“The Real Charlotte” can claim resemblance with Homer in one peculiarity at least, that of a plurality of birthplaces. She was first born at Ross, in November, 1889, and achieved as much life as there may be in a skeleton scenario. She then expired, untimely. Her next avatar was at Drishane, when, in April, 1890, we wrote with enthusiasm the first chapter, and having done so, straightway put her on a shelf, and she died again. In the following November we did five more chapters, and established in our own minds the identity of the characters. Thenceforward those unattractive beings, Charlotte Mullen, Roddy Lambert, The Turkey-Hen, entered like the plague of frogs into our kneading-troughs, our wash-tubs, our bedchambers. With them came Hawkins, Christopher, and others, but with a less persistence. But of them all, and, I think, of all the company of more or less tangible shadows who have been fated to declare themselves by our pens, it is Francie Fitzpatrick who was our most constant companion, and she was the one of them all who “had the sway.” We knew her best; we were fondest of her. Martin began by knowing her better than I did, but, even during the period when she sat on the shelf with her fellows, while Martin and I boiled the pot with short stories and the like (that are now rÉchauffÉ in “All on the Irish Shore”), or wrote up tours, or frankly idled, Francie was taking a hand in what we did, and her point of view was in our minds.

Very often have we been accused of wresting to our vile purposes the friends and acquaintances among whom we have lived and moved and had our being. If I am to be believed in anything, I may be believed in this that I now say. Of all the people of whom we have written, three only have had any direct prototype in life. One was “Slipper,” another was “Maria,” both of whom are in “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,” and the other was the Real Charlotte. Slipper’s identity is negligible. So is Maria’s. She who inspired Charlotte had left this world before we began to write books, and had left, unhappy woman, so few friends, if any, that in trying to embody some of her aspects in Charlotte Mullen, Martin and I felt we were breaking no law of courtesy or of honour.

One very strange fact in connection with Charlotte I may here record. Some time after the book had been published, an old lady who had known her in the flesh met us, and said—(please try to realise the godliest and most esoteric of County Cork accents)—

“And tell me, how in the worr’ld did you know about Charlotte’s” (I may call her Charlotte) “love-affair?”

We said we had never known of such. That it had developed itself out of the story; in fact, that we had no idea that anything of the kind was possible.

“Well, ’tis pairfectly true!” replied the old lady, intensely.

And so indeed it was, as was then expounded to us. In almost every detail of Charlotte’s relations with Lambert and his wife; incredibly, even appallingly true. And we then remembered how, while we were still writing the book, a communication had come to my sister, purporting to be from the Real Charlotte, in some sphere other than this. A message of such hatred as inevitably suggested the words, “Hell holds no fury like a woman scorned.”

These are things beyond and above our comprehension; it is trying the poor old scapegoat of Coincidence very high if it is to be pressed into the service of a case as complicated, and elaborate, and identical in detail as was this one.

“The Real Charlotte” went with us through the years ’90 and ’91, and was finished during the early summer of ’92. There is an entry in my diary. “June 8, 1892. Wrote feverishly. The most agitating scenes of Charlotte. Finished Francie.”

We felt her death very much. We had sat out on the cliffs, in heavenly May weather, with Poul Ghurrum, the Blue Hole, at our feet, and the great wall of Drishane Side rising sheer behind us, blazing with yellow furze blossom, just flecked here and there with the reticent silver of blackthorn. The time of the “Scoriveen,” the Blackthorn winter, that last flick of the lash of the east wind, that comes so often early in May, was past. We and the dogs had achieved as much freedom from social and household offices as gave us the mornings, pure and wide, and unmolested. There is a place in the orchard at Drishane that is bound up with those final chapters, when we began to know that there could be but one fate for Francie. It felt like killing a wild bird that had trusted itself to you.

We have often been reviled for that, as for many other incidents in “The Real Charlotte,” but I still think we were right.

Although the book was practically finished in June, the delays and interruptions that had followed it from the first pursued it still. It was still in the roughest and most bewildering of manuscript, and its recopying involved us, as has been invariably our fate, in many alterations and additions. Interspersed with this work were short stories, visits, hunting, occasional articles called for by some casual paper or magazine. It was not until February 4, 1893, that we “actually and entirely finished off the Welsh Aunt, alias ‘The Real Charlotte,’ and sent her off. Poor old thing.”

But even then there was no rest for the sole of her foot. Bentley offered £100, neither more nor less. Our diaries remark, “wrote breathing forth fire and fury, and refused.” In March I find that the day after I had “ridden a hunt on a drunk pony,” “Bentley returned the MS.” I think the excitement of the hunt on that unusual mount took the sting out of Charlotte’s reverse. In April, “Smith and Elder curtly refused the Real C. They said their reader, Mr. James Payn, was ill. Can his illness have been the result of reading Charlotte? Or was it anticipatory?” Martin was at this time in Dublin, a sojourn thus summarised in her diary: “Dublin filled with dull, dirty, middle-aged women. Had my hair done in enormous bundle at back. Hideous but compulsory.” I joined her there and we proceeded to London and saw and heard many cheerful things. (Amongst other items in my diary, I find “Heard Mr. Haweis preach a good sermon on Judas Iscariot, with faint but pleasant suggestion of a parallel between him and Mr. Gladstone.”) We then opened negotiations with Messrs. Ward and Downey, and pending their completion, Martin and I, with my mother and my sister, paid our first visit to Oxford.

The affair opened badly. Our luggage had been early entrusted to a porter, to be deposited in the cloak-room, and the porter was trysted to meet us at a certain hour and place. At the time appointed the porter was not. Our luggage eyed us coldly across the barrier, and, the recognition being one-sided, and unsupported by tickets, remained there, while we searched for the porter and the tickets (for which he had paid). He never transpired, and his fate remains a Mystery of the Great Western. By what is known in an Irish Petty Sessions Court as “hard swearing,” we obtained possession of our property, but not before my mother had (vide my diary) “gone foaming to Oxford” without either her ducats or her daughters, coerced by the necessity of propitiating our host, a Don of Magdalen, with whom it seemed unwise to trifle.

Those days at Oxford are written in our memories in red letters, even though a party more bent on triviality and foolishness has not often disgraced the hospitality of a Scholar. He does not, I fear, forget how, after patient and learned exposition and exhibition of many colleges, one asked him, in genuine, even painstaking, ignorance, to remind her which of them had been “Waddle College”; and how he was only able to recall it to the inquirer’s memory by the mention of a certain little white dog that was sitting at the entrance gate. Nor how, when taken to the roof of the Bodleian, to be shown the surrounding glories of Oxford, the sight of one of the ventilators of its reading-room had evoked in Martin Ross an uncontrollable longing to shriek down it, in imitation of a dog whose tail has been jammed in a door. (An incomparable gift of hers, that has made the fortune of many a dull dinner-party.) I have often wondered what the grave students in that home of learning thought of the unearthly cry from the heavens, Sirius, as it were, in mortal agony. We were not permitted to wait for a sequel. Our host, with blanched face, hurried us away.

“These be toys,” but they were pleasant, and one more recollection of that time may be permitted. It was April 30th, and on May morning, as all properly instructed persons know, the choristers of Magdalen salute the rising sun from the top of Magdalen Tower. Our host, the Don, being a man having authority, determined that we were to view this ceremony; and being also a man of intelligence, decided that one of his menials should for the occasion take his office of guide and protector. Accordingly, at some four of the clock, a faithful undergraduate threw small stones at our windows in the Mitre Hotel, and, presently, with an ever increasing crowd, we ran at his heels to Magdalen Tower. We gained the spiral stone staircase with a good few on it in advance of us, and a mighty multitude following behind. Then it was, when about halfway up, and anything save advance was impossible, that the youngest and the tallest of us announced that giddiness had come upon her, and that she was unable to move. The faithful undergraduate rose to the occasion, and immediately directed her to put her arms round his waist. This she did, and, unsolicited, buried her face in his Norfolk jacket’s waist-band. Thus they arrived safely at the antechamber to the roof. There we left her, and climbed the ladder that leads to the roof. The sun rose, the white-robed choir warbled their Latin hymn, the Tower rocked, we saw its battlements sway between us and its neighbour spires, and while these things were occurring, a very long thing, like an alligator, crawled across the leads towards us—the youngest of the party, unable to be out of it, but equally unable to stand up. The faithful undergraduate renewed his attentions.

All this is long ago; the two gayest spirits, who made the fortunes of that visit, have left us. Magdalen, and its cloisters, and its music, have moved into the bright places of memory. When I think now of those May days

and I “can make reply,” falteringly,

About a fortnight after this we sold “The Real Charlotte” to Messrs. Ward and Downey for £250 and half American rights (which, as far as I can remember, never materialised). After this we devoted ourselves to the trousseau of the youngest of the party—which was a matter that had not been divulged to the faithful undergraduate, and is only mentioned now in order to justify the chronicling of two of the comments of Castle Haven on the accompanying display of wedding presents. One critic said that to see them was like being in Paradise. Another declared that it was for all the world like a circus.

Are things that are equal to the same thing equal to each other? It is a question for the Don of Magdalen to decide.

* * * * *

Not for another year did “The Real Charlotte” see the light. Various business disasters pursued and detained her; it was in May, 1894, that she at length appeared, and was received by no means with the trumpets and shawms suggested by Sir William Gregory.

One distinguished London literary paper pronounced it to be “one of the most disagreeable novels we have ever read”; and ended with the crushing assertion that it could “hardly imagine a book more calculated to depress and disgust even a hardened reader ... the amours are mean, the people mostly repulsive, and the surroundings depressing.” Another advised us to “call in a third coadjutor, in the shape of a judicious but determined expurgator of rubbish”; The Weekly Sun, which did indeed, as Martin said, give us the best, and best written, notice that we had had, ended a review of eight columns by condemning the book as “unsympathetic, hard, and harsh,” though “worthy of study, of serious thought, of sombre but perhaps instructive reflection.” A few reviewers of importance certainly showed us—as St. Paul says—no little kindness, (not that I wish it to be inferred that reviewers are a barbarous people, which would be the height of ingratitude,) but, on the whole, poor Charlotte fared badly, and one Dublin paper, while “commending the book” to its readers, even saying that Francie was “an attractive heroine,” went on to deplore the “undeniable air of vulgarity which clings to her,” and finally exclaimed, with grieved incredulity, “Surely no girl of Francie’s social position screams, ‘G’long, ye dirty fella’!”

A very regrettable incident, but, I fear (to quote kind Mr. Brown), though legendary, it is not nonsensical.

So was it also with our own friends. My mother first wrote, briefly, “All here loathe Charlotte.” With the arrival of the more favourable reviews her personal “loathing” became modified; later, at my behest, she gave me the following able synopsis of unskilled opinion.

“As you told me to give you faithfully all I heard, pro and con, about Charlotte, I will do so.

“Mrs. A. ‘Very clever, very clever, but I have no praise for it, Mrs. Somerville, no praise! The subjects are too nasty! I have no interest in such vulgar people, and I’m sure the Authors have really none either, but it is very clever of them to be able to write at all, and to get money for it!’

“Mrs. B. was extremely interested in the book and thought it most powerful, but said that nothing would induce her even to tell her sisters that such a book was to be had, as the imprecations would shock them to that extent that they would never get over it.

“Then Miss C. didn’t like it, first because of the oaths and secondly because it would give English people the idea that in all ranks of Irish life the people were vulgar, rowdy, and gave horrible parties.

“The D.’s didn’t like it either, for the same reasons, but thought if you had given ‘Christopher’ a stronger back-bone, and hadn’t allowed him to say ‘Lawks!’, that he would have been a redeeming character, and also ‘Pamela,’ had she only been brought forward more prominently, and that you had allowed her to marry ‘Cursiter.’”

From these, and many similar pronouncements, it was but too apparent to us that the Doctors were entirely agreed in their decision, and that my mother had herself summarised the general opinion, when she wrote to one of her sisters that “Francie deserved to break her neck for her vulgarity; she certainly wasn’t nice enough in any way to evoke sympathy, and the girls had to kill her to get the whole set of them out of the awful muddle they had got into!’

The authors, on receipt of these criticisms, laughed rather wanly. “Sophie pleurait, mais la poupÉe restait cassÉe.” Although we could laugh, a certain depression was inescapable.

I do not say that we had only adverse opinions from our friends. Our own generation sustained us with warm and enthusiastic approval, and we were fortified by this, despite the fact that a stern young brother wrote to me in high reprobation, and ended by saying that “such a combination of bodily and mental hideosity as Charlotte could never have existed outside of your and Martin’s diseased imaginations.” Which left little more to be said.

On the whole, the point insisted on, to the exclusion of every other aspect of the book, was the “unpleasantness” of the characters. The pendulum has now swung the other way, and “pleasant” characters usually involve a charge of want of seriousness. Very humbly, and quite uncontroversially, I may say that Martin and I have not wavered from the opinion that “The Real Charlotte” was, and remains, the best of our books, and, with this very mild commendation, the matter, as far as we are concerned, closes.

We were in Paris (with the tallest and youngest of the Magdalen Tower party) when Charlotte was published. I was working for a brief spell at the studio of M. DÉlÉcluse; Martin was writing a series of short articles, which, with the title “Quartier Latinities,” and adorned by drawings of mine, appeared in Black and White. The casual, artless, yet art-full life of “The Quarter” fascinated Martin; she had the gift of living it with zest, while remaining far enough outside it to be able to savour its many absurdities. As we said, in one of our books, and the idea was hers, “The Irishman is always the critic in the stalls, and is also, in spirit, behind the scenes.” The “English Club” for women artists, of which I was a member, soon got to know, and to accept, the slim and immaculately neat critic of the simple habits and customs of its members, and resented not at all her analysis of its psychology. Black and White had an immense vogue there; some day, perhaps, those articles, and others of Martin Ross’s stray writings, may be collected and reprinted. If the “Boul’ Miche’,” now orphaned of its artists, ever gathers a new generation under its wings, these divagations of autre-fois will have an interest of their own for those that survive of the old order.

We had rooms at a very unfashionable hotel on the Boulevard Mont Parnasse, at the corner of the Boulevard Raspail. It was mainly occupied by art students, and the flare of esprit À bruler lit its many windows at the sacred hour of le fife o’clock, or such of its windows as appertained to les Anglaises. The third member of our mÉnage went daily to what she spoke of as “The Louvre”—meaning the Magasin, not the MusÉe—and explained rather vaguely that she had “to buy things for a bazaar.” Her other occupation was that of cook. There was a day when “Ponce” (my fellow lodger, it may be remembered, in the Rue Madame) came beneath our windows at lunch time and was offered hospitality. She declined, and was then desired to “run over to Carraton’s” and purchase for the cook a dozen of eggs. This she did, and cried to us from the street below—(we were swells, living au premier)—that the eggs were there. The cook is a person of resource, and in order to save trouble, she bade Ponce wait, while she lowered to her a basket, by the apostolic method of small cords, in which she should place the eggs. Across the way was a cafÉ, dedicated to a mysterious and ever-thirsty company, “Les bons Gymnasiarques.” The attention of these beings, and that of a neighbouring cab-stand, was speedily attracted to the proceeding. Spellbound they watched the cook as she lowered the basket to Ponce. Holding their breaths, they watched Ponce entrust the eggs to the basket; as it rose, they rose from their seats beneath the awning; as the small cords broke—which of course they did, when the basket was about halfway to the window—and the eggs enveloped Ponce in involuntary omelette, the Bons Gymnasiarques cheered. I have little doubt but that that omelette helped to cement the Entente Cordiale, which was at that time still considerably below the national horizon.

I am aware that tales of French as she is spoke by the English have been many, “but each must mourn his own (she saith),” and we had a painful episode or two that must be recounted. The gentlemen of the Magasin du Louvre could, if they would, contribute some stirring stories. One wonders if one of them is still dining out on the tall young English lady who told him at the Rayon devoted to slippers that she desired for herself a pair of pantalons rouges? And if another, who presided at a lace counter, has forgotten the singular request made to him for a “Front avec des rides”? “A wrinkled forehead!” one seems to hear him murmur to himself, “In the name of a pipe, how, at her age, can I procure this for her?”

These are, however, child’s play in comparison with what befell one of my cousins, when shopping in Geneva with an aunt, a tall and impressive aunt, godly, serious, middle-aged, the Church of Ireland, as it were, embodied, appropriately, in a black Geneva gown. My aunt desired a pillow to supplement the agrÉmens of her hotel; one imagines that the equivalents for mattress and for pillow must have, in one red ruin, blended themselves in her mind. “Oreiller,” “sommier,” something akin to these formulated itself in her brain and sprang to her lips, and she said,

“Donnez moi un sommelier, s’il vous plait.”

“M’dame?” replied the shopman, in a single, curt, slightly bewildered syllable.

“Un sommelier,” repeated the embodiment of the Irish Church, distinctly, “Je dors toujours avec deux sommeliers——”

Here my cousin intervened.