Vanity Fair
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 ecarte )--and this pair went into the rooms together, and Becky saw
a number of old faces which she remembered in happier days, when she
was not innocent, but not found out. Major Loder knew a great number of
foreigners, keen-looking whiskered men with dirty striped ribbons in
their buttonholes, and a very small display of linen; but his own
countrymen, it might be remarked, eschewed the Major. Becky, too, knew
some ladies here and there--French widows, dubious Italian countesses,
whose husbands had treated them ill--faugh--what shall we say, we who
have moved among some of the finest company of Vanity Fair, of this
refuse and sediment of rascals? If we play, let it be with clean cards,
and not with this dirty pack. But every man who has formed one of the
innumerable army of travellers has seen these marauding irregulars
hanging on, like Nym and Pistol, to the main force, wearing the king's
colours and boasting of his commission, but pillaging for themselves,
and occasionally gibbeted by the roadside.
Well, she was hanging on the arm of Major Loder, and they went through
the rooms together, and drank a great quantity of champagne at the
buffet, where the people, and especially the Major's irregular corps,
struggled furiously for refreshments, of which when the pair had had