MY FIRST FLAME.

Alderman Greenfat lives, from three to seven P.M., in joyous anticipation of the delights that hour will bring upon its wing. He tastes in fancy the never-cloying richness of the turtle, which if Jupiter had reigned now would have made Jupiter a candidate for civic honours; the invigorating flavour of the punch, which at once heightens the zest of the last and prepares the palate for the following dainty; the turbot, the venison, the champagne, the Burgundy—all are present to his imagination. Delicious! But seven o’clock arrives. What is the consummation? The meat is cold, or the wine is hot; the servants are awkward, or the next neighbour is a bore; repletion—indigestion—satiety—gout—the devil!

Lady Bauble waits patiently from March to May for the new Waverley novel, indulging perhaps in an occasional flirtation with Granby or a brief and hurried visit to Brambletye House, but turning eagerly from both to the prospect which the unnamed name of the Great Unknown opens before her imagination. Her visions are full of strange and appalling ideas. Some new Meg Merrilies appears to start into terrible existence; some second Balfour lifts up the sword of the Lord and of Gideon;[Pg 267] Amy Robsart is regenerate, Front de Bœuf blasphemes again. But the three volumes come out, and present her with a commonplace bully or an everyday coquette—a lady who chatters at an evening party, a lord who figures in the Morning Post. “This really is too bad,” says Lady Bauble, yawning; “I must absolutely give up Sir Walter!”

Captain Eustace is ordered to Rangoon. Delightful dreams are his—dreams of success and of reputation, of promotion and of pay, of armies discomfited, of stockades stormed, of midnight glimpses of the King of Ava’s harem, of curry prepared in the King of Ava’s kitchen! A few short weeks, and the fairy vision fades with a vengeance: he finds an empty camp, and a crowded hospital; a weary surgeon, and a burning sun; a rifleman in every bramble-bush, and a rheumatism in every bone.

Ο that our hopes could last for ever! That we and the objects of our desire could run on, like the fore and hind wheels of a chariot, always close but never united. That we could be contented to let our enjoyments go on like the lamp of the Rosicrucians, burning and dazzling eternally; without advancing towards them the profane step which, by the essence and law of their nature, must destroy and crush them in a moment!

It is now about ten years since I left the residence of my respectable uncle and guardian in order to pay a visit of a few weeks to some friends at a neighbouring watering-place. My guardian, Sir Abraham, was in his day something of a character—and by-and-by I may sketch his portrait. For the present I shall only quote, as faithfully as I can, the old gentleman’s parting admonition, for so constantly and unremittingly had he laboured at my education, up to the age of sixteen, that he considered six weeks of absence a long period, and six miles an infinite distance.

“Hark ye, Frederic!” he began; “all young men are fools—very well! Some are more fools than others; there are degrees of comparison, but all are fools—very well! You I hold to be particularly and peculiarly a fool; no fault of mine—very well! Now you have been for the last two[Pg 268] years pestering me with ravings and reveries about every pretty face that fell in your way; verses you have written, and they are my abomination—very well! I have found stanzas to Chloe in my shaving-pot, and sonnets to Araminta in the blank leaves of the Annual Registers—very well! You are going to-day to my cousin Sir Andrew’s; nobody to fall in love with there—too sensible a man; insists on a crooked nose in his laundress, and prefers a humpback to a ten years’ character in his choice of a dairymaid—very well! But hark you, sir! you may meet, at some of those hotbeds of frivolity and fevers, which are called card-parties, routs, balls, and I know not what beside—I say, sir, you may meet a girl called Adèle Lepicq—a fantastical name forsooth, but ladies are as fine now in their appellations as they are in their costume—very well! What’s in a name? I tell you, Frederic, if ever you mean to play the fool to any purpose, fall in love with that girl. Why, sir, she is rich enough to buy up the Bank of England—to keep even a ballad-monger from starving! Talk of beauty—sentiment—- affection! What are these to a rent-roll like hers? I tell you, a shape is as well set off by Mechlin lace as by brown holland; and a white neck is mere moonshine, till it has a diamond necklace about it. Bah!—very well!”

So spoke my revered relation, and the impression produced on my mind was that which similar speeches have produced on similar minds ever since old men were arbitrary and young men wilful. I sell myself for gold! I barter the first flush of the young heart’s emotion for what in poetry was always trash! I bend my knees to awkwardness or ugliness! I bow in adoration to malice and insipidity!

I set off, however, and found the stage which was to be my conveyance occupied by a fox-hunter and a brace of Militia officers, who were discussing the case of a poor man, named, for his sins, John Smith. He had been severely wounded in a duel. I listened with great interest to the usual interesting details—the chaises ordered at five in the morning; the vain attempt at a reconciliation; the ground measured; the surgeon in attendance; the firing, the dropping; the deep regret of the antagonist; the absconding;[Pg 269] the apprehension of danger. All this was very well; but when, after going through the action, they proceeded to investigate the cause, what was my astonishment at finding that all this, which was to engross conversation for a week and fill the newspapers for a month, was occasioned by the fascinations of Adèle Lepicq!

“I never would risk my life for deformity,” said I, in a fit of enthusiasm. “Deformity!” quoth the foe of foxes, opening his eyes very wide; “why she is a divinity! Venus was a wax doll to her—Diana a dowdy! One glance of her might charm a statue from its pedestal, or inspire the Bench of Bishops with wit!” And then all three joined in a sort of chorus of eulogy, which conveyed to me no definite idea of form or feature, but expressed simply the conviction of the speakers that every perfection of both had been collected by the munificence of a bountiful destiny in the person of Adèle Lepicq.

I arrived at my journey’s end pretty considerably puzzled, and not a little annoyed. I fortified myself, however, in my preconceived dislike of my guardian’s angel, by remembering that wealth and want of ideas, loveliness and imbecility, were perfectly compatible qualities. “Some silly uneducated heiress—all heiresses are silly and uneducated—who knows nothing but what she has learnt from her glass, and likes no one who does not corroborate daily its assertions; who votes literature mauvais ton, and would rather look into a coffin than a quarto.” So thought I with myself as I lounged into Sir Andrew’s library, in the pride of my mathematical studies, to take down Laplace from the neglect in which I flattered myself he had slumbered for years. Laplace was gone; and the card, which according to the custom of the place accounted for the vacancy on the shelf, informed me that the appropriator of the treasure was Adèle Lepicq.

I was petrified. But distrust is slow to depart, when it has once been admitted. “A Blue, then—who studies Aristotle, I warrant, and criticizes Plato! who keeps a journal in Hebrew, and scribbles notes in the arrow-headed writing! She has, I doubt not, an album—full of doggerel compliments and pen-and-ink drawings, a cabinet of shells[Pg 270] and fossils, a museum of butterflies and beetles! After all, the days were blest when women attempted nothing beyond embroidery and the making of puddings!” And with these charitable reflections I sat down to dinner. There was at table a detestable story-teller; I have met him often since, and have heard his fifty-nine stories fifty-nine times over; but on this occasion it was as much as he could do to get through one of them. It was about an omelette soufflée: how he was very partial to an omelette soufflée; how he ate an omelette soufflée seven times a week in Paris; how he never tasted a good omelette soufflée out of France except once; how a very romantic incident belonged to that omelette soufflée; how it was composed by a beauty—an heiress of sixteen; how she had studied the whole theory of an omelette soufflée for her father’s gratification, because the old man could not live without an omelette soufflée. This tale, interrupted of course by the usual accidents which disturb at a dinner-table the most experienced narrator, concluded by a rhapsody concerning filial duty, and her who was the gastronomical example of its excellence—Adèle Lepicq.

I began to be infinitely plagued by this continual recurrence of Monsieur Tonson in the shape of a reigning toast. But I was haunted for more than a week by unceasing and unpitying rumours. The shops were full of Adèle bonnets and Lepicq shawls; the musicians dedicated their quadrilles to Miss Lepicq; the Poet’s Corner in the newspaper had always its stanzas to A—— L——. By her the harp I admired at Schneider’s had been bespoken; the Arabian I noticed at the riding-house was breaking for her. By degrees my imagination became more and more engrossed by the thought which was thus eternally forced upon its notice. I began to delight in forming conjectures about the extraordinary being who did all things, and all things well. First, I painted her reserved, retiring, shrinking from her own praises, and winning, in consequence, many more than she deserved. Then I drew her wild, piquante, with a little dash of the masculine, and spirits enough to provoke the advances which her pride checked in a moment. Sometimes she was alone by the side of a river stream, reading [Pg 271]Shakespeare, and weeping unconsciously as she read; presently afterwards she was galloping along the hard sands of the sea-shore, her horse starting in vain from the echoing waters, and her hair floating long and dark upon the ocean breeze. She was my thought by day, my vision by night. I became like the lunatic who beholds, whithersoever he turns his eyes, an unvarying attendant figure, distinct in shape and hue to his own sight, but impalpable and unperceived to the gaze of others.

But I had never seen her, and I left the place in all the tortures of unsatisfied curiosity. If I was to meet her at a ball, she had a plaguy cold, and was confined to her room; if I looked for her on the public walk, she was the only person between the ages of seven and seventy who was not there; if I went to the theatre, she patronized the concert; if I rode on the downs, she rambled in the forest.

It was nearly a twelvemonth afterwards that I was one of three hundred who crowded, almost to bursting, two small drawing-rooms, not a hundred miles from Cavendish Square. I had picked up a lost fan, while the hurry and bustle of departure was going on, and was examining it in a fit of vacant abstraction, when I heard some charitable old lady annoying her friends with officious inquiries: “Where is Miss Lepicq’s fan?” “Who has seen Miss Lepicq’s fan?” “Where can Miss Lepicq’s fan be?” I started from my trance. The deuce take the fan, and the querist—but where is Miss Lepicq? She had just left the room—her carriage was stopping the way. I rushed to the landing-place, cleared the stairs with the celerity of a kangaroo, overturned a brace of footmen, and broke my shins over the pole of a sedan, arriving at the house-door just in time to see the last gleam of a kid slipper glide into the concealment of a carriage, to hear the “Home!” of the footman, and to make the best of my way to my hotel, with a head-ache and a sprained ankle.

Inquiries were bootless; she left London, England, the world; for she shut herself up in a convent, Heaven knows why: and, as her epitaph might say, is remembered with regret by all who knew her—and by one who did not.[Pg 272]

Perhaps I ought not to lament—perhaps I do not lament—that I saw no more of Adèle Lepicq. I might have been blind to beauties which all the world adored; I might have discovered imperfections of which no others dreamed. It is pleasant, when I find in all I meet some little admixture of human frailty, to look back to one object which appears still all divine; it is charming, when I am deserted by the fondest friends, betrayed by the dearest hopes, to cling to an imaginative pleasure from which I can expect no treason or desertion. I have flirted with some score of beauties with sufficiently great perseverance, and sufficiently poor success; I have been desperately in love more than once; but if all the rapture of my real passions were set in one scale of a balance, and the luxury of this ideal one were put into the other, I believe the madder weight of the two would preponderate. I remember that in the fervour of my last disappointment I wrote a very fine copy of verses to the same effect; and thus, or nearly thus, they ran—