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Music and Identity in Postcolonial
British South-Asian Literature

This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial

literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial iden-
tity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India,
Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Amit
Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi’s
The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie’s
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M.
Forster’s A Passage to India and Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music. The ana-
lyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-
classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock
‘n’ roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artifact and as a purely aestheticized
art form at the same time. As a cultural artifact, music derives meaning
from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of refer-
ence to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aes-
thetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transgressive qualities
of music render it capable of expressing identities irrespective of origin and
politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive
space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to
express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyze
the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contempo-
rary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globaliza-
tion versus cultural imperialism. It will be a useful research and teaching
tool for those interested in postcolonial literature, music studies, cultural
studies, contemporary literature and South-Asian literature.

Christin Hoene is Assistant Lecturer of English Literature at Humboldt

University Berlin, Germany and University of Potsdam, Germany.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

1 Environmental Criticism for the 9 Wallace Stevens and

Twenty-First Century Pre-Socratic Philosophy
Edited by Stephanie LeMenager, Metaphysics and the Play
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2 Theoretical Perspectives on
Human Rights and Literature 10 Modern Orthodoxies
Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Judaic Imaginative Journeys
Alexandra Schultheis Moore of the Twentieth Century
Lisa Mulman
3 Resistance to Science in
Contemporary American Poetry 11 Eugenics, Literature, and
Bryan Walpert Culture in Post-war Britain
Clare Hanson
4 Magic, Science, and Empire in
Postcolonial Literature 12 Postcolonial Readings of Music
The Alchemical Literary in World Literature
Imagination Turning Empire on Its Ear
Kathleen J. Renk Cameron Fae Bushnell

5 The Black Female Body in 13 Stanley Cavell, Literature,

American Literature and Art and Film
Performing Identity The Idea of America
Caroline A. Brown Edited by Andrew Taylor and
Áine Kelly
6 Narratives of Migration and
Displacement in Dominican 14 William Blake and the Digital
Literature Humanities
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and Social Media
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Literary Modernism Roger Whitson
Andrew Shail
15 American Studies, Ecocriticism,
8 The Gothic in Contemporary and Citizenship
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Pop Goth and Global Commons
Edited by Justin D. Edwards and Edited by Joni Adamson and
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet Kimberly N. Ruffin
16 International Perspectives on 26 Trauma in Contemporary
Feminist Ecocriticism Literature
Edited by Greta Gaard, Simon C. Narrative and Representation
Estok, and Serpil Oppermann Edited by Marita Nadal and
Mónica Calvo
17 Feminist Theory across Disciplines
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Shira Wolosky Edited by Susana Onega and
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18 Mobile Narratives
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Edited by Eleftheria Arapoglou, Witnessing
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the End of the World
21 The Unnameable Monster in Edited by Monica Germanà and
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Maria Beville
31 Rethinking Empathy through
22 Cognition, Literature and History Literature
Edited by Mark J. Bruhn and Edited by Meghan Marie
Donald R. Wehrs Hammond and Sue J. Kim

23 Community and Culture in 32 Music and Identity in Postcolonial

Post-Soviet Cuba British South-Asian Literature
Guillermina De Ferrari Christin Hoene

24 Class and the Making of

American Literature
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Edited by Andrew Lawson

25 Narrative Space and Time

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This page intentionally left blank
Music and Identity in
Postcolonial British
South-Asian Literature

Christin Hoene

NEW YORK LONDON

First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
The right of Christin Hoene to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoene, Christin.
Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature /
Christin Hoene.
pages cm. — (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature ; 32)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. South Asian fiction (English)—History and criticism. 2. Music
in literature. 3. Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.
4. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title.
PR9570.S64H64 2015
820.9'954—dc23
2014008840

ISBN13: 978-1-138-77736-1 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-1-315-77268-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Notes on Music in Postcolonial Literature 1

1 Singing the Nation 15

2 (Dis)locating Identity 51

3 Performing ‘Englishness’ 85

4 Music, Magical Realism, and Globalization 116

Conclusion: Sounding Together 148

Index 163
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

First and foremost, to Peter Dayan and Aaron Kelly my most heartfelt and
sincere gratitude. They have supported this project every step of the way
with their generous supply of time, advice, and intellectual stimulation. To
Michelle Keown and Stephen Benson, I am thankful for their astute advice
and sincere enthusiasm for the project. More thanks are due to Michelle
for her support in preparing the manuscript for publication. On this note,
a warm thank you to Emily Petermann, Ellen Grünkemeier, and Hans-
Jürgen Grabbe for their encouragement and help with the initial proposal.
Special thanks also go to Joshua Wells and Nancy Chen for their enthusi-
asm and support that made this book happen, and to Eleanor Chan for her
kind support. My most heartfelt thanks to Sarah Stefanski for her insights
into classics, the Orpheus myth, and the correct way of citing ancient Greek
texts in translation; and for the most thorough and informed proof-reading
that I could have wished for (the remaining mistakes remain mine).
This project would not have been possible without a scholarship granted
by the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft (Foundation of German Busi-
ness), for which I am very grateful. Moreover, travel grants from Edin-
burgh University’s School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures enabled
my participation at conferences, which significantly shaped the thoughts
and ideas expressed in this book. Parts of Chapter Two have been published
in revised, edited, and shortened form as “Sounding Through Time and
Space: Music in Postcolonial South-Asian Literature” in Time and Space
in Words and Music (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), edited by
Mario Dunkel, Emily Petermann, and Burkhard Sauerwald. I am grateful
to the editors and publisher for their permission to reproduce the material
here. Extracts from Suhayl Saadi’s novel Psychoraag are reproduced by
kind permission from Black & White Publishing and Suhayl Saadi. Extracts
from The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi
are reproduced by kind permission from Faber & Faber Ltd and Rog-
ers, Coleridge and White. Extracts from A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth,
copyright © Vikram Seth, 1993, are reproduced by kind permission from
David Godwin Associates, The Orion Publishing Group, and Vikram Seth.
Extracts from THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET by Salman Rushdie,
x Acknowledgments
published by Vintage, are reprinted by permission of The Random House
Group Limited, Henry Holt & Company, and The Wylie Agency. Also:
excerpted from The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie.
Copyright © 1999 Salman Rushdie. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin
Random House Company.
This book has grown out of the wonderfully fertile soil that is the
department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. To its staff
and students, to colleagues and friends, my gratitude for being the awfully
clever bunch of people that they are. Significant parts of this book took
shape during the postgraduate Works in Progress seminars, and I am par-
ticularly thankful for thoughts and suggestions on my project from Julia
Boll, Ally Crockford, Lena Wånggren, Fionnuala O’Neill, Charity McAdams,
Kieran Curran, Jana Funke, Stefanie Lehner, Karin Sellberg, Linda Tym,
all of whom I am glad to call friends as well as colleagues. Plenty of thanks
are due, too, to the department’s administrative and support staff, who are
always helpful and made my life as a postgraduate student and teaching
assistant so much easier.
To Lena and Julia thank you (again), for being the best office- and flat-
mates I could have wished for and for being very good friends, who accom-
panied me all through the Edinburgh years. To Heide Weishaar, thank
you for a Room with a View, a friendly face, and a warm heart whenever
I am in town. To Nina Engelhardt, a warm thank you for ideas shared
over countless cups of coffee, for her topical insights and discussions that
have sharpened my thinking and furthered my understanding, and for her
friendship. Thank you to my friends on both sides of the Channel and
the Pond, to my family, and particularly to my mum, Susanna Höne. As
always, she will deny her contribution, and as always, I know her support
to be invaluable. And to Dana Ferchland, with gratitude and love.
 Introduction
Notes on Music in Postcolonial Literature

Music [ . . . ] gives us a way of being in the world, a way of making

sense of it.
—Simon Frith, “Music and Identity” (114).

How could you not talk of identity when talking about music?
—Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (13).

As the opening quotes by Simon Frith and Josh Kun indicate, identity and
music are intimately linked, because music is a means to express identity
and to make sense of our ways “of being in the world” (Frith, “Music and
Identity” 114). Similarly, Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic writes about the
significance of music and identity formation in the context of slavery and
the black diaspora in the US: “music and its rituals can be used to create a
model whereby identity can be understood neither as a fi xed essence nor as
a vague and utterly contingent construction to be reinvented by the will and
whim of aesthetes, symbolists, and language gamers” (102). Three things
are important here: fi rst, Gilroy understands music within the context of
social formations (“music and its rituals”); second, he understands identity
as fluid and changeable (“[not] as a fi xed essence”), and considers music to
be capable of expressing this fluidity; and third, Gilroy stresses the emanci-
patory power of music to subvert the hierarchies involved in identity poli-
tics (“the will and whim of aesthetes, symbolists, and language gamers”).
Gilroy argues that in the context of slavery, music, as opposed to words,
always had the power to say the unsayable (38), and that music therefore
has the power to express an identity that is self-determined.1 Although
Gilroy’s focus is a very specific and historical one, his conclusions about
music’s significance for the formation of an identity that is fluid and a “self-
in-progress” (to borrow Frith’s term from his essay, “Music and Identity”
109 [italics in the original]), also hold in the postcolonial context of the
novels to be discussed. To understand music not as a fi xed product but as a
work in progress is to grasp its significance for the postcolonial condition,
which itself is commonly defi ned as hybrid, fluid, and perpetually changing
and transgressing fi xed constructs of identity.
The narrative that permeates this project is therefore a musical story of
postcolonial coming-of-age that examines the role that music plays in the
2 Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature
formation of the postcolonial state and the postcolonial subject. To inform
this study, I am looking at the use of music across six different novels, all of
which are concerned with the British South-Asian postcolonial condition:
Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag
(1993), Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag (2004), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of
Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995), and Salman Rushdie’s The
Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). Not all of these novels are primarily
about music (A Suitable Boy and The Buddha of Suburbia feature music
as part of cultural portraits of postcolonial India and Great Britain), but
all these texts include music in ways that are significant for the interpreta-
tion of postcolonial identities and cultures. Music is an intrinsic part of
the human condition, and it is particularly fruitful for the expression of
postcolonial identities, because it easily escapes constructs of meaning just
as the postcolonial condition defies meta-narratives of Western culture and
supremacy. This holds true for all the texts to be discussed, and it holds
true for all the different kinds of music featured in the texts. These range
from Western classical to Indian classical music, Bollywood tunes, Indian
folk tradition, Western pop, and rock ‘n’ roll as an originally Western art
form that has been appropriated all over the world.
Music is integrated into the texts on the levels of structure, narrative,
text, and as extra-textual references to historical composers and musicians
(dead and alive), bands, and musical pieces. Musical references are part
of the novels’ plots and contexts, they act as symbols and metaphors, and
they inform the characters’ identification with their cultural heritage and
surroundings (two aspects which do not necessarily coincide). Music’s cul-
tural roots inform the characters’ cultural as well as national identities at
home and abroad, which in this context means India, Pakistan, and their
postcolonial diasporas in the United Kingdom and the United States. Char-
acters that fi nd themselves in-between nations and cultures come to rely on
music’s ability to cross borders between nations, cultures, and languages.
Musical discourses in the six novels demonstrate that music can be seen as
part of a socio-cultural context of production, an act of political resistance
against cultural imperialism, or as an art that claims aesthetic truth and
transcendence. Examples to be discussed include Carl Dahlhaus’s The Idea
of Absolute Music, a treatise on Romantic musical aesthetics that consid-
ered music purely on aesthetic terms and divorced the art from any extra-
musical meaning. Another example is the use of the Orpheus myth, which
credits music with mythical roots and magical powers. Magical or not, the
powers of music portrayed in the novels allow the protagonists to negotiate
their identities across time and space, that is between past and present and
between here and there.
Both my methodology and subject matter are interdisciplinary, as I am
discussing the specificities and the meaning of one art form (music) within
another (literature). Music is contained within the text and transcends it at
the same time. In its original form as either sound or notation, music is not
 Introduction 3
there in the text, is not represented. The whole exercise of writing music
into literature is thereby an act of displacement and of transgression, where
the text displaces the music and the music transgresses the text. The tension
thus created between presence and absence opens up creative spaces within
the text for the representation of postcolonial identities that traditionally
are defi ned through their absence from written history. Just as music is
uprooted, displaced, and relocated, so are the postcolonial characters, and
just as music conveys and acquires new meaning within the context of an
alien art form, so do postcolonial characters acquire a new cultural iden-
tity and in turn change what this cultural identity entails. Music reaches
beyond the texts that contain it, and thereby allows for the expression of
identities that are themselves, to rephrase Homi K. Bhabha, beyond. 2

EDWARD W. SAID AND MUSICAL “TRANSGRESSION”

What renders music so suitable for the exploration and expression of post-
colonial identities is what Edward W. Said defines in his Musical Elabo-
rations as the “transgression” in music: “What I mean by ‘transgression’
is something completely literal and secular at the same time: that faculty
music has to travel, cross over, drift from place to place in a society, even
though many institutions and orthodoxies have sought to confi ne it” (xv).
The dialectic in music that Said alludes to lies between the traditionally
held belief in music’s aesthetic universality, which, as Dahlhaus argues,
has its roots in the late Classical and Romantic period, and the cultural
turn in musicology, referred to as cultural musicology or new musicology,
which gained momentum in the nineteen-eighties and which analyzes music
within the socio-political context of its cultural production. The central
question at the heart of this aesthetic divide concerns musical meaning. As
Lawrence Kramer puts it in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History,
“[i]n its modern form, the problem of meaning arose with the development
of European music as something to be listened to ‘for itself’ as art or enter-
tainment rather than as something mixed in with social occasion, drama,
or ritual” (1). This repertoire of classical music together with the modes
of listening that it fostered, described in detail by Dahlhaus, encouraged
“a sense of aesthetic self-sufficiency and an idealized, unitary concept of
music” (1). The claim for music’s autonomy is dependent on an understand-
ing of music as essentially non-verbal: music is a language of tones rather
than of words (as, for example, Theodor W. Adorno argues in “Music and
Language”), hence it is able to drift free of the tethers of verbal significa-
tion. This conception of music was particularly common in the nineteenth
century, not least as an underpinning for the idea of ‘absolute music’ devoid
of any extra-musical meaning.
On the other side of the argument about musical meaning stand the
cultural musicologists and amongst them Kramer, who understands music
4 Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature
as “meaningfully engaged with language, imagery, and the wider world”
(1). Integrating the study of music with social and cultural issues, cultural
musicologists argue that music is not exempt from worldly or extra-musical
meaning, but instead informed by it. In this light, music is not an exception
to the rule of signification but perfectly in line with it. Rather than being
mutually exclusive, this ambiguity in music between aesthetic autonomy
and cultural contingency marks the “general, higher-order context and con-
dition of intelligibility for most modern Western music” (2). In other words,
music’s essential ambivalence of meaning constitutes our experience and
understanding of it. The workings of these conceptions and their interplay
are variously at play in the novels under consideration, particularly so in
Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath
Her Feet, as discussed in Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 respectively.
Throughout Musical Elaborations, Said negotiates music’s position
in society, of which it is at once an intrinsic part—“practised in a social
and cultural setting” (x)—and marked by an “ideal purity of [ . . . ] indi-
vidual experience” (x). As Katherine Fry notes in her article on “Elabora-
tion, Counterpoint, Transgression: Music and the Role of the Aesthetic in
the Criticism of Edward W. Said,” Said’s music criticism is marked by an
“implicit tension between the criticism of art as part of a specific context or
social structure and the analysis of art as a more independent or aesthetic
phenomenon” (266). To ease this tension, Said employs his concept of the
“transgression” of music, by which he tries to bridge aesthetic universality
and social meaning and establish “the affiliations between music and soci-
ety” (Musical Elaborations 70). Said explains further that the transgressive
element in music “is its nomadic ability to attach itself to, and become part
of, social formations, to vary its articulations and rhetoric depending on the
occasion as well as the audience, plus the power and the gender situations in
which it takes place” (70). The transgressive element is therefore ultimately
aesthetic, because it is independent of social formations and circumstantial
meaning. Also, it is always already political, because the transgressive ele-
ment in music subverts power structures. As Fry phrases it, for Said the
“transgressive aspects of music allow it to engage in any number of social
mediations, thus resisting determinist and totalizing narratives” (“Elabora-
tion, Counterpoint, Transgression” 269). Thereby, Said’s concept of trans-
gression marks “an automatically emancipatory act of resistance” (272),
which renders Said’s musical aesthetics “a critical model for challenging
the objectivity and permanence of historical knowledge, interpretation and
identity” (276). Moreover, the transgressive in music makes music “resis-
tant to totalization and continually open to possibility and multiplicity”
(278). In Said’s words, this accounts for music’s aesthetic autonomy: “music
manages in spite of everything to preserve its reticence, mystery, or allusive
silence, which in turn symbolizes its autonomy as an art” (Musical Elabo-
rations 16). It follows that this transgressive element is what renders music
so fruitful for the analysis of postcolonial identities, because it supports
 Introduction 5
postcolonial voices in resisting imperial histories. Moreover, transgression
itself is a highly productive concept for the discussion of postcolonial iden-
tity, because it accommodates concepts of fluidity and the possibility of
hybridity. Musical transgression troubles notions of fi xed identity such as
the imperial binary of self and other, against which postcolonial fiction
writes. Music supports this writing back by allowing the novels’ characters
to partake in its transgression. With music, characters can “travel, cross
over, drift from place to place in a society” (xv), defying politics of location
such as the hierarchical binary of East and West or of center and periphery;
they can identify as being in-between cultures and places and chart new
spaces that are able to contain cultural hybridity. Throughout this book,
Said’s transgression is therefore not only to be read musically, but also as
a postcolonial condition that is marked by a transgression of boundaries,
be they geographical, historical, cultural, social, or related to differences in
religious beliefs, gender, race, and class.
While Said focuses on Western classical music, my analysis of the mul-
tiple musical traditions found in the novels shows that the transgressive
element that bridges social function and aesthetic universality is inherent
to all types of music. The kinds of music described in the novels are at the
same time worldly—“practiced in a social and cultural setting” (x), as Said
puts it—and otherworldly: of a higher order (Seth, A Suitable Boy [see
my Chapter 1]), located “beyond the beyond” (Saadi, Psychoraag 210), a
“self-created galaxy of notes” (Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag 179), “another
world” (Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia 62), or a mythical-magical
force from another world (Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet [see my
Chapter 4]). As Simon Frith argues, when it comes to how music works in
relation to identity, there is no difference between high and low music, art
and popular music, or Western and non-Western music: “different sorts of
musical activity may produce different sorts of musical identity, but how
the musics work to form identities is the same” (“Music and Identity” 112).
Despite differences in cultural circumstances, the transgressive element in
music is recognizable across cultures. It therefore marks a quality of music
that can bridge the aesthetic approach and the cultural studies approach.
It describes an essence that recognizes sameness of shared aesthetic values
(aesthetic approach) amongst and across different cultural meanings (cul-
tural studies approach).

MUSICAL TRANSGRESSION AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL

The transgression in music between aesthetic universality and cultural

specificity results in inherently dialectic functions of music. All the novels
depict music as intrinsically ambivalent and with seemingly contradictory
characteristics. On the one hand, music is portrayed as part and product
of a given cultural context (be it newly independent and postcolonial India
6 Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature
in A Suitable Boy, or the postcolonial diaspora in London from the 1960s
to the 1980s in The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album). On the
other hand, music constantly escapes this context. Seth describes North
Indian classical music as ineffable, and Rushdie uses the same term in his
description of rock music in The Ground beneath Her Feet (20). Music
is at the same time affirmative and subversive of ideologies. Rock music
in The Ground beneath Her Feet is a case in point here, seeing that the
novel describes it as a force of political liberation on the one hand and as
an agent of cultural imperialism on the other. Music locates and dislocates
identities, which becomes clear when looking at the interrelations between
music, place, and identity in Afternoon Raag and Psychoraag. Music signi-
fies collective as well as individual identities; most prominently in Kurei-
shi’s novels, where the pop music of the 1960s to 1980s is as much a sign of
the times from which it emerges as it is a very individual exploration of the
protagonists’ identities. Music carries and escapes meaning, and it escapes
the texts which contain it. As an art form within another art form (as music
in literature), music is present and absent from the novels at the same time.
It is part of the narrative and thereby constitutes part of the characters’
experiences. The underlying aesthetics of music inform music’s function
within the novels, as does the cultural context of its production.
Music in literature, however, cannot be truthfully represented; it is not
present on the page and does not sound from the novel as soon as we open
it, and in none of the novels to be discussed is music represented in its writ-
ten form as staff notation (and even if it were, the debate about whether a
score already constitutes music is one that in itself would merit a full-length
study).3 As Stephen Benson writes in Literary Music, “[t]he sounds of music
may be precisely what literature lacks, but it is a felt absence nevertheless”
(9). At the heart of this book therefore lies a tension of representation.
Music is generally taken to be the art form that is least representational. Its
inclusion in literature—and thereby its implied opposition to the other art
form—only stresses this, as Benson explains: “Literature is constituted by
its status as representation, its separation from a world which may itself be
no less fictional, but there are few worldly objects or experiences as unlike
the novel as music” (6). Gilroy argues that it is this refusal to represent that
enables music to express the unsayable and thereby authentically express
identity; and music in literature enables literature to do the same, as Peter
Dayan argues in his conclusion to Music Writing Literature. Next to the
socio-cultural circumstances of music, according to Dayan there is a sin-
gularity in music that remains “unspoken”: “This singular music is never
‘entendue,’ never understood as it is heard; it remains unspoken. Music
returns the favour to literature: it provides the means to figure an unspoken,
unrepresentable, singularity of literature, through the endless network of
images of languages that hybridize music and letters. Music saves language
from representation” (131). For Dayan, this bears crucial consequences for
the text’s ability to capture the singularity of identity and self-hood:
 Introduction 7
To be alive is to escape representation. It is to have that freedom which
means one cannot be calculated; one cannot be imitated or translated
or mechanically reproduced. It is never to be simply present; it is to
have a singular character which no event or structure or description
can manifest in its totality; not to be self-identical. In a word, to be
alive is to be different; and at the same time, to share, through love, in
the sense that an endless value exists. (132)

In Culture and Imperialism, Said similarly writes that to think about

others—and the postcolonial other—must mean “not trying to rule others,
not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies” (336). Questions of
representation are at the heart of the postcolonial agenda, and they consti-
tute the core of music’s significance for postcolonial literature. If music frees
literature from representation, as Dayan argues, and if music unseats lan-
guage and textuality as “preeminent expressions of human consciousness,”
as Gilroy sees it (The Black Atlantic 74), then music in postcolonial litera-
ture provides a means to subvert the hierarchy of imperial history writing
and to explore and express the singularity of the postcolonial condition.

MUSICO-LITERARY RELATIONS

Ultimately, this tension of representation is also a question of meaning.

What and how does music mean when written into literature? And how
does music in turn transform the meaning of the texts it is written into?
In his essay “The Grain of the Voice,” Roland Barthes explores the ques-
tion of meaning in music and language and he locates meaning in song (his
example of choice is the genre of the Kunstlied) in the physical presence of
the singing voice. Crucially, meaning thus happens prior to the linguistic
semantics of the text sung. This is possible, as Barthes outlines, because the
singing voice displaces the “fringe of contact between music and language”
(181), which is essentially a space of interrogation where language and
music encounter each other and explore each other’s capacity for mean-
ing. The “grain” of the voice is precisely that “dual posture—of language
and of music” (181) that the singing voice can inhabit due to the physical
presence of the singer that is communicated through the music. The grain,
Barthes writes, is “the materiality of the body speaking” (182), or rather:
singing. This physical presence is not present in the language, but only
comes into existence through singing and is then immediately present and
already communicated before the meaning of the language. In Barthes’s
words, the grain of the voice suggests that “something is there, manifest
and stubborn (one hears only that), beyond (or before) the meaning of the
words” (181, italics in the original, also for the ensuing Barthes quotes).
This means that music happens before linguistic signification. Music means
before (or beyond) language. The signifying power of the “grain,” which
8 Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature
Barthes coins signifi ance, is not so much concerned with the meaning of the
language or what the words signify, but it is about that play of signification
itself. The singing voice, Barthes argues,

forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, rep-

resentation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth) of
production where the melody really works at the language—not at what
it says, but the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers, of its letters—
where melody explores how the language works and identifies with
that work. It is [ . . . ] the diction of language. (182–183)

Language is thus transformed into music, into the melody of the singing
voice, and language-as-music thus forestalls linguistic meaning, the mean-
ing of the text sung, by a friction that is created between the music “and
something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise
the message)” (185). In other words, music does not highlight or support
the meaning or the message of language, but the being of language itself;
not what language means, but how language means. “What is engaged in
these works,” Barthes writes, “is, much more than a musical style, a practi-
cal reflection (if one may put it like that) on the language” (186).
This also applies to the music written into the novels I will be discussing
throughout this book, both vocal and instrumental music (and I allow for
this generalization from the singer and the singing voice to the musician
and music because Barthes allows for it, extending his argument “across
all the genres of vocal music” and arguing that the grain also “persists in
instrumental music” [188]). Music in literature, that is, music transformed
into text and transformed into language, suddenly signifies language.
Music in literature becomes, to extend Barthes’s argument, the diction of
language, and the friction of representation that arises when authors write
music into literature and thereby transpose music into language which has
a higher degree of abstraction than the language of the text itself, that
friction is the space where the meaning of music-as-language that signifies
before (or beyond) language-as-language resides. Music-as-language is not
only writing about music (music as a theme on the narrative level), but also
writing as music, music as textual trace on the level of text. Thereby, the
writing reflects on the music as much as the music reflects on the writing,
both on what the writing means and on how this meaning is generated. In
the context of the postcolonial novels that I will be discussing, the power of
the voice (and of music more generally, as Barthes concedes in his essay) to
displace meaning is crucial. Writing about the Swiss singer Charles Panzéra
(1896–1976), Barthes shows how Panzéra’s style of singing got “separated
from History” (185), because it was seen at the time as an “exclusively
bourgeois art” that did not conform to the aesthetic ideals of the dominant
culture. According to Barthes, “because his art was already marginal, man-
darin, [ . . . ] it was able to bear traces of signifiance, to escape the tyranny of
 Introduction 9
meaning” (185). Following the same reasoning, music in literature, because
it is “already marginal,” has the power to displace meaning from the center
of culture to its margins. Music and postcolonial literature thereby share a
space of marginality, a liminal space where new meaning can be generated,
as I will show at various points throughout this book, and a space where
meaning is negated or forestalled; a space, in Barthes’s words, “of pleasure,
of thrill, a site where language [and music-as-language] works for nothing”
(187), which I will also highlight.
Methodologically, my vantage point for analysis and interpretation is
always grounded in music, more specifically, the music as it is featured
in the novels. I will generally be analyzing two different levels on which
music is featured in the novels, namely the level of narrative and the level
of text. On the level of narrative, music is present as a theme (for literary
figures), whereas on the level of text, music serves as a textual trace that is
thus mediated by the text (for readers). Where appropriate, I further distin-
guish these levels, for example in Chapter 2, where I discuss Saadi’s novel
Psychoraag, which features an abundance of references to artists, bands,
and musical pieces that exist outside the text on an extra-textual level.
Knowledge and understanding of these extra-textual references open up
new layers of musical meaning that inform the reading of the novel. These
different levels of musical function and musical meaning within the text
and beyond the text help answer the questions: how and why is music writ-
ten into the text and to what effect? What and how does music mean within
the narrative? And what and how does it mean in the larger context of the
text as literature and beyond the text as extra-textual reference? What does
the text tell us about music and, in turn, which musical ideas and ideals
influence the writing and meaning of the text? These interrogations of the
different registers of music and of the different levels of musical meaning in
the novels address issues of representation, as explored above, to eventu-
ally fi nd answers to: what is at stake for postcolonial identities? Or: why
music? Having thus explored the relationship between music and the text
and music and questions of identity, I then interpret my analytical findings
within the framework of postcolonial theory.
Next to the topical focus on music, the logic behind the selection of nov-
els to be analyzed is roughly chronological and, more neatly, geographical.
While Seth portrays India shortly after Independence, we follow Chaud-
huri’s and Saadi’s protagonists to the UK of the last decade of the twentieth
century and the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst. More important than the
historical time frame of the novels, we follow characters to a state of cul-
tural in-between-ness where they have to negotiate the often contradictory
influences from their home and host countries. Kureishi sets his narratives
fi rmly in the South-Asian diaspora of 1960s to 1980s London, while Rush-
die takes the journey of postcolonial migration to the global level and to
the United States at the turn of the twenty-fi rst century. These different
postcolonial conditions will be examined through the lenses of the musical
10 Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature
traditions in the novels, as they feature—to varying degrees—musical pro-
cesses of belonging, displacement, relocation, and dissemination that mir-
ror the postcolonial condition of home, being exiled from home, life in the
diaspora, and migration as a global movement.
This project is situated within the interdisciplinary context of word and
music studies, pioneered by Steven Paul Scher in the 1960s, and since then
developed further by scholars coming from both disciplines, literature and
musicology.4 Scholars in this field that have been directly influential to my
own project include (in alphabetical order): Stephen Benson, Walter Bern-
hart, Siglind Bruhn, Kieran Curran, Peter Dayan, Mario Dunkel, Axel
Eglund, Lawrence Kramer, Charity McAdams, Emily Petermann, Robert
Samuels, Delia da Sousa Correa, and Werner Wolf. Notably related to my
project are Mi Zhou’s doctoral thesis on music in E.M. Forster, “Sublime
Noise: Reading E.M. Forster Musically,” which I will discuss in my fi rst
chapter in the context of analyzing music in Forster’s A Passage to India
(1924), and Michelle Fillion’s Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in
E.M. Forster. Bennett Zon and Phyllis Weliver more generally write on the
role of music in colonial literature set during the British Raj, and they ana-
lyze how non-Western music was used to cast the colonial subject as either
naïve and primitive (Zon) or as the exoticized other (Weliver). Although
looking at different places and times, other studies on the relationship
between music, identity, and literature are useful to my present project,
such as Robert H. Cataliotti’s The Songs Became the Stories: The Music in
African-American Fiction, 1970–2005, in which the author looks at music
in African-American postcolonial literature. Also, Mai Al-Nakib analyzes
musical ekphrasis in an essay on the Algerian writer Assia Djebar, whose
texts deal with the legacy of French imperialism. Writing on the relation-
ship between music and identity in literature, Paul McCann focuses on jazz
music in American fiction in Race, Music, and National Identity: Images
of Jazz in American Fiction, 1920–1960.
The field of word and music studies is usually subdivided into studies
focusing on music in literature, literature in music (for example program
music), or music and literature (a very prominent example here would be
opera studies). While this study is situated within the fi rst category, it will
not do justice to the vast explorations in interdisciplinary methodology of
word and music studies, most notably undertaken by Werner Wolf and
Walter Bernhart.5 Partly, this is due to the restrictions of time and space
that underlie every research project, and partly it is because I have found
a formalist approach to be less informative in answering questions of how
music affects identity in postcolonial novels. Stephen Benson succinctly
emphasizes the point in relation to his book Literary Music:

If a novel draws on music, the question is not how, in the technical

sense, but why: what idea of music is represented, to what end, and
how does this relate to other discourses of music, including those of
 Introduction 11
musicology? How is what a novel has to say about music caught up in
questions of representation, of aesthetics and ethics? (6)

As already argued, these “questions of representation, of aesthetics and

ethics” are pivotal for my postcolonial framework of interpretation, and
an example from A Suitable Boy shows the limitations that a formalist
approach bears in relation to such questions. In Seth’s novel, the fictional
novelist Amit Chatterji likens the performance of a rāga to the narrative
structure of a novel:6

“I’ve always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel—or

at least the kind of novel I’m attempting to write. You know,” he con-
tinued, extemporizing as he went along, “fi rst you take one note and
explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then
perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it’s only
gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with
the beat . . . and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions
begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and fi nally it
all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax.” (426)7

Amit’s conclusions, while interesting and comprehensible in terms of for-

mal musico-literary relations, do not shed any light on the value of writing
music into literature. Therefore, this quotation is a very succinct and fitting
summary of what this book is not about. Like Literary Music, this study is
not much concerned with “any of the ways in which narrative literature has
sought to model itself after music, or on particular musical properties” (5).8
I am not looking at structural parallels or any other resemblances between
music and literature as described by Amit in A Suitable Boy, because the
problems with such an “unapologetically formalist” approach are appar-
ent. As Benson points out, it leads “to an unnecessary preoccupation with
the question of verification: exactly how do we establish that such-and-such
a text is musical and how might this allow us to evade the ever-present
danger of the impressionistic metaphor?” (5) This is not to deny that litera-
ture consciously models itself after music; there are texts that do, and very
consciously so, as exemplified by my analysis of Chaudhuri’s Afternoon
Raag and Saadi’s Psychoraag in Chapter 2. Yet, this structural analysis
and comparison between rāga and novel is not an end in itself, but serves to
inform the larger focus of this volume, which is to study the effects of music
on postcolonial identity.
To this effect, Chapter 1 looks at the role of music in Vikram Seth’s A
Suitable Boy and examines how music can constitute national identity and
how India as a newly independent nation can thus be imagined through the
different musical traditions that are featured in the novel. In addition, the
role of music is examined in resisting cultural imperialism during the Brit-
ish Raj. Chapter 2 is concerned with the role of music in shaping individual
12 Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature
identity in Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag and Suhayl Saadi’s Psy-
choraag. Both protagonists fi nd themselves in situations of cultural disloca-
tion, and they use music to access memories of homes that are either far
away or that are imaginary homelands of the past, as Rushdie coins them in
Imaginary Homelands. Chapter 3 takes the concept of performance center-
stage in order to analyze the impact of music on Hanif Kureishi’s charac-
ters in The Black Album and The Buddha of Suburbia. The core of the
argument is that both identity and music come into being through perfor-
mance. Through performance, music destabilizes identity categories, such
as race and gender, and undermines essentializing narratives of religious
fundamentalism. Finally, Chapter 4 looks at rock music and its relation to
processes of cultural imperialism and globalization as they are played out
in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet. This will allow me to
conclude that music affects people across boundaries of nations, languages,
and cultures by connecting them on a musical level that forestalls differ-
ences resulting from the politics of location. In the postcolonial novels dis-
cussed in this book, music serves to undermine the postcolonial binary of
East versus West and instead brings people together through a shared love
and admiration.

NOTES

1. In “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a ‘Chang-

ing’ Same,” Gilroy employs the very useful term of “self-identity” in relation
to music‘s ability to constitute racial identity.
2. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, and particularly his “Intro-
duction: Locations of Culture” (10).
3. See, for example, Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said in Parallels and
Paradoxes.
4. See, for example, Steven Paul Scher, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, Ver-
bal Music in German Literature, or Literatur und Musik: ein Handbuch zur
Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes, to name only a
few of Scher’s publications on the interrelations between music and litera-
ture. Walter Bernhart’s essay “Masterminding Word and Music Studies: A
Tribute to Steven Paul Scher” provides an interesting and insightful overview
of Scher’s contributions to the field of word and music studies.
5. See, for example: Werner Wolf‘s essays “Musicalized Fiction and Intermedi-
ality. Theoretical Aspects of Word and Music Studies” and “Intermediality
Revisited: Reflections on Word and Music Relations in the Context of a Gen-
eral Typology of Intermediality.” Overall, the biannual publication Word
and Music Studies by the International Association for Word and Music
Studies provides a very good introduction to the research conducted in the
field.
6. Throughout this book and when I am not quoting from primary or second-
ary material that use different spellings, I will use the term rāga instead of
raag or Rāga. All terms are synonymous with each other. I have made this
decision in reference to Bimalakanta Roychaudhuri’s The Dictionary of Hin-
dustani Classical Music and Grove Music Online.
 Introduction 13
7. Further details on the characteristics of rāga will be developed when discuss-
ing it in relation to Afternoon Raag and Psychoraag in Chapter 2.
8. Where Benson‘s exception to this rule is his analysis of formal analogies
between music and literature in Bakhtin and Kundera, mine is the structural
parallels between a rāga and Amit Chaudhuri‘s Afternoon Raag and Suhayl
Saadi’s Psychoraag, as analyzed in detail in Chapter 2.

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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
look upon me as the wheel-horse of the car of state, and wonder
that I could pull along so patiently. The ingratitude of all!" he
repeated, in a meditative tone. "Ay, it is but too true! Those are the
petrifying waters which harden the heart and seem to turn the very
spirit into stone. Do you know what has been done within this hour,
Monsieur Langdale?"
"No," replied the young Englishman: "I have heard of nothing
important, sir."
"Why, I thought it must be at the gates of Paris by this time," said
Richelieu. "A treaty has been signed with Rochelle; and a good man
—a marvellous good man in his way—says I am no true Catholic,
because I will not starve some thousands of men to death or make
them take the mass with a lie upon their mouths. I do not
understand his reasoning, but that is my fault, of course; but
through this very treaty of Rochelle I think I shall make more real
Catholics than he would make false ones. But now, Monsieur
Langdale, you think I have kept you here unreasonably; but you are
mistaken. I wished to have news from various quarters ere I
suffered you to go back to England. I need not tell you to return by
the month of July next; but, for many reasons, I desire you should
return before. I leave it to yourself to do so or not; but you will find
it for your benefit. To-morrow you shall have all necessary passes,—
though it is probable that the fall of this very city of Rochelle will
lead to peace between France and England. If it do so, remember a
conversation which took place between us a good many months
ago."
"I will not forget it, my lord," replied Edward. "I believe I have
always kept my word to your Eminence."
"You have," said Richelieu. "You have. Would to God I could say the
same of all men! And, now, what money will you want for your
passage?"
"None, your Eminence," replied Edward. "I have a little property in
England, the rents of which accumulated while I was lodged and fed
by good Monsieur de Bourbonne; and I can get what I want at
Rochelle."
"Oh, go not into that miserable place!" said Richelieu,—"at least not
till all the bodies are interred and it is free from pestilence. This
siege will ever be memorable in the annals of the world for the
sufferings of the people, and for the resolution of their leaders also.
I can admire great qualities even in my enemies. But here comes
Tronson to call me to the king. Come to me to-morrow."
 CHAPTER XLIV.
Four days more passed before Edward actually got his proper passes
and safe-conduct; but then they came in the most precise style and
ample form. His whole person was described with accuracy. He was
mentioned as a young English gentleman attached to Lord Montagu,
travelling under the particular protection of his Majesty the King of
France, with two palfreniers and other servants and attendants; and
all governors of towns and provinces, and officers civil and military,
as well throughout the realm of France as in neighboring countries in
amity with that power, were directed not only to let him freely pass
and give him aid and assistance, but to show him every hospitable
attention and courtesy on his journey or journeys in any direction
whatsoever during the next two years ensuing. The whole was
signed by the king's own hand and countersigned by the cardinal.
Though I possess one of these passports myself on parchment,
signed with an immense "Louis," I regret to say it does not have the
countersignature of Richelieu; but it is certain that they were
occasionally given under his administration also. At all events,
Edward comprehended that, wherever he bent his steps, no more
interruptions of his journey would occur on the part of any of the
officers of the crown.
The cardinal himself he could not see before his departure, for those
were very busy times; but on the sixth day the young gentleman re-
entered the city of Rochelle with his good friend Clement Tournon,
and went direct to the syndic's house. The royal soldiers were in
possession of the place; the walls were in progress of demolition;
and there was an aspect of disappointment and sadness upon the
faces of the people generally, though some were rejoicing openly in
the return of peace and plenty, little heeding the loss of a certain
degree of that liberty which they had at one time cherished as the
best of human possessions.
The royal forces, however, had not confined themselves to razing the
fortifications, but, with that good-humor which is one of the chief
and most amiable characteristics of the French people, had aided the
citizens in burying the dead, in cleansing the streets, and in purifying
the town generally, so that, on the whole, the city bore a much more
cheerful and happy appearance than it had done when Edward had
last visited it. In the court before the house of the old syndic, two of
the apprentices were busy rooting out the grass from between the
stones; and Marton herself, with a gay face, though it was still
somewhat pale and thin, came running down to greet her old
master. These were all that remained of the once numerous
household; and the joy of his return to his ancient dwelling was
mingled with sufficient bitterness to draw some natural tears from
Clement Tournon's eyes.
Many little incidents occurred to Edward Langdale during his short
stay in Rochelle which we need not dwell upon here. Amongst the
servants of his host he was in some sort a hero for the part he had
taken in saving their beloved master. Several of the citizens, too,
came to visit him; and, in the stormy night of the 2d of November,
Guiton himself, wrapped in his large mantle, presented himself to
pass an hour or two with his old friend and the syndic's young guest.
It was a night very memorable,—much like that on which Edward
had crossed the seas some eighteen months before. The winds burst
in sharp gusts over the town, still rising in force, and howling as they
rose; the casement shook and rattled, the tiles were swept from the
roofs and dashed to pieces in the streets, and rain mingled with
sleet dashed in the faces of the passers-by. Many died that night of
those who were still sick in the hospitals. The conversation of the
mayor was by no means cheerful. He had been forced into his high
position against his own desire; he had drawn the sword unwillingly,
but, full of energy and hope, he had sheathed it with even less
willingness, and saw in the surrender of Rochelle the ruin of the
Protestant cause and the destruction of the religious liberties of
France. His heart was depressed, and all his thoughts seemed
gloomy. Once, when one of the fiercest gusts shook the house, he
burst forth in an absent tone, exclaiming, "Ay, blow! blow! You may
blow now without doing any damage to Fortune's favorite! By the
Lord in Heaven, Mr. Langdale, it would seem that this man
Richelieu's fortunes have even bent the clouds and storms to his
subjection! Here that tempestuous sea which was never known for
six weeks to an end to be without storm and ship-wreck has been as
calm and tranquil as a fish-pond in a garden for months—ever since
that accursed dyke was first commenced; and now no sooner is
Rochelle lost than up rises the spirit of the tempest. Hark how it
howls! At high tide half the dyke that has ruined us will be swept
away! Mark my words, young gentleman: by this time to-morrow all
the succors which we needed so many months will be able to enter
our port in safety."
And it was so. On the following day, more than forty toises of the
dyke were carried away, and a fleet of small wine-vessels from the
neighboring country entered the harbor without difficulty.
The storm raged fiercely for the next two days; and the time was
spent in friendly intercourse by Clement Tournon and Edward
Langdale, who wished to embark from Rochelle but could find no
vessel ready or willing to put to sea.
Of all the remarkable changes which have taken place in the state of
society during the last two hundred years—changes which produce
and will daily produce other changes—none is so wonderful as in the
facility of locomotion. The change from the caterpillar to the
butterfly is not so great. Go back two hundred years, and you will
find nothing but delay and uncertainty. Ay, within a shorter space
than that, the back of your own horse, the inconvenient inside of a
heavy coach going three miles in an hour, or the still slower wagon
with its miscellaneous denizens, or the post-horse with its postilion
riding beside it, were, in every part of Europe, the only means
afforded to the traveller of journeying from place to place over the
land; while over the water slow ships could only be found
occasionally at certain ports, and their departure and arrival
depended upon a thousand other chances and events than the
pleasure of the winds and waves. It is only wonderful that a voyage
did not occupy a lifetime. Now——But it is no use telling my reader
what this now is. He knows it so well that he forgets even the
inconveniences that he himself has suffered, perhaps a score or two
of years ago, and can hardly conceive the possibility of the
hardships, the troubles and disappointments, of a journey in the
seventeenth century, till he takes up some of the memoirs or
romances of that day, and finds a whole host of minor miseries
recorded which render an expedition to Mount Sinai at present but a
joke in comparison. It is true that our present system has its evils as
well as its benefits, viewed by different persons according to their
different professional or habitual tastes. The picturesque traveller
will tell you that you lose one-half of the scenery; the timid traveller,
that you risk breaking your neck; the police-officer, that thieves and
swindlers get off much more easily than they used to do; and
members of Parliament, that their constituents are a great deal too
near at hand. But there are compensations for all these little troubles
and especially in the case of those of the police-officer; for, if the
thief or swindler has easy means of getting away, there are—thanks
to electric telegraphs—more easy means still of catching him.
All Edward's preparations were made: the calculation of what rents
had accumulated in the hands of good Dr. Winthorne was easy also,
and to get the amount in gold and silver was easier still, with
Clement Tournon at his right hand. But, as there seemed, upon
inquiry, no probability whatever of a ship sailing from Rochelle within
a reasonable time, Edward determined to run across the country to
Calais, between which port and England there always has been a
desultory trade carried on, even in time of war, down to the reign of
the third George.
"I shall see you soon again, Edward," said old Clement Tournon, as
the young gentleman descended the stairs to mount his horse.
"I trust so," said Edward. "But I really cannot tell how soon I shall
return."
"Nor I how soon I shall go over," said the old man, with a smile. "I
have business myself at Huntingdon; and if you are in that
neighborhood a month hence we shall meet there. You have told me
all the places where you intend to stop, and I have made a note of
it,—so that I shall easily find you wherever you are."
Edward was surprised, but not so much, perhaps, as might be
expected; for, from vague hints which his good old host had let drop,
he had gathered that Clement Tournon, steadfast and perhaps a
little bigoted in the Protestant faith, had a strong inclination to make
England his future home. He had been there often; he loved the
country and the people, and still more the religion; and most of the
ties between him and Rochelle seemed to have been severed when
the city lost its independence. Often in Edward's hearing he had
called England the land of comfort and peace,—alas! it was not
destined long to remain so,—and even that very day he had
remarked that the state of France, with its constant broils, intrigues,
and factions, might suit a young and aspiring spirit, but was not
fitted for declining years.
He and his young friend parted with deep and mutual regret. It is
seldom that so much friendship ever exists between the old and the
young; but each might feel that he owed the other his life, not by
any sudden act which might be the result of a momentary impulse,
but by calm, determined, persevering kindness, which could not but
have a deeper source.
This has been a very short chapter: but we may as well change the
scene; for our space, according to the law of Goths and Vandals,
which altereth not, is very short, alas!
 CHAPTER XLV.
The days of vis-à-vis lined with sky-blue velvet had not come,
though, as any one who is read in the pleasant Antoine Hamilton
must know, one generation was sufficient to produce them. But, had
they been in existence, there were no roads for them to travel upon;
for we hear that just about this time one of the presidents of the
Parliament of Paris lost his life by the great imprudence of travelling
in a large heavy coach over a French country-road.
I was in great hope at this place to be enabled to introduce, for the
gratification of my readers, a solitary horseman. But I am
disappointed; for Edward Langdale, now that I have again to bring
him on the scene, had good Pierrot la Grange with him. And it would
never do to have a solitary horseman two.
It was on a road, then, leading from London into the heart of the
country, that Lord Montagu's page—Lord Montagu's page no longer,
for he had formally resigned his attendance upon that nobleman—
rode along, on a cold, bright, wintry evening, with the renowned
Pierrot la Grange, whose face, by adherence to the total-abstinence
system, though much less brilliant in hue, had become much
smoother, plumper, and fairer. Both he and his master were well
armed, as was the custom of the day, and each was a likely man
enough to repel any thing like attack on the part of others; for be it
remarked that Edward Langdale was very much changed by the
passage of twenty months over his head since first we introduced
him to the reader. He was broader, stronger, older, in appearance;
and, though of course there was nothing of the mould of age about
him, yet all the batterings and bruisings he had gone through had
certainly stamped manhood both on his face and form. He had a
very tolerable beard also,—at least as far as mustache and royal
were concerned,—trimmed in that shape which the pencil of
Vandyke has transmitted to us in his portraits of some of the most
memorable characters in modern history. It is probable that he had
grown a little also; for at his age men will grow, notwithstanding all
the world will do to keep them down. He was, in short, somewhat
above the middle height, though not a very tall man,—of that height
which is more serviceable in the field than in the ring.
At the crossing of two roads, one of which ran into Cambridgeshire,
while the other took toward Huntingdon, was a small, low inn: I
mean low in structure, for it was by no means low in character. It
was one of the neatest inns I ever set my eyes on,—for it was
standing in my day and is probably standing still,—with its neat well-
whitewashed front, its carved doorway, its various gables, and its
mullioned windows and the lozenge-shaped panes set in primitive
lead. To the right of the inn, as you looked from the door upon the
road, was a very neat farm-yard, half full of golden straw, with a
barn and innumerable chickens,—chanticleers of all hues and colors,
and dame partlets of every breed. Beyond the barn, at the distance
of fifty or sixty yards, ran a beautiful clear stream, which crossed
both the roads very nearly at their bifurcation, and which, though so
shallow as only to wash gently the fetlocks of the passengers'
horses, was, and must be still, renowned for its beautiful trout,
silvery, with gold and crimson spots and the flesh the color of a
blush-rose. On the other side of the stream, about a quarter of a
mile farther up, was a picturesque little mill, with a group of
towering Huntingdon poplars shading it on the east.
Here Edward Langdale drew in his horse, although the sun was not
fully down.
God knows what made him do so, for he had proposed to ride
farther: but there was an aspect of peace and rural beauty and
contented happiness about the whole place which might touch that
latent poetry in his disposition already alluded to. Or it might be that
all the fierce scenes of strife and turmoil and care and danger he
had passed through in the last twenty months had made his heart
thirsty for a little calm repose; and where could he find it so well as
there? Expectation, however, is always destined to be disappointed.
This is the great moral of the fable of life. The people of the house,
who had much respect for a man who came with an armed servant
and whose saddle-bags were well stuffed, gave him a clean,
comfortable room looking over the court-yard to the river, and
served him his supper in the chamber underneath.
It was night before he sat down; but, before the fine broiled trout
had disappeared, the sound of several horses' feet was heard from
the road, and then that of voices calling for hostlers and stable-boys.
Edward had easily divined, from his first entrance into the house,
that this which he now occupied was the only comfortable public
room in the inn,—although there was another on the other side of
the passage, where neighboring farmers held their meetings and
smoked their pipes. He expected, therefore, that his calm little
supper would be interrupted, and was not at all surprised to see a
gentleman of good mien, a little below the middle age, followed by
two or three attendants, enter the parlor and throw himself into a
chair.
The stranger cast a hasty and careless glance around, and then gave
some directions to one of his followers in the French language. It
was not the sort of half French spoken a good deal in the court of
England at that time, but whole, absolute, perfect French, with
French idioms and a French tongue.
As long as the conversation referred to nothing more than boots and
baggage and supper and good wine, Edward took no notice, but
went on with his meal, anxious to finish it as soon as possible. But
soon after, when the person the stranger had been speaking to had
left the room, that gentleman began a different sort of discourse
with another of his followers, and commented pretty freely, and with
some wit, upon the state of parties at the court of England.
"Your pardon for interrupting you," said Edward at once. "My servant
and myself both understand French; and it would be neither civil nor
honest to overhear your conversation without giving you that
warning."
The other thanked him for his courtesy, adding, "You are a
Frenchman, of course?"
"Not so," answered Edward. "I am an Englishman; but I have spent
some time in France."
Next came a great number of those questions which nobody can put
so directly without any lack of politeness as a Frenchman:—how long
he had lived in France; whom he knew there; when he had left it.
Edward answered all very vaguely, for he never had any great
relaxation of tongue; but the stranger caught at the admission that
he had been only a fortnight in England, exclaiming, "Then you must
have been in France when Rochelle surrendered."
"I was," answered the young gentleman: "it is not quite three weeks
since I left that city."
"Ha!" said the stranger, eyeing him from head to foot. "Will you favor
me, sir, by telling me the state of the place and the condition of its
inhabitants? It is a subject in which I take a great interest. Methinks
they surrendered somewhat promptly when succor was so near."
"Not so, sir," replied Edward. "When men have nothing to eat,—
when they have seen their fathers, and their brothers, and their
mothers, and their sisters, die of famine in their streets,—when the
very rats and mice of a city are all consumed, and the wharves have
been stripped of mussels and limpets,—they must either die or
surrender. There is no use of dying; for death is the worst sort of
capitulation, and the city becomes the enemy's without even a
parchment promise."
"Ay; and was it really so bad?" said the other.
"More than one-third of the inhabitants had died," said Edward;
"another third were dying; and the rest were so feeble that the walls
might be said to be manned by living corpses."
"You excite my curiosity and my compassion," said the other. "May I
ask if you had any command in Rochelle?"
"None," replied the young gentleman. "By accident I was in it for a
day during the siege, and saw how much they could endure. I was
in it also immediately after the siege, and saw how much they had
endured. Though Rochelle fell at last, her defence is one of the most
glorious facts in French history."
The stranger looked down upon the ground and replied nothing for
several minutes; but his companion with whom he had been
conversing familiarly took up the conversation, and asked after
several of the citizens of Rochelle whom Edward was personally
acquainted with or knew by name. The solemn words, "He is dead,"
"She is dead," "All the family died by famine," "He died of the
pestilence," were of sad recurrence. "But then," the stranger
remarked, "we know that Guiton is alive; for he signed the treaty."
"He tried hard to die first," said Edward. "But nothing seemed to
break his iron frame, and the people became clamorous."
"And what became of the good old syndic Tournon?" asked the first
stranger.
"He is alive and well," answered Edward.
"Ah! but he would have been dead and buried," exclaimed Pierrot,
who could refrain no longer, "if it had not been for you, sir."
"Indeed?" said the stranger. "Let me inquire how that happened."
"It matters not, sir," replied Edward, making a sign to Pierrot to hold
his tongue. "What the man says may be partly true, partly mistaken;
but, although I am willing to give any one interested general news, I
must decline referring to matters entirely personal when conversing
with strangers."
"Well, then, let us talk of other subjects," said the first stranger. "I
cannot consent to part with a gentleman lately from my own land,
so soon as that movement of your plate seems to imply. Supper I
shall take none; for the news that has flowed in upon me for the last
fortnight, has not tended to strengthen my appetite. Wine, however,
—the resource of the sad and the sorry,—I must have. They tell me
it is good here. Will you allow me to try some of that which stands at
your right hand?"
Edward ordered Pierrot to bring some fresh glasses, and put the
bottle over to his self-invited guest. The stranger drank some, and,
saying, "It is very fair," immediately ordered more to be brought,
while Pierrot, bending over Edward's chair as if to remove the dish
before him, whispered in his ear, "It is the Prince de Soubise."
With all his habitual self-command, Edward could not refrain from a
slight start. The color, too, mounted in his cheek with some feelings
of anger; but he was glad of the warning, and did not suffer what
was passing in his heart to appear. The conversation turned in a
different course from that which it had before assumed, Soubise
referring no more to the subject of Rochelle, though his companion,
who seemed a friend of inferior rank, often turned toward that topic.
Whenever he did so, the prince immediately asked some question as
to Edward's knowledge of France and its inhabitants; and the young
gentleman, to say the truth, took some pleasure, after the first
effects of surprise were over, in puzzling him by his answers. He had
passed over so much of France that his intimate acquaintance with
the country excited Soubise's astonishment; and from localities his
questions turned to persons. "As you have been in Lorraine," he
said, "you have probably seen the beautiful and witty Duchesse de
Chevreuse."
"I have the honor of knowing her well," replied Edward.
"Do you know the Duc de Montbazon?" asked the prince.
"Not in the least," replied Edward.
"The Cardinal de Richelieu?" continued Soubise.
"I have seen his Eminence frequently," said the young gentleman,
"and have had audiences of him; but, as to knowing the cardinal,
that can be said but by few, I imagine."
Soubise smiled. "The duchess is more easily known," he answered;
"but the death of her lover Chalais must have affected her much,—
poor thing! Did you ever meet with him?"
"Not exactly," replied Edward, with a slight shudder at the memory.
"I saw his head cut off, but did not know him personally."
The reference caused a momentary pause in the conversation; and
then Soubise said, in an indifferent tone, "As you have been much in
that part of the country, you must have probably seen a Duc de
Rohan."
"I had the honor of meeting him once," replied Edward, fully on his
guard.
"He is a relation of mine," said Soubise.
Edward merely bowed his head, and the prince proceeded to ask if
there had been any news of him current when the young gentleman
was in France.
"The last I heard of him," said Edward, "was a rumor that, after
menacing the right of the king's army till a party had been sent out
to cut off his retreat, he had, by a skilful night-march through the
woods in the rear, effected his escape and fallen back upon
Saintonge."
Soubise seemed desirous of prolonging the conversation; but
Edward soon after retired to his chamber, resolved to be up by
sunrise and pursue his way. His determination was vain, however.
Though he was on foot early, Soubise was up before him; and they
met at the door of the inn, where their horses were already
standing. A quiet bow on either part was their only salutation; and,
as there were two roads, Edward would willingly have seen which
the prince selected. As he did not mount, however, the young
gentleman followed the path he had previously proposed to take,—
namely, that toward Huntingdon,—and three or four minutes after
heard the more numerous party of Soubise coming up at good
speed.
"Ah, young gentleman," said the prince, riding up to his side, "so we
are going the same way. Permit me to bear you company."
Edward bowed his head somewhat coldly, for he did not desire the
companionship. He might have learned some policy in the varied life
he had led, and it certainly would have been politic in him to court
the good opinion of the man by his side; but, even had the nature of
his character permitted it, he believed it would be of no use.
Generous and frank, Soubise was known to be somewhat obstinate
as well as hasty; and Edward thought, "I would rather win her in
spite of him than by his aid."
Their journey, therefore, did not promise to be very agreeable; and,
when the prince demanded which way his course ultimately lay, the
young gentleman replied, "I go toward Huntingdon, sir; but, if that is
the direction of your journey, I shall have to leave you before we
reach the town, for I have to turn off the highroad some miles on
this side of Buckden."
"And so have I," said Soubise; "but we may as well make the way
pleasant by each other's society as long as our roads lie together. Do
you know this country as well as you know France?"
"This part of the country," replied Edward; "for I was born and
brought up not many miles from where we are now riding."
"Indeed!" said the prince. "I should have thought by your speech
you had passed the greater part of your life in my own land. Do you
know what that little river is just before us?"
"It is the Ivil," answered Edward, "which runs into the Ouse lower
down."
"The Ouse!" said Soubise. "I do not know much English, but that
seems to me an ugly name. If I recollect, Ouse means mud,—slime."
"We are a plain-spoken people," answered the young man, "and
usually give things the name we think they deserve. The Ouse in
many places is a sluggish, muddy stream; and our good ancestors
applied the name they judged most appropriate."
"'Tis as well they do," said Soubise, with a sigh. "We in France have
a different habit. Our more excitable imaginations take fire at a
name, and we are apt to decorate very plain things with fanciful
appellations; but this leads to frequent disappointment. Which is the
happiest people must depend upon whether it is best in a hard world
to see things as they are, or to see them as we would have them."
"We are often forced to see them as they are," replied Edward; "and
if we always did so there would be no disappointments."
"Nor much happiness," said Soubise.
Thus conversing, they rode on. But we must pass lightly over the
talk with which they enlivened the way, merely observing that
Lucette's cousin rose not inconsiderably in Edward's opinion as they
went. Nay, more: his manners were so graceful, his thoughts so just,
his conversation so varied, that the young Englishman could not but
feel pleased with his company and inclined to like himself. Still, in
the true English spirit, he said, in his own heart, "Oh, yes, he is very
charming now he is in a good humor. The devil is so when he is
pleased; but methinks I could conjure forth the horns and hoofs if I
were but to tell him who I am."
At length the scenes through which they passed became painfully
familiar to Edward's eye,—spots he had known well, cottages he had
visited, houses belonging to old friends of his family. The very trees
and shrubs and little water-courses seemed like old acquaintances
calling back times past and appealing to regret. He grew grave and
cold. The chilly feeling which had first fallen upon him not many
years before, but which had somewhat passed away during the last
few months, returned, and many memories, as ever, brought their
long train of sorrows with them.
Not far from Little Barford, a fine sloping lawn came down to the
road-side, separated from the highway merely by a thick, well-
trimmed hedge broken by some fine groups of trees; and, looking
up, a large square house with many windows, and a trim garden
terraced and ornamented with urns and statues, could be seen at
the distance of a quarter of a mile. There were several men in the
grounds engaged in various country-employments, and Edward said,
within himself, "He is taking care of the place, at all events."
At the same moment Soubise observed, "That is a fine chateau! Do
you know to whom it belongs, and what it is called? It is so long
since I was in this part of England that I forget the places."
"That is called Buckley Hall," replied Edward. "It belongs to Sir
Richard Langdale."
"How is that?" said Soubise, suddenly, as if something surprised him.
But Edward did not answer, and the prince merely said, "Let us pull
up for an instant and look at it."
It was torture to Edward to stay; but he paused for a moment, and
then said, "I fear I must go on, for I have still some distance to ride.
My road, too, lies here to the left."
"Ay?" said Soubise; "so does mine. Let us go on."
"Are you sure you are right?" asked Edward Langdale. "Huntingdon
is straight before you."
"Oh, I am right," answered the prince: "I turn just beyond Buckley."
Edward had nothing more to say; but he could not help beginning to
think that his adventure with the two blacksmiths seemed likely to
come over again. Somewhat quickening their pace, they rode on,
and Edward made an effort to cast off the melancholy mood which
had fallen upon him, and even the impression which the unsought
society of a man who had spoken of him in such insulting terms had
produced at first, and the conversation between him and Soubise
became lively and cheerful. Mile after mile passed; and at length,
after proceeding for more than an hour and a half, on a little bank
by the side of the river appeared an old church with its gray ivy-clad
tower and groups of yews in the churchyard. Beyond, at the distance
of some two or three hundred yards, was one of those fine antique
houses, built of stone, which were erected in the end of Elizabeth's
reign and in the earlier part of that of the most pompous and
conceited of kings. Thick walls, small square windows, little useless
towers, and somewhat peaked roofs, spoke a good deal of King
James. But the lawn, as soft as velvet, the groups of shrubs, and the
garden, well trimmed and swept even in the winter-time, told a tale
of more modern taste.
"I fear I shall have to quit you here, sir," said Edward, as they
approached the gate with its two massy stone pillars and large balls
at the top. "This is the end of my journey."
"What is the name of this place?" asked Soubise.
"Applethorpe," answered Edward,—"the residence of Dr. Winthorne."
"Ha?" said Soubise; "then we shall not part so soon. This is the end
of my journey also."
Edward could not refrain from turning round and gazing in his face
with a look of most profound surprise; but the prince made no
further remark, and, after pulling in their horses while one of the
servants dismounted and opened the gates they rode up to the large
arched door of the house. A heavy bell hanging outside soon
brought forth an old domestic, dressed in dark gray, who gazed
earnestly first at Soubise and then at Edward, both of whom had
sprung to the ground while he was opening the door. At first he
evidently recognised neither; but a moment after the light of honest
satisfaction brightened his countenance, and, holding forth his hand
to Edward, he exclaimed, "Oh, Master Ned, how glad I am to see
you, and how glad the doctor will be! He has been looking for you
for months. But he is not at home now, and may not come back for
an hour. But come in; come in. Every thing is ready for you. Your old
room is just as you left it,—not a book moved, nor a gun, nor a
fishing-rod: only when I went in to-day to dust the things, I saw the
ink had dried up in the horn, and was going to put in fresh this very
day."
Edward shook the old man warmly by the hand; and, turning to the
Prince de Soubise, he said, "If I understood you right, sir, you came
to visit Dr. Winthorne. He is out, the servant says; but I have interest
enough in this house to invite you to enter till his return. He will be
back in an hour, and happy, I am sure, to entertain you. But,
knowing my old preceptor's habits well, allow me to hint that it will
be necessary to send your attendants into the village, as I shall send
my servant; for, being a clergyman, he objects to have in his house
what he calls 'swash-buckler serving-men;' and his rule apply to all,
however high the quality of his guests."
Soubise smiled; and, ushering him into the library, Edward
proceeded, amidst the somewhat garrulous joy of the old footman,
to direct Pierrot to take the other men down to the village inn, to tell
the host there to attend on them well, "for Master Ned's sake," and
then to return as soon as might be with his saddle-bags.
The prince merely ordered his baggage to be brought up, directing
his men to take care of themselves, and seeming fully satisfied that
he would be a welcome guest. He took some books from the shelves
of the library, examined them cursorily, and put them back, saying,
"The good doctor seems to have improved much in worldly matters.
He has attained, apparently, the state he always desired,—
competency, and enough to have a good library. Can any one
imagine a man more happy?"
"Perhaps not," said Edward, gravely. "I believe circumscribed desires
and moderate fortunes attain the height of human felicity."
"Not so," said Soubise. "I believe every human life must be looked at
as an aggregate; and skilful would be the calculator who could
reduce to an exact sum how much joy and how much sorrow are
required to equivale a given portion of calm and unimpassioned
existence. All these things are as the individual views them. We have
nothing in this life by which to measure the real value of any object
but our own tastes. You may like a pearl better than a diamond; I
may esteem the flashing lustre of the one more than the calm
serenity of the other. That man is only happy who obtains what he
really desires. But here come our men, I see, with the baggage."
 CHAPTER XLVI.
The Prince de Soubise stood at the window of the library of
Applethorpe alone; for Edward had made an excuse to leave him,
not thinking himself bound to play the host in a house which was not
his, nor to act as the entertainer of a man whom he had some good
cause, as he thought, to dislike. Soubise was then past forty,
however, and he did not—as indeed who does in middle life?—look
upon trifles with the serious view which one takes of them in earlier
years. "Hasty and quick in quarrel" applies to small as well as great
things; and Heaven knows how much patience we acquire each day
by the mere habit of endurance. He received the young man's
apology in good part, then; and, while Edward Langdale went to
speak to every old servant and then to change his travel-stained
dress, he stood, as I have said, at the window and gazed forth upon
a scene to be viewed in no other country under the sky,—a home
scene of English life. It is probably of no age, of no time; for it is an
impress of the mind and character of the people. But I must not
dwell upon it. The chapter of descriptions has gone by. Soubise
gazed out, compared that which was before his eyes with that on
which they might have rested in his own country, admired what he
saw, and perhaps, in the desponding mood which certainly then
affected him, felt sorry that France had not so calm, so peaceful,
and so happy a look as an English country-village.
After he had continued gazing for some ten minutes, upon the road
before him appeared an elderly man upon a fine stout horse, with
clerical hat and cassock turned up, and a servant following him on a
still better beast. They both rode fast; and, though the first sat his
steed somewhat after the fashion of a sack of wheat, it was clear
that the saddle was quite familiar to him, and the slouching
shoulders and negligent air were more the consequences of perfect
ease and habit than of awkwardness. The servant pulled back the
gate: his master dashed through, and in a moment after Dr.
Winthorne was at the door.
The old footman ran forth to give him entrance, and a few words
passed, of which Soubise only heard the words, "Ned come back?
Tell the dear fellow to come down. A stranger? Well, we must see
strangers." And the door of the library opened.
Dr. Winthorne gazed at Soubise, and the prince at him, without any
sign of recognition as they approached each other. But suddenly the
reverend gentleman stopped, exclaiming, "God bless me! Monsieur
Soubise! On my life, sir, I am glad to see you. When did you come
over? How fares it with you? You are older by a good deal, but you
look well. I am right?—surely the Prince de Soubise?"
"The same, my good old friend," said the prince. "I am not surprised
you doubt, for I feel I am much changed. It is ten long years since
we met, and with me they have been stormy years."
"So I have heard," said the good doctor, "though news travels but
slowly in our poor country. But I have watched your noble struggles
as closely as I could; and I have felt great interest in them all,
though you—every one of you—made great mistakes. And now
Rochelle is lost. God help us! It is a sad case; but she could hold out
no longer; and that Mayor Guiton is a noble man."
"He is indeed," said Soubise; "and his character has risen in my
opinion by what has been told me by a young gentleman who came
hither with me——"
"Odds-my-life!" cried the old doctor, "my boy Ned!—Ned Langdale! I
must go, prince,—I must go and hug him. Sir, he is as fine a youth
as ever lived, and ought to be a great man. God send he may
escape it! But I have not seen him yet. Excuse me: I will be back in
a minute. Make yourself at home; make yourself at home. All shall
be prepared for you before you can say Amen."
With this somewhat unconnected speech, Dr. Winthorne left the
room, and in a few minutes returned with Edward Langdale, who
allowed himself to be introduced to the prince with cold ceremony.
"He says," observed Dr. Winthorne, "that somehow you have not
treated him well. But we will talk of that after supper. Every thing
should be explained between all people; but no explanation should
take place fasting. The humors are then in a bad condition; and, as
there is no chance in my house of people heating them by potations,
we will just calmly regulate them by wholesome food and moderate
drink, and then have a clear understanding."
"I am perfectly unconscious——" said the prince; but the doctor cut
him short, exclaiming, "After supper, after supper, my lord! Your
apartments are quite ready. Let me conduct you."
The old clergyman and the Protestant prince retired from the room,
and Dr. Winthorne was nearly half an hour absent. When he
returned, however, he shook Edward once more warmly by the
hand, saying, "Why, Ned, my boy, you are grown quite a man.
Heaven show us mercy! you have a beard an ell long. But now tell
me all that has happened to you. As to this man up-stairs, he is a
good man, a very good man,—hasty, but noble and generous,
steady in his friend-ships, true to his cause. There is some mistake
between you and him. He says your brother Richard wrote to him, or
visited him, or something, and he might have treated him with some
indignity; but he never saw or heard of you in his life till last night,
when he met you at an inn."
Edward smiled, saying, "He must have a short memory."
"Well, well," said Dr. Winthorne, "we will have it all after supper. Now
tell me every thing you have done and seen and suffered; for I
doubt not you have suffered too, my poor boy. We shall have plenty
of time if this prince takes as long to bedizen himself as he used to
do. He was a mighty fop in other years; but he has a more soldier-
like look now. Well, Ned, give me the whole story."
Edward Langdale willingly enough related succinctly what had
befallen him since he parted from the good doctor nearly two years
before. There was a good deal, indeed, he did not tell, for he knew
that the explanations required would be too long for the limited
space before him. Indeed, before even the abbreviated narrative
was brought to a close, the Prince de Soubise joined them, and they
retired into another chamber to supper.
The meal passed over in great cheerfulness; the wine was good, and
of that quality which parsons loved in those days, but all partook
moderately; and as soon as the servants had withdrawn—for supper
at that period of the world's history was served with very nearly the
same forms as dinner in the present times—Soubise bowed his head
to Edward Langdale, saying, in not very good English, "There must
be some mistake between us, sir. I should like to have it set right,
for your father was one of my dearest friends. We travelled long
together with this worthy minister; and I wish much to remove any
thing like coldness between myself and his son."
"I really do not know, Monsieur de Soubise," replied Edward, in
French, "what mistake there can be. But may I ask if in June of last
year you did not write a letter to your brother the Duc de Rohan, in
which you styled me an insolent varlet? The duke sent me the letter,
and my eyes, I think, cannot have deceived me."
"No, no!" cried Soubise. "Stay; let me remember. I applied that
term," he continued, more slowly, "to Sir Richard Langdale, your
father's eldest son, who, as I have been told and as I have still
reason to believe, had robbed you of your property,—of your
mother's as well as your father's inheritance. To the latter he might
have some claim: even that is doubtful. To the former he had none."
"Unfortunately, by the laws of this country he had," said Edward.
"But all this is past and over, and——"
"Stay, stay," said Soubise, interrupting him. "It is not all over yet: it
is the very cause of my coming here. I was a witness, sir, to the
marriage-contract—or settlement, as you call it here, I believe—
between your father and your mother, by which it was agreed that
all the property she possessed, not only at the time, but which might
descend to her from her uncle, should belong to her and descend to
her children. In his last letter, when he thought himself dying, good
old Clement Tournon informed me that this very property had been
taken from you by him whom I may well call your base-born brother.
Having done all that I had to do, and been disappointed in all,—
having seen the noble Buckingham die at my feet, and borne the
loss of Rochelle,—my first business was to come on here to see right
done if it could be done."
"There, Edward! there!" said Dr. Winthorne. "I told you he was noble
and true."
"I doubted it not, my dear friend," replied Edward. "But still the
words his Highness used were somewhat galling."
"They never were applied to you, upon my honor," said the prince.
"As far as I recollect now,—for it was a time of great hurry and
confusion,—I had heard that Richard Langdale, whose whole history
I knew as well as my daily service, was at the court of France
soliciting some place from his Majesty. My brother wrote to me,
mentioning only Monsieur de Langdale. Probably it was to you he
referred. Probably he was deceived as well as myself, although he
did not know so much of the circumstances as I did. My cousin left
his child with his dying breath to my charge, enjoining me strictly to
have her educated in the Protestant faith, and never to suffer her to
fall into the hands——"
"What!" exclaimed Dr. Winthorne, interrupting him,—"dear child?
little Lucette? How is the sweet where is she? Oh that I could see
her again for an hour! for she was an angel. Do you remember,
Edward, that you once had a little sister, and that when you were ill
of fever she disappeared?"
"Was that Lucette?" exclaimed Edward. "Remember her, my dear sir?
Oh, yes! But how can that be? her death killed my mother, I think.
Lucette my sister!" And he gazed down upon the table with a
bewildered mind and a chilly, painful feeling at the heart, such as he
never had experienced in life before. "I cannot comprehend," he
added. "Lucette my sister! My sister not dead!"
"No, no," said Dr. Winthorne. "Tell him all, my lord the prince.
Lucette is not your sister: she merely passed as such. Your father
and your mother took her in very early years to hide her from her
Roman Catholic relations in France, out of love and friendship for
this noble gentleman. Those relations were powerful here as well as
in the neighboring country; and at length they discovered where she
was, but Monsieur de Soubise came over and removed her, first to
the town of Brixham, where she remained some years, and thence
to France. I had some share in all this, too. But you are mistaken,
my son, about your mother's death. She grieved to lose her little
pet, and wept often and bitterly at her loss; but the origin of her
illness was a terrible fire which consumed your father's house when
you were very young. Then, exposure and injuries received before
she could escape sowed the seeds of that sad malady which, in this
land of ours, like Death's gardener, culls the sweetest and most
beautiful flowers to decorate the grave."
"Then she is not my sister?" exclaimed Edward. "She is not dead!
Thank God for that!"
It might be difficult for those who heard it to know which he thanked
God for most; and the exclamation produced a slight smile upon the
countenance of Dr. Winthorne.
"Methinks, prince," he said, "this young man must have met Lucette
since. You dog, you told me nothing of that."
But the Prince de Soubise was very grave. "Let us not talk of that
part of the subject to-night," he said. "I fear there are painful
conclusions before us. But, Mr. Langdale, my friendship for your
father and my deep gratitude to your saintly mother make me most
anxious to see you reinstated in her fine property. Let us consult
what can be done. I am here ready to swear I signed the deed as
witness with my own hand."
"That will not be sufficient," said Dr. Winthorne, with somewhat of a
smile on his countenance. "In this land we shall require the deed
itself. But let us ride over to-morrow to Buckley and see our old
friend Sykes, the hunch-backed attorney; for I cannot help thinking
that he knows something more than he will tell me. For the last six
months he has been keeping up the place at his own expense; for I
dare say you have heard, Edward, that no one has known any thing
of Sir Richard for more than twelve months. He draws no rents,
sends over no orders. His lawyer here has written and sent to Turin,
but no intelligence whatever can be procured; and many people
think that he is dead."
"It is very strange," said the Prince de Soubise. "But I have no belief
in the report of his death. Most likely he is wandering somewhere,
and does not wish the place of his abode to be known. He was
always very eccentric."
"Then you know him, my lord?" said Edward, who had not lately
mingled in the conversation; for some words which had fallen from
Soubise had saddened him.
"I have not seen him for many years," replied the prince; "but even
then he was as strange a boy as I ever saw. There was insanity in
the family of his mother, and some people thought that the child
would grow up an idiot. It was not so, however. Though he was very
strange, this strangeness never reached to madness. Fits of moody
gloom would come upon him, and he often would not speak a word
for hours. If he did, it would be with a bitter and supercilious tone,
very extraordinary in a mere child. Then, again, at times he would
fly into the most violent fits of passion, and then sink into
melancholy. The way I learned all this is easily explained. At your
father's request I took some charge of him after his mother's death
in the convent; but his behavior became so bad that I had to
relinquish the trust."
"You applied to him, a short time since," said Edward, "a somewhat
hard and unpleasant expression. You said that you might almost call
him base-born. Is it too much to ask that you would give me some
information on that point?"
"I know not well how to explain," replied Soubise, looking down
thoughtfully.
"His mother was a very light Italian woman, of a low, bad race. Your
father married her, beyond doubt, before this child was born; but it
was only just before, and that with half a dozen stilettos at his
throat; for they caught him alone with her and forced the marriage.
Almost as soon as it was over, he separated from her and she went
into a convent,—her relations spreading absurd stories that they had
caused the separation because your father was a Protestant. This
gained them some favor at the court of Rome, and one of them
obtained advancement in the Church, where, after leading a very
dissolute life, he was struck with remorse and retired into the most
austere seclusion. This is nearly all I know of the matter; but it was
this knowledge of the young man's birth, character, and connections
which made me use the term 'insolent varlet' which gave you so
much offence. I pledge you my honor, however, it was not intended
for you; and I should not have applied it, probably, to him, had I not
been in haste and irritated at the moment."
"Then I hope, my good lord," replied Edward, "that, as the
expression was not applied to me, I may look upon all the
sentiments and resolutions contained in that letter as unsaid also?"
"Do not press me to-night," said Soubise, very gravely. "I am afraid
if I speak now my reply will pain you. The house of Rohan is a proud
house, and I have much to think of. Give me a few days for
reflection, and I will meet you fairly. But in the mean time let us be
friends. Your father was the companion of my youth and my most
intimate associate; your mother, now a saint in heaven, was an
angel upon earth; and I would fain have their son's regard."
As he spoke, he held out his hand to the young man, who took it
respectfully; and shortly after the prince retired to rest.
 CHAPTER XLVII.
Though those were days of splendid cavalcades, and the
neighborhood of the royal place of Royston had rendered them not
infrequent some years before in that part of Huntingdonshire, it was
not often that such a party presented itself in the small village of
Buckley as that which was seen on the day after Edward's arrival.
First, there was Dr. Winthorne, on his tall, stout, Roman-nosed
horse, forming the centre of the group; then, on his left, Edward
Langdale, riding a wicked, fiery devil, which screamed and bit at the
approach of any other animal, but which he managed with grace
and ease. Then there was the Prince de Soubise on the doctor's
right, mounted on a powerful Norman charger and looking very
much the soldier and the prince. Behind them were three servants,
all well mounted and armed; and the whole formed a group which
attracted the attention of the villagers and made even the
blacksmith suspend the blows of his sledge-hammer to look at the
fine horses he longed to shoe.
There was a little, old, dusty house on the right-hand side of the
road as you came from Applethorpe toward the king's highway to
Huntingdon, with the gables turned toward the street, a wooden
porch carved in curious shapes, and some five or six descending
steps. On one of the pillars of the porch was hung a curious sort of
shield painted with various colors,—a quaint emblem of the holy
Roman empire; and underneath was written, with no great regard to
symmetry either in the size or shape of the letters, the words
"Martin Sykes, Notary Public, Attorney-at-Law, Solicitor in his most
gracious Majesty's Court of Chancery, &c. &c. &c.,"—which etceteras
were explained and commented upon by a long inscription on the
other pillar.
Before that little porch Dr. Winthorne pulled in his rein and
floundered off his horse, and Soubise and Edward Langdale
followed. In the first room on the left hand they found three or four
clerks; and at a separate desk, which he could not have overtopped
without assistance, was seated a little old man with very keen
features and a back and chest which assumed a menacing posture in
regard to the head.
"Ah, doctor," he said, slipping off the high stool which raised him up
to the desk, "what brings you so early to Buckley? Odds-my-life!
Why, I can hardly believe my eyes! Master Ned grown into a bearded
man of war! My dear boy, how are you? Oh, how I have missed you!
—missed the trout in the month of May,—missed the partridges in
September,—missed the snipes and the woodcocks in the cold
weather, when I have my annual abscess in the lungs,—missed thy
handsome face at all those times when a kind word in a youthful
voice cheers an old man like me!"
Edward shook him warmly by the hand, and asked after all his
ailments kindly, but speedily turned to their companion, saying, "Mr.
Sykes, this is the Prince de Soubise, an old friend of both my
parents."
"I remember him well," said Mr. Sykes. "That is to say, I do not
remember him at all. I mean, in person I do not remember him, for
he might as well be Goliath of Gath as Prince de Soubise, so far as
any identification on my part could go; but I remember quite well a
young gentleman of that name, in purfled silk philimot velvet laced
with gold, slashed velvet breeches, and a sword as long as a
barbecuing-spit by his side, being present at your father's wedding
and witnessing the marriage-contract."
"He has got me exactly," said Monsieur de Soubise. "I have had, Mr.
Notary, to take to lighter but more serviceable weapons since; but, if
my person is so much changed that you cannot remember me, there
are plenty of witnesses here to swear to whom I am; and I expect in
a few days my good friend Monsieur Clement Tournon, syndic of the
goldsmiths of Rochelle, who made and brought over a set of jewels
for my friend's bride, and who saw me witness the contract with his
own eyes. He remembers the whole deed, he says; for it was read
over to us before the signature."
"He will be an important witness, sir," said Martin Sykes; "and your
Highness will be more so. It is all coming right, as I thought it
would," he continued, turning to Dr. Winthorne and rubbing his thin,
bony hands. "Somewhat long we have been about it; but step by
step we are making way. Every thing takes time, doctor,—even a
sermon, as the poor people here know well. The great difference
between a lawsuit and a sermon is, that during the first the people
sleep often and sleep badly, and during the second they sleep once
and they sleep well. Now, Master Ned, I calculate that we shall get
to the end of this suit and have a decree in our favor—let me see:
you are about twenty, are not you?—in about forty-nine years and
seven months." He paused a single instant, and rubbed his hands,
and then added, with a smile slightly triumphant, "That is to say, if
we cannot get the original settlement. But I think we shall get it,
Ned, my boy. I think I can guess where it is. It is most likely badly
damaged; but just give me sufficient of it left to show some of the
signatures and the date, and then come in these gentlemen as
witnesses to prove what it originally contained. Oh, we will make a
fine little case of it! But parties: we want parties,—somebody to fight
us,—Master Ned."
"But if the fight is to last so long as you have said, my dear friend,"
remarked Edward Langdale, "and I am only to succeed when I am
sixty-nine years and seven months old, I think I had better not begin
the battle."
"Ay, but you forget the if," said Martin Sykes, with a laugh. "An if
makes every thing in law. It is as potent as 'any thing hereinbefore
contained to the contrary notwithstanding,' or 'always provided
nevertheless,' or any other of those sweet phrases with which we
double up the sense of our documents or give a sweet and polite
contradiction to what we have just been saying the moment before.
As to the battle, my dear young friend, it has begun already. Acting
on your behalf, as your next friend, I have managed to get
possession of Buckley, have served Sir Richard's lawyer and agent
with all sorts of processes,—some sixteen or seventeen, I think,—
ejectments, quo warrantos, rules nisi, and others; and the poor fool,
who is nothing at all unless he has a Londoner at his back, has let
me have very nearly my own way, having no orders, not knowing
where to get any, and standing like a goose under the first drops of
a thunder-shower, with his eyes staring and his mouth half open."
"But where is the contract?" asked Monsieur de Soubise, in French.
"If I understood him aright, he said he knew where it was."
Edward interpreted, feeling very sure that good Mr. Sykes was not
very abundantly provided with French; but the little lawyer shook his
head, saying, "No, no; I did not profess to know absolutely where it
is; but there is one not very far from here who I think does know. I
think he does,—I am sure he does. He tells me a box of valuable
papers were lost at the great fire; and he shakes his head, and looks
wise, and talks of its being 'made worth his while.' He is the most
avaricious old devil in the world. It is a curious thing, Ned, all
sextons are avaricious. They deal so much with dust and ashes that
they learn to like the only sort of dross which does not decay when
you bury it. He is a very old man now, and could not enjoy for more
than a few months any thing he had, were it millions."
"What! you are not speaking of the old sexton at Langley, are you?"
asked Edward,—"the man with the lame hip? He used to say he got
that injury at the fire; and my father gave him many a guinea for it.
I used to give him shillings and sixpences, too, to make him tell me
all about the fire, till one day I caught him taking away a groat I had
given to a poor child, and then I knocked him over the shoulder with
my fishing-rod. He has never liked me after, but hobbles away into
his cottage whenever he sees me, and shuts the door tight."
What there was in this little anecdote which peculiarly struck good
Mr. Sykes I cannot tell, but he fell into a fit of thought, still standing,
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