Upon this, the old lady mounted beside him, and the enumeration began in duet fashion, but try it how they would, let them take them up hill, or down hill, along the Rhine first, or commence inland, it was no use, they could not make the dozen of them.
“It is shameful!” said the gentleman.
“Very disgraceful, indeed!” echoed the lady, as she closed the book, and crossed her hands before her; while her partner’s indignation took a warmer turn, and he paced the deck in a state of violent agitation.
It was clear that no idea of questioning John Murray’s accuracy had ever crossed their minds. Far from it—the “Handbook” had told them honestly what they were to have at Ander-nach—“twelve towers built by the Romans,” was part of the bill of fare; and some rascally Duke of Hesse something, had evidently absconded with a stray castle; they were cheated, “bamboozled, and bit,” inveigled out of their mother-country under false pretences, and they “wouldn’t stand it for no one,” and so they went about complaining to every passenger, and endeavouring, with all their eloquence, to make a national thing of it, and, determined to represent the case to the minister, the moment they reached Frankfort. And now, as the a propos reminds me, what a devil of a life an English minister has, in any part of the Continent, frequented by his countrymen.
Let John Bull, from his ignorance of the country, or its language, involve himself in a scrape with the authorities—let him lose his passport or his purse—let him forget his penknife or his portmanteau; straightway he repairs to the ambassador, who, in his eyes, is a cross between Lord Aberdeen and a Bow-street officer. The minister’s functions are indeed multifarious—now, investigating the advantages of an international treaty; now, detecting the whereabouts of a missing cotton umbrella; now, assigning the limits of a territory; now, giving instructions on the ceremony of presentation to court; now, estimating the fiscal relations of the navigation of a river; now, appraising the price of the bridge of a waiter’s nose; as these pleasant and harmless pursuits, so popular in London, of breaking lamps, wrenching off knockers, and thrashing the police, when practised abroad, require explanation at the hands of the minister, who hesitates not to account for them as national predilections, like the taste for strong ale and underdone beef.
He is a proud man, indeed, who puts his foot upon the Continent with that Aladdin’s lamp—a letter to the ambassador. The credit of his banker is, in his eyes, very inferior to that all-powerful document, which opens to his excited imagination the salons of royalty, the dinner table of the embassy, a private box at the opera, and the attentions of the whole fashionable world; and he revels in the expectation of crosses, cordons, stars, and decorations—private interviews with royalty, ministerial audiences, and all the thousand and one flatteries, which are heaped upon the highest of the land. If he is single, he doesn’t know but he may marry a princess; if he be married, he may have a daughter for some German archduke, with three hussars for an army, and three acres of barren mountain for a territory—whose subjects are not so numerous as the hairs of his moustache, but whose quarterings go back to Noah; and an ark on a “field azure” figures in his escutcheon. Well, well! of all the expectations of mankind these are about the vainest. These foreign-office documents are but Bellerophon letters—born to betray. Let not their possession dissuade you from making a weekly score with your hotel-keeper, under the pleasant delusion that you are to dine out, four days, out of the seven. Alas and alack! the ambassador doesn’t keep open-house for his rapparee countrymen: his hôtel is no shelter for females, destitute of any correct idea as to where they are going, and why; and however strange it may seem, he actually seems to think his dwelling as much his own, as though it stood in Belgrave-square, or Piccadilly.
Now, John Bull has no notion of this—he pays for these people—they figure in the budget, and for a good round sum, too—and what do they do for it? John knows little of the daily work of diplomacy. A treaty, a tariff, a question of war, he can understand; but the red-tapery of office, he can make nothing of. Court gossip, royal marriages—how his Majesty smiled at the French envoy, and only grinned at the Austrian chargé d’affaires—how the queen spoke three minutes to the Danish minister’s wife, and only said “Bon jour, madame,” to the Neapolitan’s—how plum-pudding figured at the royal table, thus showing that English policy was in the ascendant;—all these signs of the times, are a Chaldee MS. to him. But that the ambassador should invite him and Mrs. Simpkins, and the three Misses and Master Gregory Simpkins, to take a bit of dinner in the family-way—should bully the landlord at the “Aigle,” and make a hard bargain with the “Lohn-Kutcher” for him at the “Sechwan”—should take care that he saw the sights, and wasn’t more laughed at than was absolutely necessary;—all that, is comprehensible, and John expects it, as naturally as though it was set forth in his passport, and sworn to by the foreign secretary, before he left London.
Of all the strange anomalies of English character, I don’t know one so thoroughly inexplicable as the mystery by which so really independent a fellow as John Bull ought to be—and as he, in nineteen cases out of twenty, is, should be a tuft hunter. The man who would scorn any pecuniary obligation, who would travel a hundred miles back, on his journey, to acquit a forgotten debt—who has not a thought that is not high-souled, lofty, and honourable, will stoop to any thing, to be where he has no pretension to be—to figure in a society, where he is any thing but at his ease—unnoticed, save by ridicule. Any one who has much experience of the Continent, must have been struck by this. There is no trouble too great, no expense too lavish, no intrigue too difficult, to obtain an invitation to court, or an embassy soirée.
These embassy soirées, too, are good things in their way—a kind of terrestrial inferno, where all ranks and conditions of men enter—stately Prussians, wily Frenchmen, roguish-looking Austrians, stupid Danes, haughty English, swarthy, mean-looking Spaniards, and here and there some “eternal swaggerer” from the States, with his hair “en Kentuck,” and “a very pretty considerable damned loud smell” of tobacco about him. Then there are the “grandes dames,” glittering in diamonds, and sitting in divan, and the ministers’ ladies of every gradation, from plenipos’ wives to chargé d’àfaires, with their cordons of whiskered attachés about them—maids of honour, aides-de-camp du roi, Poles, savans, newspaper editors, and a Turk. Every rank has its place in the attention of the host: and he poises his civilities, as though a ray the more, one shade the less, would upset the balance of nations, and compromise the peace of Europe. In that respect, nothing ever surpassed the old Dutch embassy, at Dresden, where the maître d’hôtel had strict orders to serve coffee, to the ministers, eau sucrée, to the secretaries, and, nothing, to the attachés. No plea of heat, fatigue, or exhaustion, was ever suffered to infringe a rule, founded on the broadest views of diplomatic rank. A cup of coffee thus became, like a cordon or a star, an honourable and a proud distinction; and the enviable possessor sipped his Mocha, and coquetted with the spoon, with a sense of dignity, ordinary men know nothing of in such circumstances; while the secretary’s eau sucrée became a goal to the young aspirant in the career; which must have stirred his early ambition, and stimulated his ardour for success.
If, as some folk say, human intellect is never more conspicuous, than where a high order of mind can descend to some paltry, insignificant circumstance, and bring to its consideration all the force it possesses; certes diplomatic people must be of a no mean order of capacity.
From the question of a disputed frontier, to that of a place at dinner, there is but one spring from the course of a river towards the sea, and a procession to table, the practised mind bounds as naturally, as though it were a hop, and a step. A case in point occurred some short time since at Frankfort.
The etiquette in this city gives the president of the diet precedence of the different members of the corps diplomatique, who, however, all take rank before the rest of the diet.
The Austrian minister, who occupied the post of president, being absent, the Prussian envoy held the office ad interim, and believed that, with the duties, its privileges became his.
M. Anstett, the Russian envoy, having invited his colleagues