Mrs. Rodolph Stawell

SUMMARY OF RUN THROUGH SOUTH-DEVON

Distances.

Exeter
Newton Abbot	16	miles
Torquay	7	”
Totnes	9	”
Dartmouth, vi Brixham	16	”
Kingsbridge	15	”
Salcombe and back	13	”
Plymouth	20	”
Total	96	miles

Roads.

Hills steep and frequent.

Surface poor, except from Kingsbridge to the outskirts of Plymouth.

III
THE SOUTH COAST OF DEVON

If our object in choosing to cross Devon by the coast road were simply to cling to the shore as closely as possible we should, of course, drive to Torquay by way of Dawlish and Teignmouth. But in that case we should miss the beautiful views of Exeter and the Moor from the slopes of Great Haldon, and the gorse and pines on the summit of Telegraph Hill, which most of us will think more desirable things than the beaches and lodging-houses of popular watering-places. It is true that no esplanade nor row of bathing-boxes can altogether spoil a Devon sea. It is also true that the last words of Endymion were written at Teignmouth; but as Keats, being unfortunate in the matter of weather, disliked the place very heartily, we shall be following in his footsteps most truly if we are faithful to “Nature’s holy face.” Her face is very beautiful on the summit of Great Haldon.

We glide easily down the wooded slopes, with the wild outline of Dartmoor against the sky before us and the green valley of the Teign below us, and after an almost continuous descent of seven miles run into the uninspiring streets of Newton Abbot. Let us pause for a few minutes in Wolborough Street, and picture the scene that brought this little town for a moment into English history: the throng of troops; the crowding onlookers, half curious, half afraid; in the midst of them the keen face of the foreigner who had come to be their king; the prince’s chaplain, here where the stone is set, proclaiming William III.; and over all the pouring, drenching rain. At the outskirts of the town we may see the house that sheltered William from the weather that night, and has at various times sheltered many incongruous guests of note—Charles I. and “Steenie,” Oliver Cromwell and Fairfax. William was at Ford House without a host, or the Courtenay who owned it at that time doomed it wiser to be absent; but when Charles I. was there Sir Richard Reynell’s hospitality was such that a hundred turkeys figured in a single menu.

Only five or six miles of a comparatively level road lie between Newton Abbot and Torquay. The valley through which we drive bears a familiar name, for it is in this Vale of Aller that the well-known pottery is not only made, but designed, in vast quantities. I think it must have been along this road that part, at least, of William’s wet and motley army marched through the mud from Brixham. As for the prince himself, his course must have been truly erratic if he slept at all the places in this neighbourhood that claim to have sheltered him.

Torquay is one of those rare watering-places that upset all one’s prejudices. Its houses are many and modern, its streets are populous; but the harbour under the hill is so snug, the sea so blue and bright, the boats so gay, the buildings so softly framed in trees and flowers, that the most churlish heart must be won. And near at hand the little sheltered coves, and wild paths above the cliffs, and woods almost dipping into the sea are quite as peaceful as though there were no crowded little harbour on the other side of the hill. This harbour was not here, nor any town at all, when the Spanish Armada, as Kingsley says, “ventured slowly past Berry Head, with Elizabeth’s gallant pack of Devon captains following fast in its wake.” Only a few fishermen’s cottages were on the shore, and the empty walls of William Bruere’s abbey, and below the abbey “a peere and socour for fisshar bootes.” Indeed, even when the Bellerophon and the Northumberland rode on the blue waters of this bay together, and Napoleon sailed away to St. Helena, there were more trees here than houses.

To-day there are so many houses on this shore that there is hardly a gap between Torquay and Paignton. There is nothing to keep us in Paignton, for though it has an old church, and a tower that is called the Bible Tower out of compliment to Miles Coverdale, it has none of the charm of Torquay. Only a few miles away, however, is a place of very definite charm. There is a better way than this, certainly, of seeing Totnes, but this hilly and not always very good road has the advantage of passing near the castle of Berry Pomeroy, one of the few ruins in Devonshire.

The peculiar spell of Berry Pomeroy lies, not in splendour of masonry nor grandeur of outline, but in the silence and romance of the deep woods in which the castle rock is closely wrapped. From the old church where Pomeroys and Seymours lie in their graves we run down noiselessly through the green shadows into a strange and dusky world of legend and far-off history. Through the towered gateway that fronts us generations of Pomeroys have ridden forth to defend or flout their various kings; and many a Seymour, coming homeward by this path, has lifted his proud eyes to the house his fathers built within the Norman wall. For when the last Pomeroy had “consumed his estate and decayed his howse,” he sold it to the Protector Somerset; and the Seymours who came after him raised the dwelling that is now a shell and was never altogether finished, though very magnificent, according to John Prince, with curiously carved freestone, and stately pillars of great dimensions, and statues of alabaster, and rooms “well adorned with mouldings,” and a “chimney-piece of polished marble, curiously engraven, of great cost and value.” These splendid Seymours were descended from the Protector’s eldest son. “I believe,” said William III. to the last of them, “you are of the Duke of Somerset’s family.” Sir Edward bowed. “The Duke of Somerset, sir,” he said, “is of my family.”

It was to this very gate, I believe, after Henry de Pomeroy had taken up arms for Prince John, that Coeur-de-Lion’s sergeant-at-arms came on his sinister errand. Out of the gate, however, he never rode. He “received kind entertaynment for certaine days together,” says the historian, “and at his departure was gratified with a liberal reward; in counterchange whereof he then, and no sooner, revealing his long-concealed errand, flatly arrested his hoaste … which unexpected and ill-carryed message the gent took in such despite as with his dagger he stabbed the messenger to the heart.” One cannot honestly regret it.

This is the kind of place where legend grows round history as naturally and quickly as the ivy grows over the stones. The walls themselves, it is easy to see, were raised by a magician; for the castle, seen from one side, is standing high upon a rock, while from the other it seems to be deep in a wooded valley. This is plainly due to a spell, and prepares the mind for tales of imprisoned ladies, and of wild horsemen leaping desperately into the chasm when they could no longer defend their castle from an angry king. It is only on emerging from the dim and haunted wood that one remembers regretfully how the last of the Pomeroys “decayed his howse”—so far was he from defending it—and sold it quite peacefully to the Duke of Somerset.

There was no very exciting rivalry, I suppose, between the castle of Berry, even at its best, and the castle that stands only about two miles away on the “high rokky hille” of Totnes; for the stronghold of Judhael de Totnais and William de Braose, of Zouches and Edgecumbes, was the citadel of a walled town. If we climb the rocky hill in question—through the old east gate of the town, and past the fifteenth-century church and the hidden guildhall that was once a priory—we may see for ourselves how proudly the tower of Totnes once dominated the valley of the Dart. There is only a fragment of the keep standing now, and even in Henry VIII.’s time “the logginges of the castelle” were “clene in ruine.” The story of their decline and fall seems to be unknown, but I think the place must have been treated with some indifference by the Edgecumbes, who were, unless I am mistaken, rebuilding their beautiful house at Cothele when Totnes Castle came to them. If this were the case we could forgive them, and indeed be grateful for their absorption in the lovely treasure-house above the Tamar.

The various signs of age that make these steep streets so attractive must not make us forget that the antiquity claimed by Totnes is a far more venerable affair than any such thing of yesterday as a Norman castle. It was on a certain stone in Fore Street that Brutus of Troy, father of all Britons, first set his adventurous foot when he discovered this island. So at least says Geoffrey of Monmouth in his brave, imperturbable way. Brutus, we must suppose, sailed up the Dart; or perhaps at that early date Totnes was on the coast. In any case it was the charms of these woods and waters that attracted the voyagers to land in the new island, and “made Brutus and his companions very desirous to fix their habitation in it.” That is easily understood.

We too shall do well to come to Totnes by water. It is the best way, and can be done by steamer from Dartmouth. As this, however, probably means the neglect of Berry Pomeroy, which is far more serious than the missing of Brixham, I advise every motorist whose car can travel without him to drive from Paignton to Totnes, and to send the car by road to Dartmouth while he himself goes thither by water. For the banks of the winding Dart are, in their gentle way, incomparable, with their soft woods hanging over the stream, and their cornfields streaked with scarlet, and the little creeks where thatched cottages are clustered on the shore and white-sailed boats flutter beside the tiny quay. And among the trees of the left bank are Sandridge, the birthplace of John Davis, and Greenway, the home of the Gilberts, where Sir Humphrey lived before his widowed mother married Raleigh.

In the meantime those who drive their own cars must return to Paignton by road, and follow the railway to Brixham past Goodrington sands, where Charles Kingsley loved to spend the summer days searching for the orange-mouthed Actinia and dreaming of the Spanish Armada. There is not a spot upon this Devon coast but is the stuff that dreams are made of! Dreams of gallantry and war, of conquest and deliverance and wide adventure haunt us hour by hour as we pass from haven to haven, from Torquay to Brixham, and from Brixham to Dartmouth, and from Dartmouth to the climax of Plymouth Sound; with the great names of Drake and Gilbert and Hawkins, of Raleigh and Grenville ringing in our hearts as we spin across the soil that bred them, and, shining below us, the green sea that carried them to their renown.

The sea was not green, but grey and misty, on the day that “the Protestant wind” blew William the Deliverer into Torbay. The fleet, says a letter written “on the first day of this instant December, 1688,” had met with “horrid storms,” but “was not so damnified as was represented by the vulgar.” It was here, in this harbour of Brixham—now hemmed in by busy quays, and crowded with trawlers whose flaming sails might well be meant to commemorate Orange William—it was here where the statue stands that the prince first stepped ashore. On his flag, as on the statue, was the motto of his family: I will maintain. The statue is not flattering—or so, at least, we hope—but its presence, with its calm promise of liberty, is not without dignity amid all the bustle of the fishing-fleet. The scene was busy enough that day, when William stood here with Burnet, and the guns roared, and the drums and hautboys made music, and from every headland and housetop the people shouted their welcome; and, as the fog lifted, the fleet, lying out there beyond the breakwater, which was then unbuilt, “was a sight would have ravished the most curious eyes of Europe.”

William, and gradually all his regiments of horse and foot, climbed these narrow streets to the top of the hill. Though we take another road than theirs we by no means escape the climbing. Two slow miles, on gradients varying from one in twelve to one in ten, lead us to the point where we immediately begin to descend, on a rough steep road of sharp turns, which runs down to the shore of Dartmouth Harbour and the slip of Kingswear Ferry.

These are classic waters that lap upon the clumsy sides of the ferry-boat. We move slowly, and that is well, for there is much to see: much beauty of wooded headlands, of old streets drawing nearer, of boats and ships upon a blue-green sea. To the left are the two points that shelter the harbour, and on each its ruined tower, the guardians that did their work so long and well, and perished in the doing of it: to the right the river winds away into the land and the old Britannia lies at rest, and the great buildings of the Naval College crown the hill. It was from this harbour, more than three hundred years ago, that the Sunshine and Moonshine sailed away to the North West Passage with John Davis and his “company of goodlie seamen, not easily turned from any good purpose;” and it was between those two green headlands that Francie Drake came home from “singeing the King of Spain’s beard” at Cadiz, with the San Philip and all her spoils behind him. Historic fleets have ridden at anchor in the shelter of these hills: ships for Coeur-de-Lion’s crusade; and for Edward III.’s siege of Calais no fewer than thirty-one, all furnished by Dartmouth; and on one grim occasion, at least, an unwelcome fleet from France, which left the town a ruin. Many years later another French ship came sailing in unsuspiciously with letters from the Queen, a few days after Dartmouth Castle had surrendered to Fairfax. The captain, when he heard the news, flung the precious packet into the sea; “but God provided a Wave,” says the historian, “to bring it to the Boat that went out to seek it, and so it was brought unto His Excellency.”

BUTTERWALK, DARTMOUTH.

Round the quays on the Dartmouth side of the harbour the queer old houses are huddled into streets that climb and twist and turn in bewildering irregularity. Crooked gables and overhanging eaves nod at one another across the way: the carved beams and corbels of the wider streets rouse memories of departed merchant princes: rows of young trees are planted by the waterside: and always, behind the trees, behind the gables, is a glimpse of the turquoise sea. Everywhere are signs of the splendid past: in the fourteenth-century church, with its magnificent screen and pulpit, and the tomb of John Hawley, “a riche marchant and noble warrior again the French men”: in the houses of the Butterwalk, with their heraldic beasts and granite pillars and mullioned windows, their moulded ceilings and carved chimney-pieces. It is worth while to climb a rickety staircase, if only for the sake of hearing the Merry Monarch numbered among the saints.

A narrow shady lane near the shore of the harbour leads to the castle and the old church of St. Petrock. The oldest part of the fort, the round tower whence the chain passed across the mouth of the harbour to Kingswear Castle, is said to date from the time of Henry VII. There must have been some kind of fort here earlier than that, I suppose, for when the lively men of Fowey forfeited their chain of defence, we are told, Edward IV. presented it to Dartmouth. This castle changed hands twice during the Civil War. Prince Maurice took it and strengthened it, but could not save it from Fairfax. “Being Master of all but the Castle,” wrote the general, “I summoned that. The Governour was willing to listen unto me.… I can say I find it to be in the hearts of all here, in all integrity to serve you.”

The road from Dartmouth to Slapton Sands is almost entirely composed of astonishing hills. Only in Devon could hills so many and so fierce be compressed within so small a space. But only in Devon, surely, is the coast at the same time so wild and so luxuriant, so stern and yet so tender; only in Devon can we look down from the clifftop through so soft a veil of trees, and see far below us sands so yellow and rocks so red, and the ripples of so very, very green a sea. This road that rises steeply out of Dartmouth is characteristically deep in the shade of rocky banks, and walls built of thin mossy stones. Long hart’s-tongues hang in clusters by the wayside, and every cranny of the walls is filled with tiny ferns. Having climbed to Stoke Fleming by a variety of steep gradients we promptly descend, by two miles of gradients nearly as steep, to the idyllic cove of Blackpool, whose golden sands once flowed with the blood of four hundred Frenchmen. They, and many more, had landed here; but the men of Dartmouth, who had not forgotten the sacking of their town, came swarming down these cliffs upon them, so that the survivors were glad to put to sea again. Another steep climb takes us up to Strete, and another steep descent to Slapton Sands.

Here is a dramatically sudden contrast! From the very foot of the hill the road runs, for two miles and more, over what is probably the most level strip of land in Devon. It is no more than a strip. Close beside it on the left runs the long strip of the sands, and close beside it on the right an equally long strip of water, the reedy mere called Slapton Ley. “There is but a barre of sand,” says Leland, “betwixt the se and this poole. The waite of the fresch water and rage of the se brekith sumtime this sandy bank.” It is along this bar of sand and shingle that our road runs. If we turn away from it for a few minutes, on the by-road that crosses the pool near the hotel, we shall see Slapton itself.

The village has no very striking beauty; but its steep little streets, its thatch and whitewash and flowers, its air of remoteness, its maidens with their pretty blue pinners and prettier faces, make it a very attractive place. Nor is it without distinction. Not only is it dignified by a thirteenth-century spire of extreme austerity, but it also has the remains of a collegiate chantry. The chapel tower, with its graceful arch and fragment of groining, rises alone among the flowers of a lovely garden, where wild olive and camphor grow as serenely as the Devon apples that hang above them. It is a private garden, but as it skirts the road we may drive almost into the shadow of the tower. For several centuries, from the days of Henry II. to those of Henry IV., this generous soil belonged to a Guy de Brian. It was Joan Pole, the wife of the Guy de Brian of Henry III.’s time, who founded Pole Priory upon this spot: we have it on the word of a Pole. The later Brian who made it a college was one of the original Knights of the Garter, and a very versatile person, being Edward III.’s standard-bearer in “that notable fight he had with the French at Calais,” as well as an ambassador and an admiral-of-the-fleet. In the reign of Henry IV. this manor of Slapton became the property of Harry Hotspur’s crafty father; but to many of us the most stirring memory in this place is that of Sir Richard Hawkins, the third great sailor of his name. He bought Pole Priory—now corrupted into Poole—before he set sail on that adventurous voyage that lasted so much longer than he expected. During the ten years of his absence, years of imprisonment in the South Seas and elsewhere, this was the home of his “dearest friend, his second self,” Judith, Lady Hawkins. For some reason—whether to impress the neighbours or because she suffered from rheumatism I do not know—this lady was in the habit of walking to church on three quarters of a mile of red velvet carpet. Possibly life was not very gay at Slapton at the end of the sixteenth century, and this mild ceremonial may have been a comfort to her. The time came when she sought another kind of consolation in her loneliness. The story goes[4] that when Sir Richard came home at last to Slapton he found a strange air of festivity astir in these precipitous streets. The red carpet was laid, we may be sure, from Pole Priory to the church, for when he asked what matter was afoot he found it was his Judith’s wedding-day. It was fortunate he came in time, for one cannot quite see Richard Hawkins in the part of Enoch Arden.

The main road to Kingsbridge pursues its level way between salt water and fresh till it reaches Torcross, a most desolate-looking village with a reputation for fishing. Here, sad to say, we must turn inland. The scenery between this point and Kingsbridge is no great matter, but there are some pretty villages, and Stokenham Church has a good screen. The road is fair, and the hills less formidable than usual.

There is no means of seeing, as a whole, this beautiful coast between Torcross and Plymouth, except on foot or from the sea; but most happily it is possible for motorists of inquisitive habits to find their way, here and there, to various little havens of the greatest charm. These, however, are all beyond Kingsbridge. Kingsbridge itself is a place of no particular attraction nor interest. It has a few picturesque corners and old houses, but its real claim on our affections is that the only way to Salcombe lies through it. Now a road that leads to Salcombe is something to be grateful for.

To those who do not know Salcombe, the six miles that lie between it and Kingsbridge may be a little depressing. The road leads to no other place, and is preposterously hilly: the country is treeless and discouraging. To the uninitiated it may well seem, as they drive between the imprisoning hedges, that no compensation is likely to be forthcoming. But some of us know better. We reach the edge of the hill, and suddenly the sea, brilliant and soft—a sea of liquid jewels—is shining below us, lapping upon the sands of the little creeks; wooded slopes drop steeply to the rocks that fringe the shore; red and white sails flit about the harbour, dapper yachts lie at anchor in the shelter of the hill, wave-worn barges move heavily towards the land; Salcombe lies at our feet, clinging to the hillside, a tiny town of steep streets and shipwrights’ yards and little quays; and Bolt Head stretches out a long arm to protect it.

There was an evening, not very many years ago, when at the hour of twilight a yacht put out to sea over the bar of Salcombe Harbour, while the sound of the evening bell came clearly across the water. Up the estuary the lights were beginning to shine out one by one through the dusk, and in the dark shadow of the headland the full tide silently “turned again home.” Lord Tennyson, who was on board the Sunbeam that night, has made Salcombe Bar dear to many who have never crossed it. He had been staying at the pretty house that stands on its own little promontory, hidden by trees, between the town and the bar. Here for some years lived Froude the historian among the orange-trees and tamarisks, and it was here he died.

This peaceful anchorage was very useful to pirates in the good old days. They hid safely behind Bolt Head and, when any unwary ship passed by, dashed out and plundered her. Henry VIII., though not above piracy himself, built a little castle for their undoing, upon a small precarious rock nearly circled by the sea. Here are its fragments still. Sir Edmund Fortescue strengthened it and called it Fort Charles, and held it very valiantly for Charles I.: so valiantly that it withstood Fairfax, and when it surrendered at last Fortescue was allowed to take the key with him.

To nearly every motorist, as he sits beside his tea-cup on the terrace of the Marine Hotel, or leans against the wall that keeps the sea out of the garden, it will occur at once that this harbour is an ideal place for motor-boating. This is truer than he knows. For these waters that ripple round the garden-walls of Salcombe pass on their way inland in various directions: up South Pool Creek to the thatched farmstead that has its feet nearly in the water at high tide; past Goodshelter to the old mill at Waterhead, and to Kingsbridge four miles away. And beyond the bar are all the little coves and bays of a lovely coast: Hope, where the high rocks entrap the sunshine and keep out the winds: Thurlestone, whose worldly ambitions are greater and whose charms are less: Bantham, between a curve of the Avon estuary and the sea, where the breezes are sweet with the scent of gorse, and worldly ambition seems altogether dormant. Even without a motor-boat we may see these little bays, each at the end of its own little lane; but only such motorists as are staying close at hand will care to explore lanes so narrow and winding and steep.

On our way back to Kingsbridge, however, to take the road to Plymouth, we shall see a narrow turn to the left, near West Alvington, which is a perfectly practicable means of cutting off a mile or two of dull country and avoiding a bad hill in Kingsbridge. As a whole the main road from this point to Plymouth is one of the best in South Devon, though there is a long and very steep descent at Aveton Giffard that is not marked on Bartholomew’s map, and a sharp rise in Modbury that is considerably steeper than the contour-book estimates. There is no very striking beauty of a large sort, but a great deal of the restful, wayside charm that makes Devonshire so comforting. There is no need to loiter on the road, for though it played its part in the Civil War—and indeed possibly on that account—there are few relics of its history to be seen. The bridge that crosses the sedges of the Avon at Aveton Giffard was once important enough to have a fort built on the hill for its defence; but none the less it was taken by the extremely irregular troops whose clubs and pickaxes and saws were wielded here for the Parliament. Champernowne of Modbury was one of the builders of the fort, and one of the greatest sufferers from the “clubmen,” for his house, which stood on the top of Modbury Hill, was fortified and occupied by the royalists. “This Party of ours w?? was at Modbury,” wrote Sir Bevill Grenville to his wife, “indur’d a cruell assault for 12 howers against many thousand men.” One result of this cruel assault, which could have but one end, is that only a very small fragment of Court House is still standing.

We go on our way through Yealmpton and Brixton, on a surface that gradually becomes very rough, and cross the toll-bridge into Plymouth.

This is a name that stirs the blood of every true child of Britain. In the days of Elizabeth’s great sailors it was from Plymouth that Britannia ruled the waves. And to-day there is no end to the interest that this place holds for those who love the navy and the sea as is the wont of Englishmen; no end to the modern interests of port and harbour, of dockyard and battleship, nor to the crowding memories on Plymouth Hoe.

Here on the Hoe, with Drake’s statue beside us, and his island below us, and behind it those fair woods of Mount Edgecumbe on which Medina Sidonia cast a covetous eye, we are looking down at the channel through which all the gallant adventurers of the sixteenth century sailed out to their distant goals. This statue is the symbol of them.[5] “He was of stature low,” says John Prince of Francis Drake, “but set and strong grown; a very religious man towards God and his houses, generally sparing churches wherever he came; chaste in his life, just in his dealings, true of his word, merciful to those that were under him, and hating nothing so much as idleness.” The words fit the statue well. It was here where we are standing that he and the other captains played their memorable game of bowls, while the Armada called Invincible swept nearer and nearer. His ship and her half-fed crew lay down there in the Sound, under the lee of the island that has borne his name ever since that day, and the flagship, further out, “danced lustily as the gallantest dancer at Court.” Through that channel he and the rest sailed out into the gale when their game was done, to do their thorough work. Many times he had sailed through it already on various quests of war and adventure—and, it must be owned, of pillage: and it was from this harbour, afterwards, that he went on the voyage that “was marred before it was begun, so great preparations being too big for a cover,” the voyage to Nombre de Dios Bay, where he lies “dreaming all the time of Plymouth Hoe.”

Very long and very stirring is the visionary pageant that rises before us here: the Black Prince, triumphant, sailing in with his prisoner, the King of France; poor Katherine of Aragon, landing here in an outburst of welcome; John Hawkins, setting forth on those dubious but gallant undertakings that the Queen called “private enterprise” and Hawkins called “the Queen’s business.” His son Sir Richard long remembered a scene that took place when he was a boy, under that green hill that faces us. A fleet of Spaniards, bound for Flanders to fetch a new bride for Philip II., dared to sail between the island and the mainland “without vayling their top-sayles, or taking in of their flags; which my father Sir John Hawkins perceiving, commanded his gunner to shoot at the flag of the admiral, that they might thereby see their error.” They saw it quickly, and the matter ended with feasting.

Sir Richard’s own ship, too, takes part in the ghostly pageant, sailing close to the land to bid goodbye, for many more years than he suspected, to the throng that stood here on the Hoe to do him honour. Amid blowing of trumpets, and music of bands, and roaring of guns he left the harbour, with his thoughts full of the lady who took pleasure in red carpets. And it was there, below us, that the brave heart of Blake gave its last throb as he entered English waters—the heart that is buried, they say, in St. Andrew’s Church.

The long procession of adventurous ships winds endlessly on, past the island, and out of the harbour, and away into the world of the past. The ships of Frobisher and Gilbert, of Grenville and of Raleigh are there, and the Mayflower with the Pilgrim Fathers, and the ship of Captain Cook. And at the last I see a little ship sail in alone, and on her deck a disappointed, disillusioned woman; the woman whom the French have never forgiven because, when they broke her heart, she omitted to repay them with smiles—the daughter of Marie Antoinette. The Duchesse d’AngoulÊme came hither from Bordeaux, in exile for the second, but not for the last time, with the marshals’ vows of fidelity and the news of their joining Napoleon still ringing in her ears together.