Henriette Gabrielli

Extract

‘Le chacal, monté sur un piédestal vide, allonge son museau de loup derrière le buste d’un Pan à tête de bélier; la gazelle, l’autruche, l’ibis, la gerboise, sautent parmi les décombres, tandis que la poule sultane se tient immobile sur quelque débris, comme un oiseau hiéroglyphique de granit et de porphyre.’

We search in vain Brunetière’s History of Classical French Literature for a chapter on St. Simon; George Saintsbury deliberately omits Les liaisons dangereuses from his French Novel. Brunetiére and Saints-bury give their reasons, good or plausible; but who can tell us why Madame Gabrielli in hitherto published memoirs shares the fate of the due de St. Simon and Choderlos de Laclos?

She may haunt the manuscript pages that will delight and amaze the first quarter of the twenty-first century, if there are still readers to be delighted and amazed in those scarce imaginable years : in white, always, white boots, white gloves. She will trip or stumble, high-heeled, short-sighted, with her white silk bag containing sometimes diminutive white shoes (in rainy weather), with her wig frankly like a night cap. ‘In my youth they called me the lily,’ she declared at some dinner table, and the foreign butler tittered. When reproved the following day, he defended himself :’ Yes, I know, Miladi, mais le nez.’

Her hair was never white. In my time it was the colour of fuller’s earth. I saw her first at Mrs. Singleton’s. I thought her copper-coloured : but it must have been, a lighting effect.