Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

occasions he wove fiction and narrative into his antiquarian writings with abandon. A man who
was at times depressive to the point of reclusiveness and at others warmly hospitable, Langlois’s
swings of style and sympathy might reflect what would now be called a bi-polar condition. What
he himself said was:
Je me trouvai, dès l’âge de vingt-trois ans, sujet à des accès de mélancolie, qui devinrent avec le temps plus intenses
et plus frequents; lorsqu’une foule de chagrins…vinrent irriter mes maux, je m’aperçus avec effroi que je manquais
de la force nécessaire pour lutter avec avantage contre les tribulations de la vie. [I found myself, from the age of
twenty-three, subject to bouts of melancholy which became worse and more frequent with time… when a host of
troubles exacerbated my woes I realised, with terror, that I lacked the necessary strength to struggle successfully
against the difficulties of life.] 154
Whatever his character might have been otherwise his experiences of the Revolution and
as a soldier marked him deeply and they marked his view of history. He lived, after all, literally
in its ruins. The discussion of Langlois’s own antiquarian collection, in so far as it is known,
belongs to the next chapter, but it was largely made up of debris from the Revolution. It
included, for example, the death mask of Henri IV, looted, according to a nineteenth-century
catalogue of the Rouen Museum, from a royal storehouse in 1793. 155 Langlois was sixteen at that
time and probably not in Paris so it is unlikely that he acquired it first hand but in his researches
in Normandy at Jumièges and St Wandrille, and at home in the Convent he was surrounded by
fragments that reminded him of the potential of humanity for destruction. It oppressed him.
Destruction and death are the themes that play through his writings sometimes as history,
sometimes fiction and sometimes pivoting between the two. The most curious example is his
prose poem Hymne à la Cloche [Hymn of the Bell] of 1832. Bells had always been a popular
subject of antiquarian study for they are easy to date and hard to destroy. One of the most notable
and comprehensive aspects of the revolutionary vandalism, however, had been the plundering of
the church bells of France which were melted down for canon.
In his account of the Abbey of St Wandrille, also published in 1832, Langlois describes
what he did not see, the breaking of the Abbey bells. The biggest one took the best part of a day
154
Quoted, from an unidentified source, in Coutil, Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois, p.5.
155
Catalogue du Musée d’Antiquités de Rouen, p.116.
149