under my finger. And its position unquestionably fixes, some two hundred yards westward, that of the now vanished Institution Delescluze, so interesting to me. And here spread themselves the orchards, of which the existence a moment ago was, after all, only a matter of surmise!

My discovery adds particularity now to the remembrance of that mellow place.... A goodly number of antiquated fruit trees were scattered about the cour de récréation. I can now carve it, in fancy, out of the cultivated land shown by the engraver in the most engaging conventional manner, at the back of the northern street front—an acre or so. Perhaps a little more; likelier still, a little less: recollections of this kind have a knack of magnifying affairs. It is bounded by grey walls, tall and thick, but distinctly decrepit. The trees were, of course, long past bearing, through age and neglect; but they were pleasant company, whether snow-laden, or in summer affording their scanty shade. Plum trees they were, I should say. At any rate the rough bark of their boles distilled a kind of brown gum which was in great demand among us small boys for immediate consumption; and sedulously scooped out, as soon as discovered, with the help of the stump end of a steel-pen nib.

Interspersed among these remnants of the forgotten orchard were the odd groups of Lilacs and Acacias previously mentioned. The latter, the Acacias, were tall and above interference. But strict were the standing orders touching the bloom of the Lilac, and dire the prospect of pensum or piquet to the youthful scholar who should dare to pluck the fragrant bunches!

Thus came the Lilac to assume a character at once sacred—or, at least, “taboo”—and at the same time perennially tantalizing. It was long before the realization dawned that Lilas were not the rare and precious blossoms that so uncompromising a prohibition appeared to proclaim. As a matter of fact, the Lilas, Blanc ou Rose, is one of the commonest of spring objects in France. Almost might it in its popularity be regarded as the national emblem of the renouveau, much as with us the pallid, delicate Primrose is held to herald the last of wintry days.

The old French name for the latter is Primerole, suggestive by its etymological connection with “prime,” of the youth of the year. We have made of it Primrose, through the usual process of popular phonetic adaptation, which ever tends to make a word sound like something already familiar. So that the old Primerole—meaning simply an early floweret, primula—has become with us “the early rose”! The French dubbed it Primevère a learned equivalent for the Coucou of the rustic tongue, to symbolize the advent of vernal days.

The name brings at once to mind the well-known yearning lines: