Of these three daughters one, as I have said, married Lord Arthur Russell, the next, and she, I am glad to say, lives in full intellectual vigour, married Lord Sligo, a typical "great gentleman" of the middle Victorian period. Except for his perfect manners and absence of any traces of grandiloquence or pomposity, he might have stepped out of Disraeli's novels, or let us say an expurgated edition from which all the vulgarity and false-taste had been eliminated and only the picturesqueness and cleverness retained. The third sister, Mlle, de Peyronnet, never married, but remained the devoted companion of her mother.

I am not going to imitate the pomposity of Lord Beaconsfield, which I have just denounced, by talking nonsense about _Salons_, the Eighteenth Century, or of the spirit of Mme. du Deffand or of Mile. de Lespinasse living again in these fascinating women. I am content to take them as they were and quite prepared to believe that they were not only very much nicer women, but also quite as able and quite as brilliant as those whom the spirit of Convention would be sure to name as their prototypes. I am quite certain that, though they took a natural and proper interest in history, it never for a moment crossed the minds of any of them to talk like the ladies of the _ancien régime_ or to imitate them in any sort or way. They were as natural and unsophisticated as they were incisive, intrepid, and amusing in their conversation.

Never has it been my good fortune to hear better talk than that which flowed so easily from them, and happily, in the case of Lady Sligo, still flows. What struck me most was the way in which anecdote, recollection, and quotation, though not frigidly or formally dismissed, kept a subordinate place in the talk and had to make way for comments which were actual, original, personal, and therefore in a high degree stimulating. Their talk had nothing of the flavour of the second-hand or of hearsay, however good.

I had been accustomed as a boy to hear the best type of what I may call old-fashioned after-dinner English conversation, from the mouth of a master, Abraham Hayward. Hayward was an excellent example of the special type of _raconteur_ who first became famous in the Regency period. These men, who were chiefly anecdotal in their talk, are well described by Byron in the immortal account of the House-party, _Don Juan_-- "Long-bow from Scotland, Strong-bow from the Tweed." Hayward was a man of real ability, though in a narrow sphere, and with a remarkable power of style. With him talk meant telling stories of Byron, Melbourne, Castlereagh, Cobden, Bright, Peel, and later Gladstone, Palmerston, and Lord John and other eminent Victorians. He told these with great intensive force and was vivacious as well as concise. All the same, the talk was anecdotal, and that can never be as stimulating as when it is spontaneous. It was the difference between fresh meat and tinned meat-- the difference between a vintage claret on the day it is uncorked and the day after.

Do not let it be supposed that by this comparison I am suggesting that the talk of Mme. de Peyronnet and her daughters was naturalistic and so artless. It was nothing of the kind. Though original and spontaneous, it was the result, consciously or unconsciously, of a distinct artistic intention. When they talked, they talked their best, as does the writer of good familiar letters. Lady Arthur Russell was the most pungent talker of the three, Lady Sligo the most reminiscent and, in the proper, not the derived sense, the most woman-of-the-worldly. I mean by this that she dealt most with the figures of the great world, but by no means in a grandiloquent, consequential, or Beaconsfieldian sense. She had travelled a great deal and seen an enormous number of people in every country of Europe as well as in England, and, therefore, she was and is more cosmopolitan in her talk than were her sisters.

Mlle. de Peyronnet was the most epigrammatic. She had the happy gift of improvising in a lightning-flash epigrams and _jeux de mots_ which would not have discredited the best wits even of France. I think her repartee, or rather _jeu de mot_, at the dentist's, which went the round of London, the best example I can take by way of illustration. Most people are dreary and depressed in a dentist's chair. Not so Mlle. de Peyronnet. Even here she kept not only her good-temper, but also her brilliant imagination and, above all, her verbal felicity.

The scene passes in a Dental _Atelier_ in Paris. Mlle. de Peyronnet must be imagined seated in the fateful chair, dreading the pain but hoping for the relief of an extraction. But, as Tacitus said, that morning she saw all things cross and terrible. The dentist, instead of doing his work deftly, bungled it, or else it was the fault of the patient's jaw. At any rate, the tooth broke off in the forceps, and the dentist had to confess to his patient that all the pain he had given her was useless. He had left in the root! "_Ah, mademoiselle,_" he exclaimed, "_quelle Tragédie!_" But the patient, though suffering acute agony, was worthy of the occasion. She did not pause for an instant in her comment--"_Une Tragédie de Racine!_"

There have been, no doubt, greater and deeper witticisms than that, but could anything have been happier, neater, more good-tempered, more exactly appropriate?

I sometimes feel I would rather have said that than have written Racine's _Mithridates_.

I have summarised the characteristics of each of the sisters' talk. Of Mme. de Peyronnet, who in many ways was more brilliant than her daughters, I will say only that she combined their several qualities. When I add that her talk, like that of her daughters, was original, it must not be supposed that she had not a proper appreciation of great events or of great people. Her memories naturally stretched a great deal further than those of her daughters. I remember well asking her whether she had seen any of the human _remanets_ of the Revolution, some of whom, at any rate, must have been alive during her early married life in Paris. She told me that, though there were no reprisals after the Restoration, it was curious how few of the Terrorists were visible in the Paris of her youth. Some, of course, had gone to earth under aliases, but most of them were dead. The Terror which the Terrorists felt as much as inspired, the excitement, and probably also the debauchery of the time when everyone felt, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," did not create an atmosphere in which people cultivated hygienic habits or studied rules of "how to live till eighty."

And then, I remember well, she corrected her denial. "Yes, but I did see one of the Terrorists," and then she told me how she actually saw in the flesh the man who was perhaps the worst of them all, the implacable, irresistible Fouché, the man who had been an incendiary, an extremist, and yet who was never in reality a fanatic or a profligate. Fouché always dressed in black, and in a fashion which seems to have resembled Cruikshank's caricatures of the Chadbands of the Regency period. He was a loyal, hard-working servant of any Government which employed him. If the policy of those he was working with was killing, he would kill in battalions, as indeed he did at Lyons. Yet all the time he felt no touch of the blood-lust which inspired men like Carrier. He would never have thought of killing for the sake of killing, or of committing acts of unnecessary cruelty. He was, indeed, a man of spotless private character. He was guilty of no excess except the awful excess of knowing no difference between right and wrong.

"What," I asked Mme. de Peyronnet," did he look like, and how did you come to see him?" Here is her reply.

When quite a young woman I was in the theatre one night and suddenly saw a great deal of commotion. People were standing up and looking about them and talking eagerly. This commotion, I soon saw, was caused by a very old man with white hair who was making his way through the crowd to his stall. As he moved, there ran through the house the excited whisper, "_Cest le Duc d'Otranto_."

That was the melodramatic title which Napoleon had conferred upon the man he could not trust, but dare not openly distrust or dismiss, any more than could Louis XVIII. Even in the calmest and most peaceful times the Duke of Otranto remained menacing and terrible. The background which I see when I think of Fouché is not the Convention or the Committee of Public Safety. I see him as he is described to us by the youth who went to Lyons, to plead with him for the right to cross into Switzerland. He found Fouché busy. He was doing his best to execute the command of the Convention to lay Lyons low, and to kill the greater part of her principal inhabitants. Fouché, always loyal and always punctiliously exact in his work, saw what a difficult job was the killing of seven or eight hundred men at once unless by a well thought-out plan. The mere collecting and dragging away the corpses for burial would be an immense task. The plan he ultimately devised was admirably simple. He first made the prisoners dig a long, wide, and deep trench--I understand that the Bolsheviks use the same method. He then lined them up at the very edge of the ditch. When the firing-party got to work their victims fell neatly backwards into their long grave. All that was needed was to shovel in the earth, which had been piled on the opposite side of the trench.

The young man of whose account I am thinking uses language in describing Fouché superintending the preparation of the trench which reads like a paraphrase of Tacitus' account of Tiberius at the trial of Piso and Placentia. "Nothing so much daunted Piso as to behold Tiberius, without mercy, without wrath, close, dark, unmovable, and bent against every access of tenderness." So stood Fouché.

When Mme. de Peyronnet saw him, the Terrorist had been entirely replaced by the "civilised Statesman." What passed before her eyes was a very old, white-haired man, with a regard deep and impenetrable. She added, however, "I remember noting that everyone seemed to treat him with the greatest awe." By that time, strange to say, he was one of the richest and most respected men in France. Further, he had by his second marriage entered one of the greatest families of the _ancien régime_, and had actually been accepted as "one of us" by the inner hierarchy of the French noblesse! He had even made his peace with the Church and become, at any rate in all outward forms, perhaps _ex animo_, a devout Catholic. What is even more astounding is that his second wife was as devoted to him as was his first, and so, apparently, was he to her. Fouché, indeed, may be said to have been an expert in domestic felicity. The man is as inexplicable as the Emperor to whom I have dared to compare him. Only, unfortunately for us, Fouché had no Tacitus to chronicle his deeds of horror and his ineffable treacheries and his complacent moderation in infamy. Would that the author of the Annals re- incarnated could have given us pictures not only of Fouché but of Robespierre, Marat, Saint-Just, Camille Desmoulins, Fouquier Tinville, and the rest!

Nothing was more fascinating than to hear Mme. de Peyronnet talk of the street-fighting in '48 and of how life went on, I had almost said, as usual, in the intervals of the fusillades. She told me, I remember, that when you were walking in a side-street and heard firing in the boulevard or main street at the end of it, it was almost impossible not to creep up what you thought or hoped was the safest side, and put your head round the corner and see what was happening. Who is getting the best of it in a fight is a question that will not be denied, though it may easily mean a stray bullet in your head.

Speaking of '48, though it breaks my rule, I must recall an account which I induced Lady Sligo to give last year to me and my son, of her recollections of Lamartine during this very period. I happened, if I