In the last summer of my mother’s life, I was sitting with her on the little lawn of her cottage in Sussex, when she said suddenly, “I feel it is wrong to repine as life goes on, for I can always say to myself, ‘I, too, have lives in Arcadia.”
She must have seen that I was wondering to what part of her life she referred, for she could look back to many delightful and remarkable experiences.
She put her hand on mine. “I mean the five years with your father, and the further nine summers I spent with his mother, at La Celle St. Cloud.”
So opens the first volume of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ memoirs, in which she recalls the uniquely gracious and intimate world that her grandmother created in her modest country home in a village less than ten miles from the center of Paris. It all began in 1867, when two friends, both pioneering English women’s’ rights advocates, Bessie Parkes and Barbara Bodichon, reunited in Paris. Bodichon was recovering from a fever contracted while living in Algiers with her husband, Dr. Eugène Bodichon, a prominent physician. Concerned at her friend’s condition, Parkes sought a place in the country where they could relax and get away from the stagnant summer air in Paris.
She came across a flyer advertising a chalet for rent in La Celle St. Cloud offered by a Madame Belloc. Madame Belloc was Louise Swanton Belloc, daughter of James Swanton, an Irish officer who had served in the armies of both King Louis XVI and Napoleon, and widow of the recently deceased painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc. She was also the leading advocate of English literature in France. She produced a steady stream of translations of Dickens, George Eliot, Sir Walter Scott, and others, and her network of acquaintances included many of the most famous writers of both countries. The chalet was on the grounds of a small tract where she lived with her son Louis and a frequent visitor, Adelaide De Montgolfier, daughter of the famous balloonist Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier.
Louis Belloc had been a busy and successful official in the Paris city government, but at some time in his late twenties, he collapsed from overwork or perhaps a stroke and was now living as an invalid with his mother. At the time that Bessie Parkes came to stay with the Bellocs, this model of Victorian rectitude, independence, and industry probably had no intention of remaining more than a few weeks.
But some kind of profound intimacy was sparked between Bessie and Madame Belloc, and soon after, between Bessie and Louis. When the two Englishwomen returned to Paris, Bessie had promised to come back to La Celle St. Cloud in the autumn. And she confided to Barbara, “I want you to know of a certain decision I have made! I have made up my mind to marry Louis Belloc.” Louis had not, in fact, asked her. “Such an idea, I feel sure, has never crossed his mind…. But he will do so when I stay with them this autumn.”
Barbara and Bessie’s family argued strongly against the marriage. They found it hard to conceive how a woman with such drive, responsible to dozens of initiatives to improve the lives of women and the working poor in England, could suddenly tie herself down to a sick man living on a tiny French estate. But an entry from her diary, written just two months after her wedding, offers a clue to the emptiness that the love of the Bellocs filled in Bessie:
How utterly my life has changed! In the old days it was always astonishing to me that with so many elements which should have made for real happiness–intelligence, great interest in literature, sufficient money, and the highest principles–my mother’s house was so lacking, at any rate where I was concerned, in real happiness….
How strange that Barbara should think I ever feel lonely! There have been times in my life when I have felt painfully alone, but never since the fortunate day when she and I settled into the chalet last spring. I remember feeling that evening as if I had stepped into a new dimension, and in that dimension I have, thank God, dwelt ever since, with increasing joy and peace.
Within a year of marrying Louis, Bessie gave birth to a daughter–Marie–and two years later, to a son, Hilaire. The couple had little time to celebrate Hilaire’s birth, because the Franco-Prussian War had begun a week before, and less than two months later, the family had to flee to England ahead of the imminent siege of Paris. Mademoiselle Montgolfier, however, remained, and her letters, along with those of Louis’ sisters, all of whom stayed throughout the long and difficult siege, demonstrate the kind of strength and dedication in the face of hardships that seems to have been given in exceptional degree to some people in that era.
When the Bellocs returned to La Celle St. Cloud after the armistice, they found that Prussian troops had looted the estate, leaving much of it damaged and uninhabitable. But Madame Belloc and Bessie plunged into the business of restoration, and within a few months were able to live there again. Their relief was short-lived, however. One day in August 1872, Louis collapsed, and he died just a few hours later. As Bessie wrote to Barbara afterward, “I had an angel of goodness by my side for five years. From the time he uttered his marriage vows, giving his whole self to me as he did then, I never had cause to regard him other than with the exceeding reverence which ended in exceeding love, which made me hold so lightly all the real difficulties of a life to which I was never blind.”
Marie and Hilaire Belloc would become two of the most prolific English writers of their generation. When she began to write her memoirs, Marie had seen, for the third time in her life, German troops invading her first home. Even though I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia was written in the time of the Blitzkrieg and the Blitz, it is very much a book of the century before. This is not to imply that it is stiff or outdated in any way. Instead, it is marked throughout by a sincerity of emotion that we have grown too jaded to trust and, hence, that seems antique. But as Elizabeth Bowen wrote when it first came out, “It is a book in a thousand, for it conveys the character of a group of people, at once civilized and original, and the atmosphere of an unusual place.”
Marie Belloc-Lowndes wrote three more volumes of memoirs: Where Love and Friendship Dwelt (1943); The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946); A Passing World (1948). I am nearing the end of Love and Friendship and can report that it maintains the same warm and intelligent spirit as I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Despite wartime printing limitations, Macmillans in the U. K. managed to put out a handsome set of volumes that are as pleasant to hold and read as anything I’ve come across. I started reading the series with the U. S. edition published by Dodd, Mead, but I liked the Macmillan editions so much I bought another copy just to keep.
good title