And there one could wish to stop with this apotheosis of liberty and order read with the generous enthusiasm of a boy; but as the reader knows, it was but the first act of the piece. The letters, vivid as they are, written as they were by a hand trembling with fear and excitement, yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone, to the profound effect produced. At the sound of these songs and shot of cannon, the boy’s mind awoke. He dated his own appreciation of the art of acting from the day when he saw and heard Rachel recite the ‘Marseillaise’ at the Français, the tricolour in her arms. What is still more strange, he had been up to then invincibly indifferent to music, insomuch that he could not distinguish ‘God save the Queen’ from ‘Bonnie Dundee’; and now, to the chanting of the mob, he amazed his family by learning and singing ‘Mourir pour la Patrie.’ But the letters, though they prepare the mind for no such revolution in the boy’s tastes and feelings, are yet full of entertaining traits. Let the reader note Fleeming’s eagerness to influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further history displayed; his unconscious indifference to his father and devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive ‘person resident on the spot,’ who was so happy as to escape insult; and the strange picture of the household – father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna – all day in the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed off alone to school in a distant quarter on the very morrow of the massacre.
They had all the gift of enjoying life’s texture as it comes; they were all born optimists. The name of liberty was honoured in that family, its spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of the foreign friends of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men distinguished on the Liberal side. Like Wordsworth, they beheld
France standing on the top of golden hours
And human nature seeming born again.
At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their element in such a decent and whiggish convulsion, spectacular in its course, moderate in its purpose. For them,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.
And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like Wordsworth) they should have so specially disliked the consequence.
It came upon them by surprise. Liberal friends of the precise right shade of colour had assured them, in Mrs. Turner’s drawing-room, that all was for the best; and they rose on January 23 without fear. About the middle of the day they heard the sound of musketry, and the next morning they were wakened by the cannonade. The French who had behaved so ‘splendidly,’ pausing, at the voice of Lamartine, just where judicious Liberals could have desired – the French, who had ‘no cupidity in their nature,’ were now about to play a variation on the theme rebellion. The Jenkins took refuge in the house of Mrs. Turner, the house of the false prophets, ‘Anna going with Mrs. Turner, that she might be prevented speaking English, Fleeming, Miss H. and I (it is the mother who writes) walking together. As we reached the Rue de Clichy, the report of the cannon sounded close to our ears and made our hearts sick, I assure you. The fighting was at the barrier Rochechouart, a few streets off. All Saturday and Sunday we were a prey to great alarm, there came so many reports that the insurgents were getting the upper hand. One could tell the state of affairs from the extreme quiet or the sudden hum in the street. When the news was bad, all the houses closed and the people disappeared; when better, the doors half opened and you heard the sound of men again. From the upper windows we could see each discharge from the Bastille – I mean the smoke rising – and also the flames and smoke from the Boulevard la Chapelle. We were four ladies, and only Fleeming by way of a man, and difficulty enough we had to keep him from joining the National Guards – his pride and spirit were both fired. You cannot picture to yourself the multitudes of soldiers, guards, and armed men of all sorts we watched – not close to the window, however, for such havoc had been made among them by the firing from the windows, that as the battalions marched by, they cried, “Fermez vos fenêtres!” and it was very painful to watch their looks of anxiety and suspicion as they marched by.’
‘The Revolution,’ writes Fleeming to Frank Scott, ‘was quite delightful: getting popped at and run at by horses, and giving sous for the wounded into little boxes guarded by the raggedest, picturesquest, delightfullest, sentinels; but the insurrection! ugh, I shudder to think at [sic] it.’ He found it ‘not a bit of fun sitting boxed up in the house four days almost.. I was the only gentleman to four ladies, and didn’t they keep me in order! I did not dare to show my face at a window, for fear of catching a stray ball or being forced to enter the National Guard; [for] they would have it I was a man full-grown, French, and every way fit to fight. And my mamma was as bad as any of them; she that told me I was a coward last time if I stayed in the house a quarter of an hour! But I drew, examined the pistols, of which I found lots with caps, powder, and ball, while sometimes murderous intentions of killing a dozen insurgents and dying violently overpowered by numbers…’ We may drop this sentence here: under the conduct of its boyish writer, it was to reach no legitimate end.
Four days of such a discipline had cured the family of Paris; the same year Fleeming was to write, in answer apparently to a question of Frank Scott’s, ‘I could find no national game in France but revolutions’; and the witticism was justified in their experience. On the first possible day, they applied for passports, and were advised to take the road to Geneva. It appears it was scarce safe to leave Paris for England. Charles Reade, with keen dramatic gusto, had just smuggled himself out of that city in the bottom of a cab. English gold had been found on the insurgents, the name of England was in evil odour; and it was thus – for strategic reasons, so to speak – that Fleeming found himself on the way to that Italy where he was to complete his education, and for which he cherished to the end a special kindness.
It was in Genoa they settled; partly for the sake of the captain, who might there find naval comrades; partly because of the Ruffinis, who had been friends of Mrs. Jenkin in their time of exile and were now considerable men at home; partly, in fine, with hopes that Fleeming might attend the University; in preparation for which he was put at once to school. It was the year of Novara; Mazzini was in Rome; the dry bones of Italy were moving; and for people of alert and liberal sympathies the time was inspiriting. What with exiles turned Ministers of State, universities thrown open to Protestants, Fleeming himself the first Protestant student in Genoa, and thus, as his mother writes, ‘a living instance of the progress of liberal ideas’ – it was little wonder if the enthusiastic young woman and the clever boy were heart and soul upon the side of Italy. It should not be forgotten that they were both on their first visit to that country; the mother still child enough ‘to be delighted when she saw real monks’; and both mother and son thrilling with the first sight of snowy Alps, the blue Mediterranean, and the crowded port and the palaces of Genoa. Nor was their zeal without knowledge. Ruffini, deputy for Genoa and soon to be head of the University, was at their side; and by means of him the family appear to have had access to much Italian society. To the end, Fleeming professed his admiration of the Piedmontese and his unalterable confidence in the future of Italy under their conduct; for Victor Emanuel, Cavour, the first La Marmora and Garibaldi, he had varying degrees of sympathy and praise: perhaps highest for the King, whose good sense and temper filled him with respect – perhaps least for Garibaldi, whom he loved but yet mistrusted.
But this is to look forward: these were the days not of Victor Emanuel but of Charles Albert; and it was on Charles Albert that mother and son had now fixed their eyes as on the sword-bearer