God," he says, "I had never taken it up again." He had hardly an option. At the end of two years he was sent for. Things were not going well. His protégée had made herself thoroughly disliked, and was unwilling to abide by the consequences. It was Henriette who sent for him, nobody else cared enough, and, as no one would have anything more to do with her, he was compelled to go to the Queen. She spoke her mind freely to him: "I did put her where she was well treated, and might have been well yet, until the occasion had offered that I might have taken her, but she would not remain there. Then I put her with Madame de Brienne to be tried if she were capable to be at court, who could not endure her pride and vanity, a sufficient proof that she would not well agree with her own equals of both age and quality, since she had not complaisance for so virtuous and grave a lady above herself. And now I cannot take her to the court, for the number of maids is complete, which I cannot augment, neither can I put any away to take her. Wherefore if she hath suffered, or do suffer hereafter, she cannot blame anybody but her own self. Therefore let her learn prudence to govern herself, and I shall not be defective on my part. In the meantime, I will that you know that when I received her from your hand, I did not discharge you of the care of her person. I did indeed charge myself with her pension, and shall make it be duly paid; but I left the government of her unto you. Therefore take her out or leave her there, or put her either in monastery or private house, as you will judge fitting. It is all one to me where she be so that she be in good company; for I leave the charge of her unto you." He would have done better had he left her at the Nether Bow in Edinburgh. It was with the utmost difficulty he placed her, first at one and then at another monastery in the Faubourg St Germain. She was there in January 1649 when the first of the wars of Paris broke out. The child King was conveyed secretly to St Germains en Lay, and the Parisians barricaded the streets. Blakhal was at his wits' end to know what to do with Mademoiselle Gordon, and it says much for Anne of Austria that in the midst of her own trials she remembered this girl, and sent a carriage with two esquires to bring her to St Germains. What happened next reads like a chapter in Twenty Years After.' The King's writ did not run in Paris, and a royal carriage was an object of suspicion. No one No one was now allowed out or in without good passports, which were difficult to obtain. The Lord of Aubeny, a cousin of sorts, got a pass from the Parliament for two ladies, as one of the Queen's femmes de chambre was also to be brought. This pass, which was imperfect, nearly cost them their lives. It was for two gentlewomen unnamed, and a third was in the carriage, a lady of Normandy, known to one of the esquires. The captain of the guard was not satisfied. He thought they might be persons who dared not declare themselves, and a cry was raised that they were the nieces of the hated Mazarin. The people surged madly round the carriage, and threatened to pull it to pieces and kill every one in it. For their own safety the captain was obliged to turn it back with a guard, and the mob, in the belief that they were being taken to prison, let them pass. By this ill-wind of civil dissension Henriette Gordon gained a footing at court, and the end of Blakhal's third and last adventure was in sight. The Queen had no place for her, and proposed that she should go to the Princess of Condé, but this she refused to do. She had come to France to wait on her Majesty, and her people would be displeased if she condescended to less. To oblige the Queen, the Princess took her as a friend until such time as she could take her to herself. When the Prince of Condé was imprisoned, the Princess sent her packing. Madame de Brienne would not receive her, and sent her to Aubeny, who sent her back to Madame de Brienne. Madame de Brienne would not let her come into the house, but asked Madame de Feran, a counsellor's lady, to deliver her to Madame de la Royal. Flotte in the Palais Madame de la Flotte had not a bed to give her, and sent her once more to Madame de Brienne," who had both beds and chambers of reserve." That inflexible lady would not let the gate be opened to her, and Madame de Feran had to take her for the night. Nor was that all. One of the Princess of Condé's femmes de chambre retained her linen until she was paid twelve gold pistoles and a half for a just debt. This debt Blakhal discharged, borrowing the money from Mr Leith, the Superior of the Scots College. The Queen had to bow to the inevitable, and keep her at court, first as a supernumerary, and then as Maid of Honour. When Blakhal wrote she was dame d'atours to Madame, wife of Monsieur the King's brother. Once established at court, Mademoiselle Gordon gave Blakhal short shrift. She did not follow his counsel, and jeered at his good advice; and soon she would not see him. He heard her say that she was obliged to none, either in France or in Scotland, but only to the Queen-Mother and to Monsieur. For this affront she was to see herself as he saw her. In his "Epistle dedicatorie" to the "Breiffe Narration" he says: you have done for this child (if I can call her a child now of fourteen years old) more than ever any priest did for a child before you, or will do after you, whereby you will win your own soul, and that will be all your reward. For you need not expect from her so much as thankfulness, although she should come to be the most powerful woman in the whole world. For she is not sensible of any good that can be done to her, and will neither love nor respect you, nor follow your advice; and her ingratitude will be your greatest cross that ever you shall find. Experience will teach you the truth hereof." difficult actions mentioned in it VOL. CCXXIV.-NO. MCCCLIII. C MY FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN. BY AN IRISHMAN. evidence in its favour has been fabricated by the police. I have lived fifty years in the country, and long enough out of it to get some standard of comparison; and all I am sure of about it is that I shall never be able to anticipate its next move, but when that next move has been made I shall see at once that it was inevitable. In Ireland, all facts are doubtful and all inferences are open to question. Let me give an example. "WE'RE a mighty peculiar not be prejudiced against a people-glory be to God!" case merely because the only So I once heard an Irishman summarise his fellow-countrymen, and the remark stuck in my mind as the only general statement I had ever listened to about them that was absolutely accurate, both in content and atmosphere. Of all other verdicts, including my own, the best I can say is that parts of them are partially just. The more plausible they seem the more they are likely to be wrong, while even the improbability of a paradox will not necessarily make it true. The tradition of the stage stereotypes the Irishman as romantic, sentimental, humorous, alcoholic, and foolish; Bernard Shaw presents him as realistic, sober, and astute; Thackeray thought that all Irishmen belonged to an unofficial Mutual Advertisement Society; while Dr Johnson pronounced them to be a fairminded people because they never spoke well of one another. There is evidence for and against all these propositions, but I am myself too much Irish to be misled by mere evidence, of which our national view is that "if oral it is probably perjured, and if written it is probably forged " (as Lord Darling said in another connection), but that we must For over a quarter of a century I had to pass every week through one of the oldest parts of Dublin. On one side of the laneway that formed my short-cut lay half an acre of waste-land, on which a cluster of middle-class houses had stood "since Adam was a boy," as the vernacular put it, or in more definite terms since the early eighteenth century, until an opportune fire swept them away in the third quarter of the nineteenth. Some traces of former conditions still remained: here, a broken wall, the bricks pale yellow and crumbling, the mortar dropping away in ragged lumps; there, half the gable end of a house, the chimney almost intact, but the fireplace a blackened hole, the depository of obscene horrors. Not a blade of grass appeared above the surface of the earth; it was trodden hard by the bare feet of children for whom it was the only available playground, and it was covered with a sediment of tin cans, scraps of paper, broken crockery, and bits of ironware rusted out of all recognition. Its hollows were filled with stagnant water, its hills composed of cinders, vegetable refuse, and worse, amongst which a grimy goat could usually be seen nosing in search of interest and refreshment. Facing this desolation stood a row of twostoried houses, built about the same time as those that had gone. They leaned drunkenly askew, they bulged out over the pavement, cracks ran up their sides from doorstep to roof, and the soot-laden plaster rotted away in scabs from the front like a monstrous skin disease. The mouldering doors gaped on their hinges, the windows were grimed thick with the dirt of generations, the sashes were coming away from the glass, and the glass itself was cracked where it was not have been condemned and destroyed long before. Perhaps they have been by this time, for I have not visited the spot since the Irish Free State set up business on its own account; but in Dublin, at the end of last century or the beginning of this, no civic matter was urgent which a publican or a slum owner could induce a friend in the Corporation to postpone. Nor, I must add in fairness, was it easy to persuade the occupants of such places to leave them. I myself have seen two families united in screaming protests against their forcible removal when the adjoining tenement had dissolved into its constituent debris the day before, and their own followed suit the day after. Repairs of any kind are, of course, obviously useless when the main fabric is on the brink of collapse. So Murphy's Alley (the name will serve as well as its own) hung together from year to year in the sure and certain hope that so long as it stood it would harbour tenants, and so long as there were tenants a profitable rent could be extracted. altogether broken. The only To this spot I was once attempt at decoration was the accompanied by a Colonial visifamily washing, stuck out on tor of strong views and a poles from the upper storeys. forceful personality, nourished Some tenants, less hardy than on the uplift pages of his their neighbours, had stuffed favourite magazine. The day the larger holes with rags or was not happily chosen for brown paper; but, in general, comfort, but it was approdecay was allowed to run its priate enough to Murphy's course without protest or Alley. It was raining, and remedy. In any ordinary civil- had been raining venomously ised town the houses would all night; and on the open |