t Scribe's he was
entertained frequently; and "very handsome and pleasant" was his account
of the dinners, as of all the belongings, of the prolific dramatist--a
charming place in Paris, a fine estate in the country, capital carriage,
handsome pair of horses, "all made, as he says, by his pen." One of the
guests the first evening was Auber, "a stolid little elderly man, rather
petulant in manner," who told Dickens he had once lived "at Stock
Noonton" (Stoke Newington) to study English, but had forgotten it all.
"Louis Philippe had invited him to meet the Queen of England, and when
L. P. presented him, the Queen said, 'We are such old acquaintances
through M. Auber's works, that an introduction is quite unnecessary.'"
They met again a few nights later, with the author of the _History of
the Girondins_, at the hospitable table of M. Pichot, to whom Lamartine
had expressed a strong desire again to meet Dickens as "un des grands
amis de son imagination." "He continues to be precisely as we formerly
knew him, both in appearance and manner; highly prepossessing, and with
a sort of calm passion about him, very taking indeed. We talked of De
Foe[201] and Richardson, and of that wonderful genius for the minutest
details in a narrative, which has given them so much fame in France. I
found him frank and unaffected, and full of curious knowledge of the
French common people. He informed the company at dinner that he had
rarely met a foreigner who spoke French so easily as your inimitable
correspondent, whereat your correspondent blushed modestly, and almost
immediately afterwards so nearly choked himself with the bone of a fowl
(which is still in his throat), that he sat in torture for ten minutes
with a strong apprehension that he was going to make the good Pichot
famous by dying like the little Hunchback at his table. Scribe and his
wife were of the party, but had to go away at the ice-time because it
was the first representation at the Opera Comique of a new opera by
Auber and himself, of which very great expectations have been formed. It
was very curious to see him--the author of 400 pieces--getting nervous
as the time approached, and pulling out his watch every minute. At last
he dashed out as if he were going into what a friend of mine calls a
plunge-bath. Whereat she rose and followed. She is the most
extraordinary woman I ever beheld; for her eldest son must be thirty,
and she has the figure of five-and-twenty, and is striking