180 PRÆTERITA-I

207. Clotilde (Adèle Clotilde in full, but her sisters called her Clotilde, after the queen-saint,¹ and I Adèle, because it rhymed to shell, spell, and knell) was only made more resplendent by the circlet of her sisters’ beauty; while my own shyness and unpresentableness were farther stiffened, or rather sanded, by a patriotic and Protestant conceit, which was tempered neither by politeness nor sympathy; so that, while in company I sate jealously miserable like a stock fish (in truth, I imagine, looking like nothing so much as a skate in an aquarium trying to get up the glass), on any blessed occasion of tête-à-tête I endeavoured to entertain my Spanish-born, Paris-bred, and Catholic-hearted mistress with my own views upon the subjects of the Spanish Armada, the Battle of Waterloo, and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

To these modes of recommending myself, however, I did not fail to add what display I could make of the talents I supposed myself to possess. I wrote with great pains, and straining of my invention, a story about Naples (which I had never seen), and “the Bandit Leoni,” whom I represented as typical of what my own sanguinary and adventurous disposition would have been had I been brought up a bandit; and “the Maiden Giuletta,” in whom I portrayed all the perfections of my mistress. Our connection with Messrs. Smith & Elder enabled me to get this story printed in Friendship’s Offering;² and Adèle laughed over it in rippling ecstasies of derision, of which I bore the pain bravely, for the sake of seeing her thoroughly amused.

I dared not address any sonnets straight to herself; but when she went back to Paris, wrote her a French letter seven quarto pages long, descriptive of the desolations and solitudes of Herne Hill since her departure. This letter, either Elise or Caroline wrote to tell me she had really read, and “laughed immensely at the French of.” Both

¹ [See Bible of Amiens, Vol. XXXIII. pp. 31, 32, 34.]

² [In the number for 1837: see now Vol. 1. pp. 288-304.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]