Cantileu <1>
20th Nov.
My dear Henry
It is very ungrateful of you never to have answered my register of the weather so faithfully kept for your sake, I conclude you have now left off yours, but I go on with mine till I hear from you. Lately it has been but a brumous <2>journal & certainly I cannot recommend the Département de Seine Inferieure per hyemale. <3> You are now very busy about nothing as I heard you were resting from your labours, which were I conclude very intense at Ilfracombe. <4> You never told me whether that place struck you as at all like any description of it. You will probably now hear enough of the Manchester Magistrates,<5> they have lit a flame which will spread from one end of the Kingdom to the other, but I am not at all afraid of a Revolution, tho' the French are all persuaded we are on the eve of one. They are going to have a stormy session themselves. I wish we were to be at the opening of it, but we shall not be at Paris till the 6. December, as our house will not be vacant till the 5. Direct to No 2. Sackville Street <6> & it will come in the Government Bag. Mr F. <7> has made a new arrangement this time & I hope it will succeed better than the last. Caroline <8> has been ill with a very bad cough & we had Dr Flaubert<9> from Rouen, who is reckoned very clever & who ought to be popular, for he would hardly take his fee & advised nothing but simples<10> & surtout point de Medecins ni de medecines. <11> Very unlike the M. Ds of England.
How glad I am that you are to come to us at Paris at Easter, I long to renew my acquaintance with you, as we meet at such dreadfully long intervals.
William <12> is returning from Russia, as the climate does not agree with him I suppose he is by this time in England The last I heard of him was that he was just setting off in a party of pleasure to a villa 2000 versts<13> from Petersburgh. We have got a new Governess she is Anglaise. I wish she may do but she has all the cold manners & reserve of her nation. I hope the abominable conduct of the Coroners <14> will be brought before Parliament. "as moral liberty is the prime blessing of Man in his private capacity so is civil liberty in his public capacity. There is nothing that requires more to be watched than Power. There is nothing that ought to be watched opposed with more determined resolution than its encroachment. Sleep in a State as Montesquieu <15> says will is always followed by Slavery. Pray write to me very soon, I now find we shall be at Paris the 3d December.
I wonder you did not go & see Nettlecombe as it belongs to the Grandfather of your friend Trevelyan <16> -
Yrs
E F
W. H. Fox Talbot Esqr
Trinity College
Cambridge
Angleterre
Notes:
1. Probably a misspelling of Canteleu, Normandy.
2. Old French for foggy or misty.
3. Department of Seine-Lower in winter time.
4. Ilfracombe, Devon.
5. A reference to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in August 1819. The magistrates, alarmed by the size of a radical meeting held on St Peter's Fields, ordered the Manchester yeomenry to arrest the speakers. However, the yeomenry instead launched a general attack on the crowd, injuring at least five hundred people and killing at least eleven. [See Doc. No: 00854].
6. 2 Sackville Street, occaisional London base of WHFT.
7. Rear Admiral Charles Feilding (1780-1837), Royal Navy; WHFT's step-father.
8. Caroline Augusta Edgcumbe, née Feilding, Lady Mt Edgcumbe (1808-1881); WHFT's half-sister.
9. Dr Achille-Cleophas Flaubert (d. 1846), director of Rouen's municipal hospital and father of the novelist, Gustave Flaubert.
10. 'Simples' were herbal remedies.
11. Above all no medics or medicines.
12. William Thomas Horner Fox Strangways, 4th Earl of Ilchester (1795-1865), botanist, art collector & diplomat.
13. An obsolete Russian measure, roughly 3500 feet or just over one kilometre.
14. See the Peterloo Massacre note above.
15. Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), French political philosopher.
16. Walter Calverley Trevelyan, 6th Baronet (1797-1879), naturalist & antiquary.