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Updated: June 10, 2025
"Nothing yet to inconvenience you, but our Governor Clinton may send you a billet doux from Albany before May ends and June begins if this periwigged beau, St. Leger, strolls out to ogle Stanwix " Dorothy turned her horse sharply, saluted Sir George, and galloped away towards her father, who had halted at the cross-roads to wait for us. "Good-bye, Sir George," I said, offering my hand.
But this little Parisian dwarf had had to shape his passions, as his periwigged grandfathers had done, and as no doubt his great-grandnephews would do, in the bodies of the heroes and gods of Greece, two thousand years dead.
All the people whose portraits are hanging up, beruffled, dignified, calm, and periwigged, on the old walls of Edgeworthstown certainly had extraordinarily strong impressions, and gave eloquent expression to them.
A wide contrast is a romantic, tragic King Charles, with a melancholy remembrance in his long face and drooping eyes of the day when he bade farewell to the world at St. James's and left it for the scaffold at Whitehall. His swarthy periwigged sons balance the sister queens, Mary and Anne. St. James's, like Kensington and Hampton Court, seems somehow peculiarly associated with them.
But, when one tries to catch him and pin him down on the dissecting-table, he turns out to be exasperatingly elusive. Even his most fervent admirers cannot agree among themselves as to the true nature of his achievements. Balzac thought of him as an artist, Taine was captivated by his conception of history, M. Bourget adores him as a psychologist, M. Barrès lays stress upon his 'sentiment d'honneur, and the 'Beylistes' see in him the embodiment of modernity. Certainly very few writers have had the good fortune to appeal at once so constantly and in so varied a manner to succeeding generations as Henri Beyle. The circumstances of his life no doubt in part account for the complexity of his genius. He was born in 1783, when the ancien régime was still in full swing; his early manhood was spent in the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars; he lived to see the Bourbon reaction, the Romantic revival, the revolution of 1830, and the establishment of Louis Philippe; and when he died, at the age of sixty, the nineteenth century was nearly half-way through. Thus his life exactly spans the interval between the old world and the new. His family, which belonged to the magistracy of Grenoble, preserved the living tradition of the eighteenth century. His grandfather was a polite, amiable, periwigged sceptic after the manner of Fontenelle, who always spoke of 'M. de Voltaire' with a smile 'mélangé de respect et d'affection'; and when the Terror came, two representatives of the people were sent down to Grenoble, with the result that Beyle's father was pronounced (with a hundred and fifty others) 'notoirement suspect' of disaffection to the Republic, and confined to his house. At the age of sixteen Beyle arrived in Paris, just after the coup d'état of the 18th Brumaire had made Bonaparte First Consul, and he immediately came under the influence of his cousin Daru, that extraordinary man to whose terrific energies was due the organisation of Napoleon's greatest armies, and whose leisure moments for apparently he had leisure moments were devoted to the composition of idylls in the style of Tibullus and to an enormous correspondence on literary topics with the poetasters of the day. It was as a subordinate to this remarkable personage that Beyle spent nearly the whole of the next fifteen years of his life in Paris, in Italy, in Germany, in Russia wherever the whirling tempest of the Napoleonic policy might happen to carry him. His actual military experience was considerably slighter than what, in after years, he liked to give his friends to understand it had been. For hardly more than a year, during the Italian campaign, he was in the army as a lieutenant of dragoons: the rest of his public service was spent in the commissariat department. The descriptions which he afterwards delighted to give of his adventures at Marengo, at Jéna, at Wagram, or at the crossing of the Niémen have been shown by M. Chuquet's unkind researches to have been imaginary. Beyle was present at only one great battle Bautzen. 'Nous voyons fort bien, he wrote in his journal on the following day, 'de midi
Retief watched the bearers coming and going, bringing trays laden with drinks, carrying off empties. There was a lull in the drinking now, as the diplomats gathered around the periwigged Chief of State and his courtiers. Bearers loitered near the service door, eyeing the notables.
'I hired this off of my Lord Marshalton, Zigler explained, while they helped us out of our coats under the severe eyes of ruffed and periwigged ancestors. 'Ya-as. They always look at me too, as if I'd blown in from the gutter. Which, of course, I have. That's Mary, Lady Marshalton. Old man Joshua painted her. Do you see any likeness to my Lord Marshalton? Why, haven't you ever met up with him?
Another portrait is Bridgman, a well-known landscape gardener of the time, who is proposing to our young hero some scheme for his estate; while the seated and periwigged figure who runs his fingers over the harpsichord has been suggested as that of the great composer Handel.
His plain suit certainly was a relief to the eye, wearied with periwigged sages and bejewelled sinners. Here was the little theatre where Rousseau's plays were acted. Here were the gilded chairs in which kings had sat, swords heroes had held, books philosophers had pored over, mirrors that had reflected famous beauties, and painted walls that had looked down on royal revels long ago.
You must go through the ceremony, however much you may sigh to avoid it; and however much you know that the lions in one capital roar very much like the lions in another; that the churches are more or less large and splendid, the palaces pretty spacious, all the world over; and that there is scarcely a capital city in this Europe but has its pompous bronze statue or two of some periwigged, hook-nosed emperor, in a Roman habit, waving his bronze baton on his broad-flanked brazen charger.
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