Ii is odd enough that one of the prettiest byways
of French history, though in the Revolutionary time, should wind through the lanes and woods of Surrey. Dorking and its environs were already associated with the memory of Rousseau, when in the autumn of 1792 the neighbourhood of Mickleham and the valley of the Mole was startled and deeply interested by the news that several families of French Cmigris, all bearing names more or less distinguished, were about to settle there. The welcome these unfortunate people received was not unanimous. The owner of the cottage at Westhumble, into which Madame de Broglie and several of her friends crowded with some difficulty, was anxious about his rent. Mrs. Phillips, who then, as fate would have it, was living in a cottage at Mickleham, at the foot of Norbury Park, wrote to her sister, Miss Burney, that it was supposed these "French papishes " would never pay. However•, the landlord had already yielded to their entreaties before Mr. Lock, of Norbury Park, the kindest and most hospitable of men, wrote to say that he would be answerable for the rent. The arrival of Madame de Broglie and her party seems to have been the first, though not the most important, that Mrs. Phillips had to chronicle.
Juniper Hall was—and still is—a good-sized house standing near the main road between Mickleham and Burford Bridge, about three-quarters of a mile from the cottage, now altered and enlarged, which Miss Constance Hill has been able to identify as the home of Captain and Mrs. Phillips, where Fanny Burney met the romance of her life. Juniper Hall had then, after some vicissitudes, come into the hands of a Mr. Jenkinson, a rich lottery-office keeper, and seems to have beeii known less by its own name than as " Jenkinson's." Here assembled the most delightful group of French emigrants that ever entertained English country society. They were none the less charming because some of them at least did not hold the extreme Legitimist views of the party of the Princes : they were Constitutionalists, friends of La Fayette; one dares to say that their generous ideas would have been those of the unhappy Louis XVI. himself, if he and
• Juniper Halt : a Rendervous of Certain illustrious Personages during the French Revolution, Including Alexandre d'Arblay and Fanny Burney. By Constance Hill. Illustrations by Ellen G. Hill, and Reproductions in Photo- gravure, etc. London: John Lane. 121s. net.] is people could have been allowed to trust and understand each other. There was the Comte de Narbonne, lately War Minister; the Duo de Montmorency, who had set the example in 1789 of renouncing titles and privileges ; M. de Jaucourt, an active Member of the Legislative Assembly ; the Marquise de is Chatre and her young son ; last, not least interesting. Comte Alexandre d'Arblay, who had been La Fayette's Adjutant-General, and had come from Holland to share the exile of his most intimate friend, Narbonne. Mrs. Phillips's letters give a delightful idea of M. d'Arblay, who seems to have had all the attraction, the gay simplicity, the absolute natural- ness, the frank charm, of the best type of Frenchman. From the first, it was to him especially that the English neighbours lost their hearts ; his light-hearted friendliness was irresistible, and he lost nothing by the modesty which always led him to place himself in the background where his companions, especially M. de Narbonne, were concerned.
Miss Fanny Burney joined the Mickleham party in January, 1793, by which time Madame de la Chare had left " Junipere," and other distinguished exiles—Madame de Stael, the Princesse d'Henin, Lally-Tollendal, Malouet, occa- sionally Talleyrand—had joined the little colony. The house was at this moment a centre for many of the refugees in the intervals of their restless projects, and the execution of the King had thrown a new gloom over its pleasant society. Miss Burney had already enjoyed some intercourse with French people during a visit to her old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Young, at Bradfield Hall in Suffolk, the Due de Liancourt having settled himself at Bury St. Edmunds in order to be near Arthur Young, who, by the by, was now " a severe penitent of his democratic principles." (This result of the first years of the Revolution is not always remembered by Arthur Young's admirers.) But Miss Burney did not quite surrender her heart to the French till she arrived at Mickle- ham, first as a visitor to Mr. and Mrs. Lock, then to her sister Mrs. Phillips. From there she writes : " There can be nothing imagined more charming, more fascinating, than this colony ; between their sufferings and their agremens they occupy us almost wholly." No one will wonder at this, who at all realises what effect Madame de Stael and Talleyrand, with their genius and brilliancy, to say nothing of their gentler, more sweetly mannered companions, must have had on a quiet English neighbourhood in 1793. And from the very first there was the charm of M. d'Arblay's delightful character and fine literary taste,—such it appeared, at least, to the author of Evelina.
She was now a woman of forty, young in heart and attrac- tive in appearance, lately set free from her five years of life at Court, the hardships and disagreeables of which have been, we think, a little exaggerated. Miss Hill gives a very pretty portrait of her, never before reproduced : a charming speci- men of the type of face which seems to belong to the eighteenth century. It is easy to believe that Miss Burney was in every sense of the word the most sympathetic person the French exiles had met in England. Gentle by nature, with a delicate appreciation of other 'people's wit, she probably knew how to listen, and this talent is valued by French talkers. There can, indeed, be no real conversation without it. Miss Hill may have been thinking of Mlle. de Lespinasse, for instance, when she says :—"It seems to us that the charm of the old French salons was due perhaps as much to the listeners as to the talkers."
Anyhow, the colony at Juniper Hall fell in love with Miss Burney. Madame de Stael, not unlike Mrs. Thrale in the ardent eagerness of her sudden fancies and friendships, not satisfied with the ordinary intercourse of neighbours, insisted that Fanny must come and stay with her at Juniper Hall. This charming plan was frustrated by Fanny's prudent father. Dr. Burney had heard some gossip—unfounded, we believe—about Madame de Stael and M. de Narbonne. He was perhaps reached and influenced by the talk of Surrey neighbours, some of whom, probably jealous of Mrs. Phillips's intimacy with the French exiles, seem to have regarded them from an unamiable point of view. It was very natural, and just what might happen now in a country neighbourhood. One of these ladies, a Miss F—, called one day on Mrs. Phillips and " very shortly and abruptly said, So, Mrs. Phillips, we hear you are to have Mr. Nawbone and the other French company to live with you. Pray is it so ? " Dr. Burney had his way, and Fanny, to Madame de Stairs
hardly disguised indignation—" Your sister might be a girl of fourteen"—did not pay the proposed visit. But his inter- ference availed nothing, as everybody knows, in a far more important matter. Fanny's French and English readings with the fascinating Alexandre d'Arblay ended in the marriage which startled all her friends, but was justified by years of happiness.
So much for the story which forms the chief subject of Miss Hill's agreeable book. Her materials are mostly drawn from the letters of the two sisters, Fanny and Susan, but she does not confine herself to Juniper Hall and the valley of the Mole, or to the personal adventures of her principal characters. We have to thank her for many interesting and informing glimpses of the history and society of the time. The volume begins, indeed, in the scenes from which Madame de Stael and her friends escaped to their Surrey refuge, and the con- trast is a telling one between Revolutionary Paris and the quiet Mickleham lanes. One of the book's chief merits—a great one—is that it is alive. Miss Hill has herself keenly realised, and makes us realise, that bright little alien society whose voices, gay in spite of past and future terror and trouble, seem to her to sound still along the roads and country paths with which she is familiar.
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