Note 22 — Chapter VI

Much has been written in prose and verse on the advantages and mischief of smoking tobacco. Tissot, among others, filled a volume to prove that half the maladies of mankind may be traced to the use of tobacco. But when some millions of people, male and female, as in Turkey, smoke from morning till night, and live, florid and robust, to a good old age, it may be questioned whether Tissot showed the same sagacity in his nosological researches on this as on other subjects. All I can say is that Lady Hester gave her sanction to the practice by the habitual use of the long oriental pipe, which use dated from the year 1817, or thereabouts.

As she had now kept her bed for many weeks, we will describe her there, when, lying with her pipe in her mouth, talking on politics, philosophy, morality, religion, or on any other theme, with her accustomed eloquence, and closing her periods with a whiff that would have made the Duchess of Rutland stare with astonishment, could she have risen from her tomb to have seen her quondam friend, the brilliant ornament of a London drawing-room, clouded in fumes so that her features were sometimes invisible. Now, this altered individual had not a covering to her bed that was not burnt into twenty holes by the sparks and ashes that had fallen from her pipe; and, had not these coverings been all woollen, it is certain that, on some unlucky night, she must have been consumed, bed and all.

Her bed-room, at the end of every twenty-four hours, was strewed with tobacco and ashes, to be swept away and again strewed as before; and it was always strongly impregnated with the fumes.

The finest tobacco the country could produce, and the cleanest pipes (for she had a new one almost as often as a fop puts on new gloves), could hardly satisfy her fastidiousness; and I have known her footman get as many scoldings as there were days in the week on that score. From curiosity, I once counted a bundle of pipes, thrown by after a day or two’s use, any one of which would have fetched five or ten shillings in London, and there were one hundred and two. The woods she most preferred were jessamine, rose, and cork. She never smoked cherry-wood pipes, from their weight, and because she liked cheaper ones, which she could renew oftener. She never arrived at that perfectability, which is seen in many smokers, of swallowing the fumes, or of making them pass out at her nostrils. The pipe was to her what a fan was or is in a lady’s hand—a means of having something to do. She forgot it when she had a letter to write, or any serious occupation. It is not so with the studious and literary man, who fancies it helps reflection or promotes inspiration.