again. It was very hard; very hard; lonely and
disheartening.
There was Mrs. Newbright, who took her up for some
time, attracted by the sweetness of her singing at church
and by her proper views upon serious subjects, concerning
which in former days, at Queen's Crawley, Mrs.
Becky had had a good deal of instruction. Well, she not
only took tracts, but she read them. She worked flannel
petticoats for the Quashyboos--cotton night-caps for the
Cocoanut Indians--painted handscreens for the
conversion of the Pope and the Jews--sat under Mr. Rowls
on Wednesdays, Mr. Huggleton on Thursdays, attended
two Sunday services at church, besides Mr. Bawler, the
Darbyite, in the evening, and all in vain. Mrs. Newbright
had occasion to correspond with the Countess of Southdown
about the Warmingpan Fund for the Fiji
Islanders (for the management of which admirable
charity both these ladies formed part of a female committee),
and having mentioned her "sweet friend," Mrs. Rawdon
Crawley, the Dowager Countess wrote back such a
letter regarding Becky, with such particulars, hints, facts,
falsehoods, and general comminations, that intimacy
between Mrs. Newbright and Mrs. Crawley ceased forthwith,
and all the serious world of Tours, where this misfortune
took place, immediately parted company with the
reprobate. Those who know the English Colonies abroad
know that we carry with us us our pride, pills, prejudices,
Harvey-sauces, cayenne-peppers, and other Lares,
making a little Britain wherever we settle down.
From one colony to another Becky fled uneasily. From
Boulogne to Dieppe, from Dieppe to Caen, from Caen
to Tours--trying with all her might to be respectable,
and alas! always found out some day or other and
pecked out of the cage by the real daws.
Mrs. Hook Eagles took her up at one of these places--
a woman without a blemish in her character and a house
in Portman Square. She was staying at the hotel at Dieppe,
whither Becky fled, and they made each other's acquaintance
first at sea, where they were swimming together,
and subsequently at the table d'hote of the hotel. Mrs
Eagles had heard--who indeed had not?--some of the
scandal of the Steyne affair; but after a conversation
with Becky, she pronounced that Mrs. Crawley was an
angel, her husband a ruffian, Lord Steyne an
unprincipled wretch, as everybody knew, and the whole case
against Mrs. Crawley an infamous and wicked conspiracy
of that rascal Wenham. "If you were a man of
any spirit, Mr. Eagles, you would box the wretch's ears
the next time you see him at the Club," she said to her
husband. But Eagles was only a quiet old gentleman,
husband to Mrs. Eagles, with a taste for geology, and not tall
enough to reach anybody's ears.
The Eagles then patronized Mrs. Rawdon, took her to
live with her at her own house at Paris, quarrelled with
the ambassador's wife because she would not receive her
protegee, and did all that lay in woman's power to keep
Becky straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.
Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but
the life of humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her
before long. It was the same routine every day, the same
dulness and comfort, the same drive over the same
stupid Bois de Boulogne, the same company of an
evening, the same Blair's Sermon of a Sunday night--the
same opera always being acted over and over again;
Becky was dying of weariness, when, luckily for her,
young Mr. Eagles came from Cambridge, and his mother,
seeing the impression which her little friend made upon
him, straightway gave Becky warning.
Then she tried keeping house with a female friend;
then the double menage began to quarrel and get into
debt. Then she determined upon a boarding-house existence
and lived for some time at that famous mansion
kept by Madame de Saint Amour, in the Rue Royale, at
Paris, where she began exercising her graces and
fascinations upon the shabby dandies and fly-blown beauties
who frequented her landlady's salons. Becky loved
society and, indeed, could no more exist without it than an
opium-eater without his dram, and she was happy
enough at the period of her boarding-house life. "The
women here are as amusing as those in May Fair," she
told an old London friend who met her, "only, their
dresses are not quite so fresh. The men wear cleaned
gloves, and are sad rogues, certainly, but they are not
worse than Jack This and Tom That. The mistress of the
house is a little vulgar, but I don't think she is so vulgar
as Lady --" and here she named the name of a
great leader of fashion that I would die rather than
reveal. In fact, when you saw Madame de Saint Amour's
rooms lighted up of a night, men with plaques and
cordons at the ecarte tables, and the women at a little
distance, you might fancy yourself for a while in good
society, and that Madame was a real Countess. Many
people did so fancy, and Becky was for a while one of the
most dashing ladies of the Countess's salons.
But it is probable that her old creditors of 1815 found
her out and caused her to leave Paris, for the poor little
woman was forced to fly from the city rather suddenly,
and went thence to Brussels.
How well she remembered the place! She grinned as
she looked up at the little entresol which she had
occupied, and thought of the Bareacres family, bawling
for horses and flight, as their carriage stood in the
porte-cochere of the hotel. She went to Waterloo and to
Laeken, where George Osborne's monument much
struck her. She made a little sketch of it. "That poor
Cupid!" she said; "how dreadfully he was in love with
me, and what a fool he was! I wonder whether little
Emmy is alive. It was a good little creature; and that
fat brother of hers. I have his funny fat picture still
among my papers. They were kind simple people."
At Brussels Becky arrived, recommended by Madame
de Saint Amour to her friend, Madame la Comtesse de
Borodino, widow of Napoleon's General, the famous
Count de Borodino, who was left with no resource by the
deceased hero but that of a table d'hote and an ecarte
table. Second-rate dandies and roues, widow-ladies who
always have a lawsuit, and very simple English folks, who
fancy they see "Continental society" at these houses, put
down their money, or ate their meals, at Madame de
Borodino's tables. The gallant young fellows treated the
company round to champagne at the table d'hote, rode
out with the women, or hired horses on country excursions,
clubbed money to take boxes at the play or the
opera, betted over the fair shoulders of the ladies at the
ecarte tables, and wrote home to their parents in
Devonshire about their felicitous introduction to foreign
society.
Here, as at Paris, Becky was a boarding-house queen,
and ruled in select pensions. She never refused the
champagne, or the bouquets, or the drives into the country,
or the private boxes; but what she preferred was the
ecarte at night,--and she played audaciously. First she
played only for a little, then for five-franc pieces, then for
Napoleons, then for notes: then she would not be able
to pay her month's pension: then she borrowed from
the young gentlemen: then she got into cash again and
bullied Madame de Borodino, whom she had coaxed and
wheedled before: then she was playing for ten sous at a
time, and in a dire state of poverty: then her quarter's
allowance would come in, and she would pay off Madame
de Borodino's score and would once more take the
cards against Monsieur de Rossignol, or the Chevalier de
Raff.
When Becky left Brussels, the sad truth is that she
owed three months' pension to Madame de Borodino, of
which fact, and of the gambling, and of the drinking, and
of the going down on her knees to the Reverend Mr.
Muff, Ministre Anglican, and borrowing money of him,
and of her coaxing and flirting with Milor Noodle, son of
Sir Noodle, pupil of the Rev. Mr. Muff, whom she used
to take into her private room, and of whom she won
large sums at ecarte--of which fact, I say, and of a
hundred of her other knaveries, the Countess de
Borodino informs every English person who stops at her
establishment, and announces that Madame Rawdon was
no better than a vipere.
So our little wanderer went about setting up her tent
in various cities of Europe, as restless as Ulysses or
Bampfylde Moore Carew. Her taste for disrespectability
grew more and more remarkable. She became a perfect
Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it would
make your hair stand on end to meet.
There is no town of any mark in Europe but it has its
little colony of English raffs--men whose names Mr.
Hemp the officer reads out periodically at the Sheriffs'
Court--young gentlemen of very good family often, only
that the latter disowns them; frequenters of billiard-
rooms and estaminets, patrons of foreign races and
gaming-tables. They people the debtors' prisons--they
drink and swagger--they fight and brawl--they run away
without paying--they have duels with French and German
officers--they cheat Mr. Spooney at ecarte--they get
the money and drive off to Baden in magnificent britzkas
--they try their infallible martingale and lurk about the
tables with empty pockets, shabby bullies, penniless
bucks, until they can swindle a Jew banker with a sham
bill of exchange, or find another Mr. Spooney to rob.
The alternations of splendour and misery which these
people undergo are very queer to view. Their life must
be one of great excitement. Becky--must it be owned?--
took to this life, and took to it not unkindly. She went
about from town to town among these Bohemians. The
lucky Mrs. Rawdon was known at every play-table in
Germany. She and Madame de Cruchecassee kept house at
Florence together. It is said she was ordered out of
Munich, and my friend Mr. Frederick Pigeon avers that it
was at her house at Lausanne that he was hocussed at
supper and lost eight hundred pounds to Major Loder
and the Honourable Mr. Deuceace. We are bound, you
see, to give some account of Becky's biography, but of
this part, the less, perhaps, that is said the better.
They say that, when Mrs. Crawley was particularly
down on her luck, she gave concerts and lessons in music
here and there. There was a Madame de Raudon, who
certainly had a matinee musicale at Wildbad,
accompanied by Herr Spoff, premier pianist to the Hospodar of
Wallachia, and my little friend Mr. Eaves, who knew
everybody and had travelled everywhere, always used to
declare that he was at Strasburg in the year 1830, when a
certain Madame Rebecque made her appearance in the
opera of the Dame Blanche, giving occasion to a furious
row in the theatre there. She was hissed off the stage by
the audience, partly from her own incompetency, but
chiefly from the ill-advised sympathy of some persons in
the parquet, (where the officers of the garrison had their
admissions); and Eaves was certain that the unfortunate
debutante in question was no other than Mrs.
Rawdon Crawley.
She was, in fact, no better than a vagabond upon this
earth. When she got her money she gambled; when she
had gambled it she was put to shifts to live; who knows
how or by what means she succeeded? It is said that she
was once seen at St. Petersburg, but was summarily
dismissed from that capital by the police, so that there
cannot be any possibility of truth in the report that she was
a Russian spy at Toplitz and Vienna afterwards. I have
even been informed that at Paris she discovered a
relation of her own, no less a person than her maternal
grandmother, who was not by any means a
Montmorenci, but a hideous old box-opener at a theatre on
the Boulevards. The meeting between them, of which
other persons, as it is hinted elsewhere, seem to have
been acquainted, must have been a very affecting
interview. The present historian can give no certain details
regarding the event.
It happened at Rome once that Mrs. de Rawdon's half-
year's salary had just been paid into the principal
banker's there, and, as everybody who had a balance of
above five hundred scudi was invited to the balls which
this prince of merchants gave during the winter, Becky
had the honour of a card, and appeared at one of the
Prince and Princess Polonia's splendid evening entertainments.
The Princess was of the family of Pompili, lineally
descended from the second king of Rome, and Egeria
of the house of Olympus, while the Prince's grandfather,
Alessandro Polonia, sold wash-balls, essences,
tobacco, and pocket-handkerchiefs, ran errands for
gentlemen, and lent money in a small way. All the great
company in Rome thronged to his saloons--Princes,
Dukes, Ambassadors, artists, fiddlers, monsignori, young
bears with their leaders--every rank and condition of
man. His halls blazed with light and magnificence; were
resplendent with gilt frames (containing pictures), and
dubious antiques; and the enormous gilt crown and arms
of the princely owner, a gold mushroom on a crimson
field (the colour of the pocket-handkerchiefs which he
sold), and the silver fountain of the Pompili family shone
all over the roof, doors, and panels of the house, and
over the grand velvet baldaquins prepared to receive
Popes and Emperors.
So Becky, who had arrived in the diligence from
Florence, and was lodged at an inn in a very modest way,
got a card for Prince Polonia's entertainment, and her
maid dressed her with unusual care, and she went to this
fine ball leaning on the arm of Major Loder, with whom
she happened to be travelling at the time--(the same
man who shot Prince Ravoli at Naples the next year, and
was caned by Sir John Buckskin for carrying four kings
in his hat besides those which he used in playing at
