The Story of a Newspaper — 11 Oct. 1882

AN odd chance enables me to lift the curtain on a scene a century and three years old, and from the glimpses of real life in dumb show on the stage you can make tragedies and romances enough.

I unearthed the other day half a dozen volumes from a dusty book-shelf, which proved to be the Journal Politique, published weekly in Geneva, in 1779, by Michel Lambert. The leaves—thumbed by how many readers when Washington was President here in Philadelphia!—are thin and torn and coffee-colored, but out of them that dead generation starts up alive and real. M. Lambert had a system of dividing his newspaper into compartments, one being allotted to each country in the world, and through these compartments now we have glimpses, as through long unopened windows, into the daily life of Marie Antoinette[1], or Queen Charlotte[2], or Catharine in Petersbourg (as they called it then)[3], or even of “Son Excellence G. Washington à Philadelphie[4].” Watched from day to day in this way, these historic personages suddenly cease to be articulated skeletons that we have studied in books since our school days; they are flesh and blood; talk and walk in full sight. We criticise the clothes they wear and look after their health each morning.

This week the good Madame Elizabeth[5] is innoculated, and we go with all Paris to mass to pray for her every day before breakfast, and then read the bulletins posted up concerning her progress; and, a month later, S. M. Louis XVI takes a cold in his head when out driving on a damp day, and we are all anxious until we hear that “Monsieur has found assuagement, to the infinite relief of the Royal Family and of his devoted France.” Devoted France that had already planned so certain a cure for all colds in that royal head!

That incomparable monster, Russian Catharine, parades every week in M. Lambert’s columns as the benignant mother of her people. Intellectually she was a century older than they. That is clear. A good many of our very latest advances, at which we are all yet still clapping our hands, were projected a century ago by this clear-brained, gross-blooded woman, and were sneered at by all Europe as visionary absurdities. She urged the importance of opening China to the world, not for the sake of trade, but that “the arts of the East might be brought to Europe.” She proposed sending twenty sons of Russian Boyards[6] to Peking to study Oriental art, and invited the Emperor in return to allow a deputation of as many noble Chinese youths to visit Petersbourg to study civilization—heaven save the mark!

She originated precisely the same plan which is under consideration this winter for the exploration of the Arctic Sea. She began to establish trading-posts from the mouth of the Lena to the Persian Gulf “to form a base of operation on land for vessels seeking a passage through Behring Straits.” Her ukase on this subject is almost identical in idea and words with Mr. Bennett’s letter to the government dated February, 1882[7].

The barbaric splendor of the great “Light of the North” reminds us of the Hindu fables of the magnificent, malignant Rakshas. She literally showers gold and priceless jewels about her on the filth and discomfort of her court; a foreign visitor amuses her by a witty retort, and she sends him a casket crusted with diamonds; a penniless Tartar from the Steppes tickles her humor, and he receives that day a leaden box containing titles to a castle, estate and four thousand serfs. One can imagine how guest and Tartar, being shrewd fellows, made haste to scurry away with their casket and deeds out of sight of the soft-eyed woman while yet their heads were safe on their shoulders. She kept her son Paul a prisoner at Gatchina, mutilating and drugging him when it suited her whim, until he was reduced to the condition of a sickly animal[8]. But one day she ordered him, with his poor little wife Maria[9], to court, that they might see their child baptized, and here M. Lambert gives us a fervid picture of the scene, the little Altesse Imperial on his silver cushion and the Royal beast of prey beside him. “The devout Imperatrice, after the last prayer was said, lifted the child high in her arms and again devoted him to God.”

A glimpse into the domestic life of the day is given in the account of a Polish princess, who escaped July, 1779, from the dungeon of a castle in which her husband had kept her immured for ten years. He pursued her with sixty Uhlans and captured her on the banks of the Dneiper, where she appealed for aid to the neighboring Boyards.

There is, too, a Claimant story with some dramatic points: Among the criminal cases reported from the French courts in 1780 is that of a merchant of Toulouse, who, in 1765, being heavily in debt, bought the corpse of man resembling himself, dressed it in his own clothes, locked it up in his vacant chateau and then decamped to India. A month later the body was found and hastily buried, and, after a due amount of mourning, the widow married again. Fifteen years afterward the debtor returned with enough rupees to pay off his creditors and to support his old estate with splendor, but the wife refused to recognize him and the second husband caused his arrest as an imposter.

On every page of the newspaper are these imperfect silhouette pictures of the old times and customs. Packs of starving wolves descend upon lonely villages in France and tear children from their mothers’ arms. The black plague attacks a town and leaves one dead in almost every house. All the villagers assemble in the chapel, hang a black mortuary cloth over the bell, and with sad, slow steps take their way across the hills never to return. A poet or painter might find a suggestion in this old news item—fathers, lovers and mothers departing, in the soft glow of sunset, leaving behind the accursed hamlet, their homes and their unburied dead.

Or, here is material for a hot-pressed sensational novel. Captain Charles Ross, of Hammersmith, England, “secretly married the daughter of one of the gentry,” and soon after was ordered to America. His wife, disguised as a man, followed him, reached Philadelphia during its occupation by the British, and discovered him wounded in a farm-house in New Jersey. She disclosed herself to him, and his commanding officer, touched by the story, sent Ross back to England on sick leave with a letter intended to melt the heart of her stern father. But the exposure had been too much for her, and we read a month or two later that “Mistress Ross was taken on shore at Liverpool, ill, and it was feared would not reach Hammersmith alive.”

Here comes riding down the land, out of the “Arabian Nights,”[10] a prince from Muscat to Warsaw, seeking his fortune. “He is only nineteen,” says M. Lambert. “He comes to form himself with the beaux arts, the sciences of Europe. He has in his suite thirty persons, horses of rare speed, and ten camels laden with pieces and the preserved foods used in the East.” It might be Sindbad[11] of his first venture.

The Journal gives an account, too, of “a monument which the people of the United States propose to erect in the square facing the Palais de Justice, in Philadelphia, to Liberty and to Louis XVI,” in order, according to the inscription, “that the gratitude of the Republic to that great sovereign might be known to all future ages.”

Is there any record of such a plan in the annals of old Philadelphia? I am afraid the monument was designed and built by some jealous penny-a-liner for M. Lambert’s paper.

But the actual glimpses of real people and their doings in this old journal have a strong fascination in them, though really I do not know why we should concern ourselves more for them than for the Smiths and Browns of whom we read in this morning’s news. But they affect us as do the human figures in stereoscopic pictures, which were caught by chance as they crossed the landscape. It is impossible that we should ever know anything about them, yet they trouble us with an uneasy curiosity and sense of kinship. We want to stop them and force them to give an account of themselves.

Unfortunately I have not the next year of the Journal. These fragments of human history have no end. I shall never know whether the poor Polish princess was hauled again to her dungeon, nor whether that tricky (but in the end honorable) Claimant gained his wife and estate, or ended his days in the galleys; nor what was the fate of the boy-prince from Arabia on his strange pilgrimage. Nor does the fact that they all by this time have turned into dust and herbage and leaves together satisfy my curiosity one whit.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

Notes

1. Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), Austrian born, wife of King Louis XVI of France.

2. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818), German born, wife of King George III of Great Britain and Ireland.

3. Yekaterina Alexeevna, Catherine II, or Catherine the Great (1729-1796), ruler of Russia.

4. George Washington (1732-1799), first president of the United States.

5. Élisabeth Philippine Marie Hélène de France (1764-1794), the youngest sibling of King Louis XVI.

6. Boyar, highest ranking title next to prince in Russian aristocracy from c. 900-1600.

7. James Gordon Bennett, Jr. (1841-1918), publisher of the New York Herald, sponsored the USS Jeanette’s trip to the Arctic in 1879.

8. Paul I (1754-1801), Emperor of Russia from 1796-1801.

9. Maria Feodorovna (1759-1828), born Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg in Prussia.

10. A collection of tales of Arabian, Persian, African, and East Asian origin, first imported to Europe and expanded upon by Antoine Galland (1646-1715) under the title Les Mille et une Nuits, The Thousand and One Nights.

11. A hero of a number of the stories of The Thousand and One Nights.

Key Words

Arabian Nights, Catherine the Great, Charlotte of Mecklenburg, George Washington, histories, James Gordon Bennett, Journal Politique, journalism, Maria Feodorovna, Marie Antoinette, Michel Lambert, Paul I

Creator

Abigail Fagan