Candide in India
Letters from India, 1829-1832. By Victor Jaquemont. Selected and Translated, with an Introduction, by Catherine Alison Phillips. (Macmillan. 21s.) THE author of these letters inherited from his father, an ideologue and disciple of Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy; an interest in precise ideas and impressions. It was this perhaps, together with his natural charm and a certain simplicity which earned him the nickname of Candide, that endesiied Jaquemont to Stendhal, when they met at the radical salons of the Restoration. Stendhal says that, as a connoisseur sees a fine horse in a young colt, so he saw in the young Jaquemont a man of the greatest. distinction).- He admired him enough to send him manuscripts to criticise. They returned with detestable, style de porlier, written in the margin. But Stendhal confessed that at least Jaquemont had taught him not to talk so much about himself in company. Together, they went to the Opera des Bouffes to hear Pasta and Schiassetti singing under. the direction of Rossini, and after- wards they visited them and took them home to their hotel opposite the Bibliotheque Nationale. Both were unlucky ; Pasta preferred to Stelidlial the charming Neapolitan lover she maintained on the second storey of the hotel; Jaquemoit's passion for Schiassetti reached the seventh crystallisatgui, and when she returned to Italy he grew morbid and melancholy, and he was sent to the United States of America to recuperate. There in 1828, though he had not yet passed his final medical examination, he was invited by the Jardin des Plantes to make a botanical and geological survey of India. He accepted, made a short stay in London where he was given valuable letters of introduction, and on May 25th, 1829, landed in Calcutta. In Anglo-Indian society he was an immediate success. The English, he said, are prevented, by frigidity and affectation, from knowing the 'pleasureS.Of friendship or con- versation ; to them a man who is simple, natural, and intelli- gent is a delightful novelty. - He enjoyed himself exceedingly, and made a firm friend of the Liberal Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, who liked him both for his character and his radical opinions. For Lady Grey, the wife of the Lord Chief Justice, he crystallised several times. He admired the political talents of the English, but he was repelled by the idiotic luxury and ostentation of their lives. Every young lieutenant in India, he says, never forgets that he has sacrificed home and country for a God-forsaken. desert, and in return exacts a standard- of comfort and obedience that would never- bee-his at-home;' lhocks:_sitz.Vw:romiatuy's: sgrqufts -Ow -
travel laboriously across deserts, loaded with baggage, in order that, under blazing heat, surrounded by sand, they may eat at just the same times, from just the same plate and linen, as at Brooks's or at Bath. Jaquemont could not afford, and did not envy, such imbecility. He travelled light, with few servants, under great difficulties and in much danger, but he crossed the Himalayas and entered Tibet, and, with the help of Lord William Bentinck, even entered the proscribed
territories of the terrible Ranjit Singh, " the Lion of Bengal," who liked Jaquemont so much that he offered him the vice- royalty of Kashmir. The collections he made, and the journals he wrote, gave his travels a permanent scientific value : his- torically, his letters are no less valuable, for he observed human nature and political organisation in India with an eye naturally sharp and sharpened by friendship with Stendhal and Merimee. And it is charming to notice that, even on the frontiers of the Celestial Empire, Jaquemont still preserves the- tricks of speech of Beylisme. " Puff, happy few," recur : in Tibet he met a brigand and hoped for an adventure, but " betas," he wrote to Stendhal, using a favourite word, " mon brigand a fait fiasco."
On the way out to India, he had spoken to the captain of his ship of five books he would write that would make him famous ; but on December 7th, 1832, after three weeks' intense suffering, he died of pneumonia in Bombay, and was buried with the modest epitaph he had composed : " Victor Jaquemont, born in Paris on August 8th, 1801, died at Bombay on December 7th, 1832, after travelling in India for three and a half years."
His travels indeed have prevented him from being forgotten. " Le voyage" Stendhal said of him, "est la settle porte que la vanile a laisee °merle a la verite," but it was written mali- ciously, when Stendhal thought Jaquemont vainglorious for despising Napoleon. Yet it is true that, on his journey, the door is never closed to truth. His correspondence has been collected and published several times, once with an intro- duction by his friend Merimee, and they preserve both the intellectual vigour and the personal charm he had in life. Baudelaire, reading his letters, compared him with Delacroix.
The present volume is an excellently edited and translated selection of the letters written from India : they make an admirable book which is worth reading both for the pleasure of meeting Jaquemont and for his fascinating account of India. Much of what he says of it and its rulers under the East India
Previous page
