Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, the second volume of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ memoirs, covers a period of just over ten years, but it is a nearly non-stop parade of personalities. Most of them come from French literature, art, and theatre, for Belloc Lowndes spent much of this time writing notes from Paris for a variety of English papers.
She started working as a journalist at a young age out of necessity. Her mother, Bessie Parkes Belloc, whose short but deeply loving marriage to Louis Belloc was the focus of the first volume, I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, had inherited a considerable fortune not long after becoming a widow. But she put it in the hands of a family friend who lost it all in a series of bad investments, and Marie and her brother Hilaire spent their teens living off the charity of family.
The experience left her with a certain amount of resentment about the leisures of the English upper classes:
I had felt painfully apart from the life led round me in Sussex by the young people with whom I came in contact. From Jane Austen, onwards, this kind of life has been described in innumerable English novels. But not one of the writers, with the exception of Anthony Trollope, seems to have realized the part that money, even though in those days never mentioned, played in country house life. We were really poor, and so I could never join in the driving, the riding, and the coming and going to country houses, and occasionally to London, which filled the lives of my contemporaries.
When she returned with her mother to live with her grandmother, Louise Swanton Belloc, at her house in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, Marie was relieved to escape the obsession of her schoolmates and their parents over “making a good marriage.” Through her grandmother, who had a very successful career as a translator, Marie already had numerous contacts with figures in French culture and politics great and small, and these provided her not only with the material for countless articles but also many of the best parts of this book.
Many English language readers have lost sight of French literature between Flaubert and Proust, so even some of the more familiar names in Where Love and Friendship Dwelt may no longer ring a bell, but pretty much every French writer of any substance in the last decade of the 19th century appears here. Guy de Maupassant confided his passion for the English novel to her–but cautioned, “All the same, Tom Jones is a book you must not look into till you are married.” Anatole France’s taste in English literature was, as much of his work seems today, idiosyncratic: he thought Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor its supreme masterpiece.
She visited Zola and his wife in their Paris townhouse “filled–crammed is the right word–with large pieces of what they believed to be mediaeval furniture.” Only his tapestries pleased Marie: “Whether old or faked, they were beautiful, and that could not be said of anything else in his Paris house.” She saw Alphonse Daudet in his years of suffering the advanced stages of syphilis, the time recounted in his slim, stunning journal, In the Land of Pain. She walked with Paul Verlaine as he was on his last legs, near death at 51 from drugs, alcohol, and depression:
He and I once had a long talk on Hell and the Devil. Both Hell itself, and the Devil as an entity, were to him intensely real. Indeed he spoke as if Hell is a city much like Paris, and he told me he had a vivid image in his mind of what the Devil looks like. He believed in the existence of a great number of minor devils, and to them he put down many of the terrible things which happen to human beings in this world.
Other names are now long forgotten. Louise Michel, then an aging Communard, whom Belloc Lowndes visited in a sordid garret she shared with “eight or nine cats, as well as a sickly monkey.” Paul Déroulède: a great French patriot perhaps, but his Chants du paysan and Chants du soldat are probably justly neglected in any language. The Comtesse de Martel, Sibylle Riqueti de Mirabeau, known by her pen-name of “Gyp.” Belloc Lowndes calls her “By far the most original, eccentric, and, in every sense of the word, brilliant woman writer I have known.” Gyp’s Wikipedia entry describes her as “as a fanatical anti-Semite & anti-Dreyfusard.” Let us move along.
One name–Rimbaud–is somewhat disdainfully dismissed. Belloc Lowndes sniffs that none of the respected men of the time “would have admitted Rimbaud had genius. All would have followed Jacques Blanche in describing him as un mauvais petit drôle” (a nasty little creep).
Perhaps because the world it described was so much different from the one it was published in, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt was warmly received. The New York Times’ reviewer gushed, “There are so many gleaming points and glowing facets to this gem of personal reminiscence that one is puzzled which to omit in a brief account of it.” And in The Saturday Review, R. Ellis Roberts called it “fully as rich in recollection, as evocative of the past as the book to which it is the sequel.” I think, however, that Mary Crosbie was closer to the mark, writing in her Guardian review that “There is less charm–less coherence of effect–in the second than the first book.”
The focus of the next volume in this series, The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946), shifts to London, where she returned as a newlywed in 1896.
