Disraeli: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

was particularly upset by the review in Blackwood’s, and in a later novel he described his feelings upon reading it: ‘With what horror, with what blank despair, with what supreme appalling astonishment did I find myself for the first time in my life the subject of the most reckless, the most malignant and the most adroit ridicule…The criticism fell from my hand…I felt that sickness of heart that we experience in our first scrape. I was ridiculous. It was time to die.’²¹

      In the face of such attacks as that in Blackwood’s, Disraeli fell ill. ‘What is the matter?’, Sara Austen, who was by now half in love with him, wrote anxiously. ‘My shaking hand will tell you that I am nervous with the shock of your illness…For God’s sake take care of yourself. I dare not say for my sake do so…If without risk you can come out tomorrow, let me see you at twelve or at any hour which will suit you better. I shall not leave the house till I see you. I shall be miserably anxious till I do. My spirits are gone till you bring a renewal of them.’²² When his doctor advised him against going out, Mrs Austen suggested that he went abroad for a time with her husband and herself.

      Affecting to make light of the attacks on him and his book, Disraeli wrote to Austen’s husband facetiously suggesting that, although he had left his last place ‘on account of the disappearance of the silver spoons’, he defied anyone to declare that he was not sober and honest, except when entrusted with the key of the wine cellar, when he had candidly to confess that he had ‘an ugly habit of stealing the Claret, getting drunk and kissing the maids’.²³

      Despite the frivolous tone of this letter, Disraeli was deeply upset by the attacks to which he was subjected, not so much those upon his book as those upon him personally. He affected to be little concerned now or later about these attacks and allowed a new edition of the book, edited by his sister, to appear in 1853, maintaining most improbably that the characters in it were not drawn from life. Yet in the summer of 1826 he fell into an even deeper depression. He spent much of each day in his bedroom in Bloomsbury Square with the blinds drawn. On the verge of a nervous breakdown such as his father had once suffered, he welcomed the Austens’ suggestion that they travel abroad together.

       3 A CONTINENTAL HOLIDAY

      ‘I feel now that it is not prejudice when I declare that England with all her imperfections is worth all the world together.’

      

      HAVING READILY ACCEPTED the Austens’ suggestion of a Continental holiday, Disraeli was equally ready to borrow the money to pay for it and, having made arrangements to do so, he wrote the first of his reports describing his journey to his father on 9 August:

      My dear Father, We reached Paris Sunday afternoon and are now in the Rue de Rivoli, the best situation here…Paris is delightful. I never was so much struck with anything in the whole course of my life…I expected another London but there are no points of resemblance. I did not expect in so short a distance to have met such a contrariety of manners and life…^* I am going to the Louvre this morning and to the Opera this evening…I have not kept my journal, but of course shall…God bless you.

      Yours most affectionately,

      B. Disraeli.¹

      A fortnight or so later, on 21 August from Geneva, he wrote again, assuring his father that the ‘unparalleled heat of the season’ did not affect him in the least, and that he had not had ‘a day’s nor an hour’s illness’ since he had left England: he felt ‘ten thousand times better’ than he had done for the past three years. He would, no doubt, have enjoyed the trip more had Austen been a more entertaining companion and had not Sara been so coyly flirtatious, so ready to speak French even more quickly than she did English, and had she not kept so critical an eye on the amount of Burgundy he drank while affecting to be amused by it.²

      From Geneva, Disraeli wrote again to his father:

      I take a row now every night with Maurice, Lord Byron’s celebrated boatman [who] is very handsome and very vain, but has been made so by the English, of whom he is a regular pet…He talks of nothing but Lord Byron…He told me that in the night of the famous storm described in the third Canto of C[hilde] H[arold], had they been out five minutes more the boat must have been wrecked. He told Lord Byron of the danger of such a night voyage, and the only answer which B. made was stripping quite naked and folding round him a great robe de chambre so that in case of wreck he was ready prepared to swim immediately…

      One day Byron sent for him and, sitting down in the boat, he put a pistol on each side (which was his invariable practice) and then gave him 300 napoleons, ordering him to row to Chillon. He then had two torches lighted in the dungeon and wrote for two hours and a half. On coming out, the gendarme who guarded the castle humbly asked for quelque-chose à boire. ‘Give him a napoleon,’ said his Lordship. ‘De trop, milor,’ said Maurice, who being but recently installed in his stewardship was somewhat mindful of his master’s interest. ‘Do you know who I am?’ rejoined the master, ‘Give it to him and tell him that the donor is Lord Byron!’ This wonderful piece of information must have produced a great effect on the poor miserable tippling gendarme. But in the slightest thing was Byron, by Maurice’s account, most ludicrously ostentatious. He gave him one day five napoleons for a swimming race across the lake. At the sight of the club foot Maurice thought he was sure to win, but his Lordship gained by five minutes.

      Byron, he says, was not a quick swimmer, but he was never exhausted, by which means he generally won when the distance was great. One morning Maurice called for him very early to swim. Byron brought to the boat his breakfast, consisting of cold duck, &c., and three or four bottles of wine, and then amused himself, while they were sailing to the appointed place, by throwing the provisions gradually into the water. Upon this, honest Maurice gently hinted that he had not himself breakfasted, and that he should swim much better if he had some portion of his Lordship’s superfluity. ‘Friend Maurice,’ said B., ‘it ill becomes true Christians to think of themselves; I shall give you none. You see I eat no breakfast myself; do you refrain also for the sake of the fishes.’ He then continued his donations to the pikes (which here are beautiful) and would not bestow a single crumb on his companion. ‘This is all very well,’ says Maurice, ‘but his Lordship forgot one little circumstance. He had no appetite; I had.’ He says that he never saw a man eat so little as B. in all his life, but that he would drink three or four bottles of the richest wines for his breakfast.³

      According to Sara Austen, Disraeli also refused to stint himself with wine. ‘He seems to enjoy everything,’ she told his sister, ‘and has just said High Mass for a third bottle of Burgundy.’⁴

      ‘Mrs A[usten] is very well,’ Disraeli reported in turn to his father. ‘I hope to God my mother is better. Love to all.’

      A fortnight or so later, Disraeli gave a further report to his father from Milan, describing the ‘painfully sublime’ scenery of the Alps which had also deeply impressed so many travellers from the north in the earlier days of the Grand Tour when one such tourist ‘started with affright’ as he obtained the first glimpse of their ‘awful and tremendous amphitheatre’.

      ‘We gazed till our eyes ached, and yet dared not withdraw them from the passing wonders,’ Disraeli told his father, having driven across the Simplon Pass which had been created on Napoleon’s orders some twenty-five years before. ‘Nothing could be more awful than the first part of our passage; the sublimity of the scenery was increased by the partial mists and the gusts of rain. Nothing is more terrific than the near roar of a cataract which is covered