About My Father's Business

WITH THE CHILDREN'S CHILDREN

That great invading French army of nobles, gentry, artists, traders, handicraftsmen, of which some account has already been given, was added to from time to time, even as lately as the Revolution, and the restoration of the dynasty after the downfall of Napoleon, when a strange reaction against the Protestants was commenced, partly as a pretence for concealing political animosity. The department of the Gard was once more the scene of horrible atrocities, against which Lord Brougham invoked the aid of the English Parliament, and obtained the help of Austrian bayonets to protect the people, who were being murdered, tortured, or outraged, in defiance of feeble local authorities. But by this time there was a new generation of the first great Anglo-French colony in London. Spitalfields had grown to the dimensions of a township. Bethnal had begun to lose its greenness. There was, as there still is, a remarkable settlement about Soho. "Petty France" was as well known as the exhibition of needlework in Leicester Square, or Mrs. Salmon's wax figures in Fleet Street.

Those poor refugees who fled to escape from the horrors of Sainte Guillotine, or the ruthless cruelties at Nismes, came to brethren many of whom had never seen the glowing valleys and golden fields of Languedoc, whence their forefathers escaped only with life and hands to work. They had preserved their national characteristics; they attended churches and chapels where the pastors still spoke their native tongue, and where they had established schools for their children; but they had settled down to a quiet, though a busy life, in the heart of the great workshop of the world, and only a few of them – principally the gentry, some of whom had regained a portion of their property – felt frequent or urgent impulses to return. More than a hundred and twenty years had elapsed since the "Royal Bounty" had been expended in the relief of the 27,000 émigrés who yet were without any permanent refuge for the destitute, the sick, the aged, and the insane among their number. This was in 1688, and it was not till nearly twenty-eight years afterwards that any regular institution was organized. The earlier refugees had become aged or had died, after having obtained such temporary help as could be afforded by subscriptions or the large benefactions of their more wealthy fellow-countrymen. Still, the later emigrations increased the number of applicants for permanent relief. At last, in 1718, a great concourse of French refugees assembled in a chapel which formed a special portion of a building only just completed, but which had already received the dignity of forming the subject of a Royal charter granted by His Majesty King George I. to his "right trusty and right well-beloved" cousin, Henry de Massue, Marquis de Ruvigny, Earl of Galloway, and a number of trusty and well-beloved gentlemen, all naturalized refugees, who made the first governor and directors of the "Hospital for Poor French Protestants and their descendants residing in Great Britain;" otherwise known as the French Hospital, but soon to be spoken of with simple pathetic brevity as "La Providence."

The idea of founding such a charity was due to a distinguished refugee in Holland – no less a personage than M. de Gastigny, Master of the Hounds to Prince William of Orange; a ruddy, jovial-looking gentleman withal, whose portrait, should you go to see it, will set you wondering whether he could ever have been classed among the "sour sectaries" to whom it was the fashion to attribute a disregard of social pleasures. A bequest of a thousand pounds sterling from the bluff keeper of the kennels was to be divided into equal sums – £500 for the building, and the interest of the remaining £500 to be spent on its maintenance.

Not a very adequate provision, truly, for any such purpose; but sufficiently suggestive to set the more prosperous members of the great Anglo-French colony to increase the amount. The astute Master of the Hounds must surely have foreseen this result when he left this legacy to the management of the trustees of the already existing relief fund, still miscalled "the Royal Bounty." They exhibited that prudence in money matters which is a French characteristic, and let the thousand pounds accumulate for eight years, after which a general subscription was invited from successful merchants and traders, while with a just appreciation of the benefits which had been conferred by these good citizens on the land of their adoption, some wealthy Englishmen added their contributions to the general fund.

Thus it came about, that a piece of land was purchased in the Golden Acre – a queer old half-countrified precinct of St. Giles, Cripplegate – that a building was erected for the reception of eighty poor persons, that a charter was granted, and that the new charitable association was consecrated in the new chapel by Philippe Menard, the minister of the French Church of St. James's and secretary of the enterprise.

This was, indeed, something worth working for. The aged or afflicted poor among the refugees were no longer mere mendicants living on precarious alms. Out of their abundance the more prosperous gave cheerfully. In 1736 another adjoining site was purchased, and another side of the great open quadrangle of garden ground was built upon, so that by 1760 the "Providence" numbered 230 inmates. This, however, was its culminating point of usefulness. Religious persecution had diminished, and at length may be said to have ceased altogether. Even as early as 1720 only 5000 persons required relief from the "Bounty," so that eventually the trustees were enabled to devote part of it to the assistance of those who fled from the Revolution – many of whom were the descendants of those who had been the persecutors of the Protestants. The great industrial colony, prudent, temperate, and industrious, had almost grown beyond its earlier needs – and all that it required was that some adequate provision should be made for infirm or aged men and women, who being widowed or unmarried, and without means of support, required a refuge in which they might peacefully end their days. The same causes which had diminished the number of applicants had also reduced the amount of current subscriptions, so that some portion of the building was removed, as being no longer necessary, and in order to secure a sufficient endowment an Act of Parliament was obtained, empowering the directors to let their land on building leases. By that time the neighbourhood was known not as "the Golden Acre," but as St. Luke's, and on the ground once purchased by the Marquis de Ruvigny and his trusty and well-beloved companions, grew Radnor Street, Galway Street, Gastigny Place, and part of Bath Street, while the number of inmates was reduced to sixty – that is to say, about twenty men and forty women, all of whom were to be above sixty years of age, of French extraction, and professing the Protestant religion. It was a queer old range of building, that retreat; pleasant enough, perhaps, when as a rather blank series of red brick houses, it looked across its own formal walled garden to the pleasant fields and open country, but strangely silent, and with a crumbling, dreary look about it, when the lunatic asylum of St. Luke's dominated all the surrounding tenements of a crowded, sordid neighbourhood. Only the initiated could easily find the little low black door that opened in the bare wall, and led to the large irregular space, which was laid out in weedy beds and stony borders, distinguished by an air of decay rather than of production – especially where in certain dank corners a tangle of sapless stalks and tendrils indicated some faintly hopeful attempt to rear an arbour, in which persons of robust imagination might fancy they were sheltered from impending blacks that issued from the manufactory chimneys close by. The visitor to this out-of-the-way corner of the great city, seeing the old people walking up and down the paved causeway in front of the row of crooked-paned lower windows, or airing themselves at the doorsteps, might be excused for the fancy that they had the imaginative faculty of children; and were expected to "make believe" a good deal before they could quite reconcile themselves to the notion that this dingy area of quadrilateral plots and paths, in which the wet stood in small puddles, was ever a "pleasaunce" gay with garden blooms, and smelling of knotted marjoram and fragrant thyme. Yet there were still evidences of the invincible cheerfulness of the old French nature, among the old creatures with faces streaked like winter apples, and hands which, even though they trembled, were swift of gesture and of emphasis.

There were old fellows there who had still about them indications of true comeliness and grace that distinguished them from all vulgar surroundings; – ancient gentlemen, who would go out on wet days to sweep away any rainpools that might lie before the doors of the old ladies, and so besmirch an otherwise immaculate shoe. It should be remembered, too, that there was no livery there. Those who had some one to help them to the garb of gentility wore what pleased them; those who were dependent on the charity for clothing, were neither bound in one pattern, nor condemned to the uniform of poverty. Neat or lively cotton prints, or warm stuff gowns, with proper hose and caps and kerchiefs, for the women; plain Oxford mixture, black, steel grey, or brown, for the men, and each one measured for his suit. Those who entered there were not the recipients of a dole grudgingly conceded. It was no poorhouse, but the "Providence." Only eleven years ago there were some evidences of the old meaning of the place in the remnants of the antique furniture which adorned the queer rooms. They were not wards or dormitories, but veritable bedrooms; and each one had its own peculiarities, even in the bedsteads with spindle posts and dimity hangings, the boxes and cupboards, and special chairs which distinguished it from the rest. Some of these things had evidently been heirlooms either of the institution or of the individual; and, indeed, the preservation of individuality was a cheerful feature of the place, despite its dim and somewhat dreary surroundings.

The Board Room was, in its way, one of the most extraordinary apartments in London: with its tables supported by a tangled puzzle of legs, its high-backed, polished chairs with leather seats, worn till they reminded one of the cover of an antique ledger bound in unfinished calf; its wonderful old black-framed prints representing the meetings of the Huguenots in the Clerk's field in the times when men and women carried their lives in their hands, and dragoons rode congregations down and slashed them with sabres as they fell. Its dimly-seen portraits of the noble, broad-browed, dark-eyed Ruvigny (the first governor), who refused to go back to France even at the invitation of the King; of the gentle Pastor Menard, with high, capacious forehead, and calm, strong mien; of hale, shrewd, ruddy Gastigny; and of some men of later date, with Frenchman written in every line of their finely-marked faces.

The little room set apart as a chapel – a barely-furnished place enough, with desk and raised platform and plain seats – was venerable because of all the meaning that lay in its studied absence of all ornament, and because of the significance it must once have had to the sad-eyed men who crowded into it, some of them thinking, perhaps, how it had come about that they could stand there in peace and without a hand upon the hilt of a sword.

There were, even at that later time, old men and women in the dim old building who could repeat family legends of the emigration – for they lived to a great age, these French folk, many of them being still alert of eye and ear, and foot, even though they had heard the click of the shuttle and the rattle of the loom eighty years before.

Some of them have survived the old place itself; for while they are in a new home, the ancient building has changed, if even it be not altogether dismantled. The leases paid good interest, and eight years ago a new French hospital arose – away from the dingy old precinct of the Golden Acre.

To see this later "Providence" aright, you must come through the very heart of that neighbourhood which was once the great Silk Colony, thread the bye-ways of Poverty Market, note the tall silent houses where the looms no longer rattle, nor the sharp whirr of the shuttle stirs cage-birds to sing; pass across the debatable land lying on the edge of Shoreditch, where human beings live in sties built in the backyards of other houses, in streets that are still with the blank silence of misery and want. You should walk amidst pigeon and dog fanciers; call in at certain dingy, slipshod taverns, where at night a slouching company will meet to hear bullfinches pipe for wagers, and where starving men and women stand and drink away the pence that are all too few to buy food for the starving brood at home, and so are flung upon the sloppy counter in exchange for the drugged drink that feels like food and fire in one. Through Bethnal Green, with its "townships" and its "Follies," extending in sordid rows of tenements built to one dreary pattern. Over districts which, only a few years ago, were fields and open spaces, leading to farm lands and hedgerows, and so away to the great expanse of marsh land where the dappled kine wade knee-deep in the lush pastures, and the stunted pollards stand like patient fishermen upon the river's brink.

Yes, the present "French Hospital" – New Providence – was built ten years ago in the border-land beyond the Weavers' Garden, that great garden and pleasure-ground known as Victoria Park. It is the only garden left to the descendants of those old craftsmen who once dwelt in houses every one of which had its gay plot of flowers, its rustic arbour, or its quaint device of grotto-work, built up of oddly-shaped stones and pearl-edged oyster-shells. Do you think there is now no remnant of the old French folk left? Come for a stroll among the grand beds and plantations of this East-end playground, and you shall see. On holidays and alas! on those days when (to use the expressive term handed down from prosperous times) the weaver is "at play" – that is to say, waiting for woof and weft, and so wiling away the sad and often hunger-bringing hours – you will see him, with his keen well-cut face, his dark appreciative eye, his long delicate hands, his well-brushed, threadbare coat and hat; and the mark of race is plainly to be noted in his intensity of look and his subdued patient bearing. He comes of a stock which had it not been of the hardiest and the most temperate and enduring in the world, would have disappeared a century ago. On Sunday mornings, when the bells are sounding round about him, he is to be met with lingering (with who shall say what inner sense of worship) by the strange shrubs and flowering plants, or standing with a pathetic look of momentary satisfaction on his lean, mobile face, to mark the rare glow and gush of colour made by the blooms in a "ribbon" device of flowers on a sunny border by a dark background of cedar. But come and see what his forefathers might have called, in their Scripture phraseology, "the remnant of the children of Israel;" the old inmates of that French Hospital founded so long ago when De Ruvigny was the "beloved cousin" of George I., and Philippe Menard preached at St. James's; when the Duchess de la Force brought donation after donation to the work, and Philippe Hervart, Baron d'Huningue gave £4,000, all in one splendid contribution, to the building fund. Could they have seen (who knows that they have not?) this great French château rising beyond the park palings in a neighbourhood fast filling with houses, but still open to the air that blows from the Weavers' Garden and from the great expanse of land leading towards the forest, they would have recognised the familiar style of those grand mansions which in France succeeded the castles of the feudal nobility when Henry Quatre was king. The high-pointed roof with its irregularly picturesque lines, the quaint towers and spires, the slate blue and purple, and rosy tints of colour in slope and wall and gable; the various combinations of form and hue changing with every point of view, make this modern copy of the old French château a wonderful feature in any landscape, and the unaccustomed visitor seeing it as it stands there in its own ornamental ground, surrounded by a quaint wall decorated in coloured bands, wonders what can be the meaning of a building so full of suggestion; while if he be of an imaginative turn, he may fall into a daydream when he peers through the gate that stands by the porter's lodge.

But let us pass through this gate, and so up to the entrance-hall, and we shall seem to leave behind us not only the Weavers' Garden, but most things English. The hall itself, paved with encaustic tile, leads to a flight of broad, shallow steps, beneath an arched ceiling of variegated brick and two screen arches. These steps conduct us at once to a central corridor, extending for the entire length of the building, and rising to the greatest height of the open roof of timber with its lofty skylights. In front of us is a double stone staircase, one branch being for the old ladies, the other for the men; and immediately at the foot of the former division is the entrance to the refectory, a large handsome dining-hall, where, at two long tables, this wonderful company assemble, only the very infirm having their meals carried to the upper ward, where they are waited on by paid attendants. Separate staircases are provided for the servants of the establishment, whose rooms are in the tower above the main wards – or rather, let us say, principal apartments, for they are not so much wards as a series of twenty-two large bedrooms, linen-rooms, and two bath-rooms. The steward of the hospital, a venerable gentleman with the courteous air and speech of some seneschal of olden time, has also his own apartments, reached by a third stair, his sitting-room and office occupying a space close to the entrance. On the right of the main staircase and at the end of the corridor is the ladies' sitting-room, a fine high-windowed light and lofty place, admirably warmed, as indeed all the building is, and so furnished that at each large square table four old ladies can sit and have not only ample space for books or needlework, but on her right hand each can open a special separate table-drawer with lock and key, wherein to keep such waifs and strays – shreds, patches, skeins, and unconsidered trifles – as children and old women like to accumulate. There is another day-room beside this, and a similar, though not quite so large an apartment is provided for the men, both rooms being furnished with sundry books and a few sober periodicals of the day.

It must not be forgotten though that many of the old gentlemen have grown accustomed to the use of tobacco, and here in the basement is a smoking-room, quite out of the way of the ordinary sitting and dining-rooms, and not far from the laundry and drying-rooms, which form an important part of the establishment.

But, hush! there is a hymn sounding yonder in the refectory; a hymn sung by voices, many of which are yet fresh and clear, though the singers number more than eighty years of life, and of life that has often been hard and full of heaviness.

It is the grace before meat, and the hot joints, with the fresh vegetables from their own garden, have just come up from the big kitchen by means of a lift to the serving-room.

There are no servants to wait at table, and the family dinner-party is a private one, inasmuch as it is the custom here for the most active of the inmates to agree among themselves who shall be butler, or beaufetière, for each day during the week. So the dinner-time goes pleasantly and quickly, the meat, the vegetables, and the capital household beer, of which each man has a pint twice a day, and each woman half a pint, being the only articles that require serving.

The good old-fashioned family custom of everybody having his or her own teapot is observed here. A great gas-boiler stands on one side the refectory, and a row of convenient lockers on the other; and each inmate has tea and coffee from the stores, while bread and butter are also served out for consumption according to each individual fancy, and not in rations at each meal time. Thus those old ladies and gentlemen who have spending money, or friends to bring them some of the little luxuries that they so keenly appreciate, can add a relish to their breakfast or to the evening beer.

We will not go in while they are at dinner, for there are those here yet who "might have been gentlefolk" but for the mutability of mortal affairs. Stay! here come the old ladies, with old-fashioned curtseys, which are more than half a bow, and not a mere vulgar "bob." There is no mistaking some of their faces. You may see their like in French pictures, or in old French towns still. Some of them with eyes from which the fire had not yet died out; with deftly-moving fingers; with a quick, springy step; with an inherited remnant of the French moue and shrug, as they answer a gentle jest about their age and comeliness.

"Eighty-four; and I don't know how it is, but I don't seem to see so well in the dark as I used. When I went out to see my brother-in-law, I was quite glad he came part of the way home with me."

"Turned eighty, but I can't get upstairs as I used to do."

"You speak French, madame?"

"Pas beaucoup, monsieur;" this from one of the only two actual French women now in the establishment, the rest being lineal descendants only. The oldest, who is now going quietly and with a very pretty dignity out of the refectory, is ninety-four, and can not only hear a low-toned inquiry, but answers it in a soft, pleasant voice. She bears the weight of years bravely, but the burden has perhaps been heavy; and she speaks in a mournful tone, as one looking forward to a mansion among the many – to a house not made with hands, may sometimes speak when even the grasshopper becomes a burden.

As to a young person of sixty-five or thereabout, nobody regards her as having any real business to mention such a trifling experience of life; while of the men – most of whom seemed to have filed off for their pipe or newspaper – one remains finishing his dinner, for he has been on duty for the day, and is now winding up with a snack of bread-and-butter and the remainder of his mug of porter – a stoutly-built, hale, stalwart-looking gentleman who, sitting there without his coat, which hangs on the back of a chair, might pass for a retired master mariner, or a representative of some position requiring no little energy and endurance. I fancy, for the moment that he must be an official appointed to serve or carve and employed on the establishment.

"Eighty-four," and one of the old weaving colony of Bethnal Green.

There can be no mistake about it. Every inmate provides certificates and registers enough to make the claim undoubted; and as to the right by descent, half the people here carry it in their faces, and to the initiated, are as surely French, as they are undoubtedly weavers.

The morning here begins with family prayers, which the steward reads from a desk in the refectory, and so the day closes also. The Sunday services are in the chapel, and such a chapel! To those who remember the dim, barely-furnished room in the old building at St. Luke's, this gem of architectural taste and simple beauty at the end of the main corridor comes with no little surprise. Its beautiful carved stone corbels, mosaic floor, and charming ornamentation; its broad gallery entered immediately from the upper floor, so that the feeble and infirm may go to worship directly from their sleeping-rooms; its glow of subdued colour and sobered light from windows of stained glass; its simple decorations, and its spotless purity, are no less remarkable than the plainness which characterises the general effect. It is to be noticed, too, that there is no "altar," but "a table;" that neither at the back of the communion nor on the carving of the lectern, nor even in the windows, is there to be seen a cross. Where the Maltese cross would occur amidst the arabesques of the stained glass, we see the fleur-de-lis. French Protestantism, has perhaps, not yet lost its intense significance, at all events here, in this chapel where the service of the Church of England is observed, and an ordained clergyman ministers to the family of the children's children of the ancient persecuted people of Languedoc, the symbol under which the Protestants were burned and tortured and exiled has no place. This is probably in accordance with the traditions left by De Ruvigny, by Gastigny, by Menard, and by their successors, whose portraits still hang in the fine board-room of the new "Providence."